Patricia Treece - Nothing Short of a Miracle: Gods Healing Power in Modern Saints

Here youll find answers to questions you never knew you had not just about miracles, but about what can happen to you if you dare to say yes to the Love behind them.

Patrick Coffin, author and radio host
Catholic Answers Live

Anyone picking up this book will be moved by these manifestations of the love of God reaching into human lives with healing power. Take up and read! You will enjoy!

Patti Gallagher Mansfield
Catholic Charismatic Renewal

At a time when the world has deluded itself into thinking that science has all the answers, this book reminds us that God has answers of his own.

Matthew Kelly, New York Times bestselling
author of Rediscover Catholicism and
founder of DynamicCatholic.com

It is possible to be holy in the modern world, and the miraculous lives described by Patricia Treece will serve as both your model and inspiration in your life of faith!

Msgr. Richard Soseman,
Congregation for the Clergy, Vatican City

Nothing Short of a Miracle

Also by Patricia Treece

A Man for Others

The Sanctified Body

Messengers: After-death Appearances of Saints and Mystics
(in condensed paperback as Apparitions of Modern Saints )

Mornings with Thrse of Lisieux

Quiet Moments with Padre Pio

Meet Padre Pio: Beloved Mystic, Miracle-Worker, and Spiritual Guide

Through the Year With Padre Pio: Daily Readings

Meet John XXIII: Joyful Pope and Father to All

God Will Provide: How Gods Bounty Opened to Saints
and 9 Ways It Can Open for You, Too

Patricia Treece

Nothing Short of a Miracle

Gods Healing Power in Modern Saints

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Nothing Short of a Miracle was first published as an Image book in 1988 by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York. Our Sunday Visitor, Huntington, Indiana, published a second edition in 1994. This 2013 updated edition by Sophia Institute Press adds recent cures and several chapters of completely new material on very recent saints and their authenticated miracles.

Copyright 1988, 1994, 2013 Patricia Treece

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Cover design by Carolyn McKinney

Cover images: Fr. Solanus photo used with permission of the Father Solanus Guild, 1780 Mt. Elliott, Detroit MI 48207; all rights reserved. Fulton Sheen photo: The Granger Collection, New York. John Paul II photo: Rue des Archives / The Granger Collection, New York. Padre Pio photo used with permission, National Centre for Padre Pio, Barto, Pennsylvania. Mother Teresa photo courtesy of Mother Teresa Center.

Scripture references are taken from the Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America , second typical edition, copyright 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC. Used with permission. All rights reserved. No portion of this text may be reproduced without permission in writing from the copyright owner. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Sophia Institute Press
Box 5284, Manchester, NH 03108
1-800-888-9344
www.SophiaInstitute.com
Sophia Institute Press is a registered trademark of Sophia Institute.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Treece, Patricia.

Nothing short of a miracle : Gods healing power in modern saints / Patricia Treece.

pages cm

Originally published: New York : Image Books, 1988.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-933184-58-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ePub ISBN 978-1-622821-94-5 1. Christian saints Cult.
2. Spiritual healing Catholic Church. I. Title.

BX2325.T73 2013

231.7 3 dc23

2013016141

This book is for

JESUS:

Even Your greatest saints only mirror You dimly.

Jesus, may we love You as they do.

And may You gather us all, writer and readers,
into Your healing and life-giving arms.

Contents

Prologue

Nothing Short of a Miracle Can Help This Kid

March 14, 1921

Yawning openly on this gray afternoon, a young nurse makes a last round of her newborn charges in New York Citys Columbus Hospital Extension on 163rd Street. In the final moments of an unusually busy shift, the weary nurses thoughts are already far from babies as she bends over the whimpering Smith infant at whose midday birth she assisted two hours earlier.

Instantly wide awake, Mae Redmond gasps, Oh God! Oh God! for infant Smiths face is like charred wood, cheeks and lips blackened and burnt. Pus exudes from both tiny nostrils. Worst, where eyes should be are only two grotesque edemic swellings.

Horrified, Mae must struggle not to pass out as her mind grasps for how this can be. No one has handled the newborn after his normal delivery since she herself weighed and measured him and put in the eye drops prescribed by law.

The drops! Suddenly her panic lunges in a definite direction. She staggers across the nursery and picks up the bottle of 1-percent silver-nitrate solution used in the newborns eyes. What she reads on the label makes her shriek hysterically again and again, Doctor! Oh God! Get a doctor!

Into infant Peter Smiths eyes the rushed nurse has deftly dropped, carefully pulling back each lid to get it all in, not 1-percent silver-nitrate solution, but 50-percent silver-nitrate solution. Even 5-percent to 25-percent solution is used only on unwanted human tissue tumors, for instance because it eats away flesh as effectively as electric cauterizing tools. Fifty-percent solution will gradually bore a hole in a solid piece of wood. And it has already been at work on the soft human tissue of infant Peters eyes for two hours.

Dr. John G. Grimley is the first physician to hear the nurses shrill cries. Looking at the badly burnt face and the bottle label, the suddenly ashen-faced doctor can only shake his head helplessly. A few minutes later he is reporting to an anguished Mother Teresa Bacigalupo, Superior of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart who own and run Columbus Hospital, that the nurse has accidentally destroyed a newborns sight.

Desperately, the deadly bottle in hand, Mae meanwhile runs to find Dr. Paul W. Casson. But Casson cannot help the baby either. In fact the second doctor to see the infant will later recall that the sight of the tiny charred face and the 50-percent label knocks him speechless and breathless at a loss for what to do. It is obvious to his experienced eye that the deadly solution has penetrated every layer of facial skin. And by now in those eye sockets there can be nothing left to treat. All Casson can do is put in a call that Dr. Michael J. Horan, who delivered Margaret Smith of a perfect son less than three hours ago, should return immediately to the hospital.

As he is telephoning, Mother Bacigalupo scurries anxiously into the nursery, interrupting him to plead he do something to save the babys sight. Casson can only explain no human remedy can restore destroyed tissue. Nothing short of a miracle, he ends, can help this kid.

Her whole body bowed with sorrow, the nun says resolutely in Italian-accented English, Then we will pray.

God! Do! the doctor urges, his face as stricken as her own. When Dr. Horan arrives, Casson meets him in the hall and tries to break it gently, saying only that a slightly stronger solution of silver nitrate has been used for the Smith infants eyes.

Dr. Horan exclaims at once, Anything stronger than 1-percent solution and thats a blind baby. A minute later as he bends over the crib, the eyes which are now beginning to exude pus like the nose are so swollen he cannot open them. Three doctors have already seen the baby, and except for ordering cold compresses to reduce inflammation, they can do nothing for him. Horan sends for an eye specialist and waits, a nervous wreck, Casson notes. The eye specialist Dr. Kearneys expertise merely confirms the other mens medical knowledge of the properties of nitrate. As if the situation cannot be worse, Horan bears the additional burden of knowing Mrs. Smiths first baby, a girl, lived only five days. How to tell her and her husband that if their second baby lives, he will be totally blind? He will also be terribly disfigured, since, when a burn goes through all the layers of skin, the body cannot repair itself with new skin, but only with scar tissue.

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