The Miracle That Grew From the Ashes of 2018

Damaging wind gusts, hail, and rain swept into Washington, D.C., on April 3—the 29th day of Lent, the day Theodore McCarrick stopped breathing, the day he stood across from Jesus Christ. Since no bishop dared to speak on his behalf, Mother Nature eulogized. When the storm lifted and the sun shone, I thought of Fr. John Hollowell, the priest on his way to becoming the first American recognized as having received a miracle at Lourdes, France.

I know of no one—on this earth—who responded to the Catholic Church’s 2018 Summer of Shame more directly, more bravely, or more strikingly than the priest raised in the quiet countryside of Indiana. When the Molotov cocktail of McCarrick’s secret life and landslide of Church sin exploded that summer, Fr. Hollowell descended a long, spiral staircase into the wilderness of the suicidal, the homeless, the meth addicts, the male prostitutes, the anxious, the alcoholics, the porn-addicted. He went to the valley of the ruined—the place of the victims of clergy sexual abuse. And he loved them there.

I’ve long waited to tell this story—a story of miraculous healing, now under investigation by the Lourdes Medical Bureau in France. The week of the Passion seems the perfect time to tell the extraordinary account of the priest who loved so well, so thoroughly, that he nearly became a victim of death himself.

And for Fr. Hollowell, that would have been okay. Because in 2018, a few days after speaking for the first time to a victim of clergy abuse, he found himself in his confessional at St. Paul’s Parish in Greencastle, Indiana, uncontrollably weeping. Then, he prayed: “Father, if I’m able to suffer for the victims—in imitation of You on the Cross—and offer my life in reparation for the crimes of priests, I do it willingly.”

Then his Passion began. Back then, he had no idea that God, it seemed, wanted him to feel the victims’ crucifixion. He didn’t know that when, in persona Christi, he turned to Jerusalem and offered to suffer and even die, he would become their cross and begin to endure the myriad manifestations of post-abuse torment in startlingly similar fashion.

Fr. Hollowell just knew the Master had need of a victim and that the bullied and abused survivors needed a priest to love them. He had no idea, though, how deeply the Garden needed to be entered, the extent that his back and head would be bloodied, the Cross carried, Golgotha climbed, and the nails felt—in the same exact fashion as the sexually abused.

Without this crucifixion, his offering for the victims, perhaps, would have fallen short. And the miracle would not have happened.

In the architecture of the supernatural—and their confluence with incomprehensibility, meaningfulness, and arrangement in time—the story of Fr. Hollowell shines like a blaze of light cutting across a Bethlehem night sky.

I’m disinclined to return to the pre-Covid summer of 2018, but as darkness demands the presence of light, I must write—briefly—of the darkest year in the history of the American Catholic hierarchy, when the majority of bishops settled into a sweeping, Cistercian quietude. Their response to McCarrick and the Summer of Shame must be remembered if we are to grasp the miracle born in its wake—the healing of Fr. Hollowell is on its way to becoming the 72nd officially approved miracle since Our Lady appeared to Bernadette Soubirous along the River Gave in Lourdes in 1858.

For faithful sons and daughters of the Church—millions who have watched children flee Catholicism as the Israelites fled Pharaoh—the following story should offer a pinhole of hope: one that might help to lead your prodigal sons and daughters back to the Church they left after 2018, when revelations of clergy sin poured like red tides. Parish priests, too, might carry the story of Fr. Hollowell into their Holy Week prayer to reflect on how God—and Our Lady—responds to a true servant willing to die.

But above all, the bishops who knew—and said nothing—about McCarrick’s secret life should come to understand how true shepherds live. True shepherds don’t bother with the tired, skipping-record refrain of “We pray for all the victims of abuse.” They don’t outsource compassion to committees. 

True shepherds search out the wounded. And they love them. They work like unnoticed roughnecks on the sea, the tireless ones who go all the way to the bottom, to the dark and unseen pits, to break open the long-trapped geysers of pain. And they do it out of love—because that’s what Christ did, that’s how He loved.

The cancerous tumor in Fr. Hollowell’s head was slowly growing when bishops gathered in Baltimore that autumn in 2018 for their plenary assembly, when they voted down—by a nearly two-to-one margin—a proposal that simply asked the Vatican to release all documents related to the numerous criminal allegations against Theodore McCarrick. When the American laity pleaded for transparency and answers, bishops chose silence, as the Vatican had urged they do before the meetings. No, they would not begin to examine the history of the cardinal who had managed to rise to the highest echelons in the world—a Catholic powerbroker whose backroom impurity and influence stretched like a black aura. 

