Another cure given in Vice-Postulator Father John Vaughn’s pamphlet “Meet Father Seelos” was actually told him not by witnesses, but by the individual to whom it occurred.
John Ducote, Grand Knight of the Redemptorist Knights of Columbus Council in New Orleans, reports that in June 1938, when he was six and a half years old, he was attacked by polio, or infantile paralysis, the most dread children’s disease of that era. When the disease rampaged through the little boy’s body, it left him with both legs and both arms completely paralyzed.
The reader will recall the Notre Dame nun who had ridden on the train with Father Seelos when he moved to New Orleans. Her order still held the dead priest in great veneration, and when John’s mother reported her son’s condition to a Notre Dame nun named Sister Gertrude, Mrs. Ducote was counseled to ask the intercession of Father Seelos. The mother took this advice. She not only frequently asked Father Seelos to pray for John, but she made repeated visits to his tomb with her request. In the Knights of Columbus’s own words:
I remained totally paralyzed until approximately the end of August. Then one Sunday morning I called for my dad to come to me. He did not hear me because he had the radio on. I then got up and walked through two rooms to the side of my dad. These were the first steps I had taken in three months! I have always felt that I am walking today because of my mother’s prayers to Father Seelos [for his intercession].
As the 1980s come to a close, over a thousand pieces of mail a month arrive at New Orleans’s Seelos Center where, since official acceptance of the Cause by Rome, records of healings and other favors attributed to Father Seelos’ intercession are amassed. A monthly bulletin on the saint publishes some of the letters of thanks to encourage readers to also seek the prayer help of the saint. In a June 1986 copy, a grandmother writes her gratitude for Father Seelos’ prayers; she has just attended the high school graduation of her grandaughter stricken with leukemia eleven years earlier. The July bulletin includes a thank you for no further polyps or tumors from an individual one year into recovery from colon cancer.
From Erin, Tennessee, the same month, a mother writes:
My son was in a very bad car accident. The doctor said at the time he didn’t see how he was alive. He had a crushed pelvis and left leg. . . . At that time he was told he’d never use his left leg and live a normal life because of his crushed pelvis. Well I asked for your prayers and I began to pray to Fr. Seelos [for his]. Today my son lives a normal life and wall(s fine even without a cane. Fr. Seelos again has helped. God be praised.
Among the cases believed able to meet the Church’s stringent criteria for beatification miracles and forwarded to Rome for further study is a young woman’s healing which looks like the first recorded cure of sickle-cell anemia, a disease which to date can merely be controlled but never conquered by medical means. Another case is a crippled woman’s surgery which strangely accomplished things far beyond what doctors feel possible.
A third is the extraordinary cure of Angela Boudreaux from terminal liver cancer. In an interview for this book, Mrs. Boudreaux revealed that, besides her cure, which may one day be proclaimed an official miracle by the Church, Father Seelos has been God’s channel for several healings in her family.
These begin with a “cure” which seems rather minor — unless you’ve ever cared day after day, night after night, for a baby screaming, scratching, and crying with the pain and itching of severe eczema. That was the case with the Boudreaux’s fourth child, John, who about a year after his birth in 1964 developed an allergy his mother says “was so bad that.any creases in the body, such as those of elbows, knees, armpits, the back of the neck, etc., would crack and bleed with an odor like a drainage ditch.”
Because he scratched and bled all night, crying all the while, his
mother had to rig up cardboard restraints when she pajamaed him so he
would be unable to bend his arm to further gouge his flesh. This nightmare
had gone on about a year, starting not long after he was weaned from
breast-feeding to canned formula; yet the pediatrician and another specialist
assured the mother it had nothing to do with any food allergy.