![]() ![]() ![]() Irish author John Scally wrote a book, “Marion: A Modern-Day Miracle”, in which he detailed Marion’s steady decline over the years from 1978, when she was told she had multiple sclerosis (MS), until her cure at Knock in 1989. As he tried to draw his hand away, she held it and read “MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS”. He dismissed her worries, but she noticed writing on his hand. As soon as he came to her bedside, she knew something was wrong. Jimmy wrote the dreaded words on his hand with a ballpoint pen. The neurologist wanted him to break the news to Marion. It was 1978.Īfter Marion had been hospitalized several days and examined by a neurologist, Jimmy was suddenly called from his barracks in Cork to the hospital. The doctor suggested she go to Dublin for a brain scan and also to have a kidney infection looked at. When she opened her eyes, everything was blurred, and colors were jumbled together. She suffered frequent headaches, and her vision began to swim.Īt Jimmy’s father s funeral, Marion had a complete blackout and fell to the ground. She had given birth to both children by cesarean and began to suspect that this had caused her physical debility and increasing sense of being a wrung-out rag. She only cuddled Cora by laying her on the double bed, lest she drop her. Nor did she tell Jimmy, who was away in the army.īy the time Cora was born in late 1976, Marion was often unsteady on her feet and with her grip. When a sharp-tongued relative dismissed her complaints as just “nerves and malingering”, Marion decided to keep her troubles to herself. There was no improvement, and her chronic tiredness grew in intensity. The doctor diagnosed a slipped disc and put her leg in traction for some weeks. When Anthony was ten months old she moved toward his crib one day and suddenly found herself falling onto it. On top of a great tiredness, she was getting a sensation of pins and needles in one leg as well as bouts of intense pain. She took little notice at first, having heard of many mothers having postnatal problems. Their first child, Anthony, was born in 1973, and soon after that Marion’s problems started. Marion’s joy was dissipated soon after the wedding, however, when Jimmy was sent on a tour of duty with the United Nations peacekeepers in Cyprus. Then he asked McCormack if he could marry his daughter. She met Jimmy Carroll at a dance in December 1970 and fell in love “truly, madly, deeply”.Īn Irish soldier’s pay wasn’t much in those days, so Jimmy had to work hard at getting enough money to rent a house. Then came a redheaded Irish soldier who put Elvis right out of her mind. She lost her heart to Elvis Presley’s songs, and her mother wondered if his pictures might displace the images of the Sacred Heart and Mary on her bedroom walls. When she finished compulsory education at age fourteen, she left school and waltzed casually through her remaining teen years as factory worker, shop assistant and waitress. The child developed a special prayer bond with Mary. The little one survived, and, despite his meager resources, he had a Lourdes Grotto built in Athlone to thank the Mother of God, convinced Mary’s prayers to God had saved Marion’s life. Her father, who often used to read his children the lives of the saints, led the family in prayers to Mary. ![]() She was sent to the Peamount Sanatorium, Dublin, and the doctors warned her family that her life was in grave danger. Marion contracted it when she was only seven years old. Tuberculosis was a dreaded killer among Ireland’s poor in the 1950s. While she was a tiny child, they were forced to make ends meet by going off to work in England, leaving her with relatives. ![]() She was born Marion McCormack in 1951 in this city on the Shannon River, also birthplace of the tenor Count John McCormack (no relation). I found these qualities when I met Marion Carroll in Athlone, seventy-five miles west of Dublin. I have discovered there are a joyfulness and freshness to these people, a simplicity and a humility. Miracle cures are startling and encouraging, as is meeting the recipients. So every so often, Augustine said, God works a miracle in an extraordinary, startling way. Unfortunately, we tend to lose our sense of wonder. Cured instantaneously of advanced Multiple Sclerosis at KnockĪugustine said God is working miracles all the time-if we look at the wonders of nature, or our own bodies or just our eyes, we discover myriads of miracles. ![]()
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