In New Orleans the parents of Cecilia Villars asked the dead priest’s prayers when their sixteen-year-old daughter became sick on November 17, during a smallpox epidemic that battered the city late in 1869. Cecilia’s “impossible” overnight cure from physician-verified smallpox was followed within a month by her equally inexplicable cure from other life-threatening problems, including a lung tumor.
With what we know about the links between mind and body, it would today be possible to theorize that Cecilia’s trust in Father Seelos’s intercession triggered remarkable and rapid changes in her body without anything supernatural involved at all. If so, this would also be a wondrous thing that many a victim of infectious disease or tumor would like to experience.
But a cure in Pittsburgh in 1872 shows that hearings through the intercession of saints often take place in situations in which the mind-body link cannot be cited-and in which, in fact, spiritual explanations seem the most plausible. On that April I 1, a twenty-month-old baby, Julius Stephi, was literally pulling his hair out in the agony of meningitis. The child also had pneumonia. Both were complications from a severe attack of measles.
Three physicians, Doctors Hoffman, Foligney, and Clark, had fought for the child’s life — and lost. The little one was in prolonged death throes when his grandmother, Mary Magdalena Vogel of another Pennsylvania town came into Pittsburgh and stopped by on her way to mass at St. Augustine’s Church.
In this pre-telephone era, Mrs. Vogel did not.know her grandson’s condition. She was shocked to see her daughter and son-in-law waiting in torture for the writhing baby’s death agony to be over. During the mass, Mary Vogel testified later, the panicked little body in the crib was continuously before her eyes. Just as the priest reached the solemn moment of the mass when, Catholics believe, the bread and wine offered are changed into the body and blood of Christ (Mk 14:22-24; see also Lk 22:19-20 & Mt 26: 26-28., Mrs. Vogel suddenly saw another face in her mind: Father Seelos, who had been her confessor years earlier. Redemptorist John Vaughn relates:
In this particular church they would ring the bell in the church tower at the moment of the consecration during the Sunday High Mass. As the bell rang she said: “Father Seelos, while you were on earth you had the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Now that you are in heaven, you are not less powerful. Please ask God to heal my grandchild.” Then she promised to make a novena in honor of Father Seelos and have a Mass said if the child would either end his agony by a quick death or recover.
Mass ended and Mrs. Vogel rushed back to her grandson. Her daughter met her at the door. “Mother, mother, the most wonderful things just happened. Just after the consecration bell rang in the tower of St. Augustine’s, little Julius stopped writhing,. He’s asleep as quiet as a lamb. I think he’s going to be all right!”
An hour later the toddler, who had refused all food for two days, woke up ravenous-and well.
Cures like this led to opening official investigation into Seelos’ sanctity, which observers during his lifetime predicted. From 1900 to 1903, testimonies were taken under oath in the places where Father Seelos spent much time: Augsburg in Germany; and Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New Orleans in the States. His Cause for official sainthood was then sent to Rome.
A cure from around this time was that of a handicapped individual, a pious, if perhaps eccentric, old woman known as “Holy Oil Mary.” Mary Bauer got her nickname because this staunch believer in prayer for healing used to anoint the sick with oil according to the command of the apostle (James 5:14). Using her black-enameled crutches, she made her way each morning into St. Mary’s Assumption Church where Father Seelos is buried.
There, after mass, she spent most of her day praying. Apparently one
day God spoke to her about her own crippled condition. While every day
she paid a visit to the tomb of Father Seelos in the church, this day
she asked his intercession for her own cure, stood up, set her crutches
aside and walked off without them. For roughly the next seventeen years
— witnesses place the cure about 1905 — until her death
on March 11, 1923, the prayerful woman in the old-fashioned black dress
walked unaided.