But let us turn now to the bright Alleluia of hope, to the miracle that sparked to life when a humble priest prayed to God to allow him to carry the cross of victims.

John Hollowell grew up carefree and strong, a boy who could outrace nearly every boy in Acton and who’d chase down batted baseballs in the cornfield across from his large and happy home. He was one of eleven Hollowell children, steeped in the Catholic faith from birth. All eleven Hollowells still practice the faith that their educator-parents instilled from the crib.

That home was a place of warmth and order, where mom and dad taught their brood to be humble, honest, and always true to God. They catechized them and said that friendship with Jesus could carry them all the way to Heaven. In that black-and-white, Hoosier, let’s-rub-that-stain-out kind of way that little John Hollowell was raised in, he understood problems and sin weren’t for ignoring; they were meant to be faced down and dealt with—a quiet testament to the seeds from which courage grew, which rooted him to the idea of becoming a priest. 

So, years later, when he joined the seminary in the fumes of the 2002 Boston priest abuse scandals, he knew what to do when he heard the pieces fall—McCarrick, the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the endless breaking stories of other revelations. He didn’t look away. He stepped forward.

“Fr. Hollowell is as humble a man as I know, but when his mind is made up on something, it’s as good as done,” said his longtime best friend, Fr. Jonathan Meyer. “When he’s convicted about something, he’s not going back…he knew that victims didn’t care about lawyers’ money or press releases expressing remorse. Fr. Hollowell knew the victims just wanted to be listened to and loved.”

Leave it to an Indiana boy to take it a step further. The college football player and track athlete had rarely been sick in his life. But that changed after he asked God for something of a higher order.

Lord, let me become their cross, the priest prayed. Nail their wounds and nightmares to my body.

When the seizures began in 2019, doctors at the Mayo Clinic discovered the large brain tumor. “I knew it was the answer to my prayer,” he said last week from All Saints Parish, which he co-pastors with Fr. Meyer in Dearborn County, Indiana. He received the diagnosis at the Mayo Clinic on February 11, 2020, the Feast Day of Our Lady of Lourdes. He was scheduled for surgery to remove his tumor—an oligodendroglioma—on March 13 at the Mayo Clinic.

In the weeks leading up to the operation, Fr. Hollowell turned to his now-closed Twitter account to speak to his 20,000 followers. He told them he intended to “embrace this illness, to take it to the Cross willingly”—for survivors of clerical sexual abuse. He invited victims of priestly abuse to reach out and share their stories with him. He promised to carry their pain with him into surgery and into the long road of radiation and chemotherapy that would follow. 

His final thought, just before the anesthesiologist began explaining the cocktail of medications that would lull his body into unconsciousness, was of the 180 victims who had reached out to him with their names and stories. Through emails, letters, and occasional late-night phone calls, they thanked the priest. And then, with trembling voices, they vomited out their Judas-kiss nightmares.

So, Fr. Hollowell took it all with him and fell asleep on the operating room table, with the victims’ pain he had chosen to make his own.

When he awakened five days later—and doctors had removed approximately 85 percent of the cancer—a pandemic had swept into the world. In the aftershock of his surgery, Fr. Hollowell was told that family visitations would be restricted until the worldwide virus could become contained.

So in that I-guess-I’ll-have-a-go-at-it-alone-for-a-while Indiana kind of way, Fr. Hollowell asked a nurse to wheel him into his hospital bathroom, where he began to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in a weak and stuttering voice. On the other end of his cell phone camera were weeping Catholic Mass attendees, shut out of their parishes, looking at a priest with a surgical gash that was gruesome and, seemingly, as wide as a backyard garter snake. He held up the Eucharist against the backdrop of plumbing pipes and industrial bathroom tile. 

As the days of Covid pushed on, Fr. Hollowell began to wheel himself into the bathroom-church, where he set up his little camera on the sink and prayed the Rosary, Breviary, and celebrated Masses for the new congregation he had built throughout the world. He imagined, or hoped then, that handfuls of the victims may have seen a prayer or two—or maybe even stayed around for a Mass.

Then doctors discovered another problem in his brain; there had been an infection from his first surgery. So, another surgery was scheduled, where a surgeon removed the large portion of his skull that had been cut in the first surgery. He was fitted with a white plastic helmet for several months. There was then a third surgery where a large metal plate was installed where his skull used to be. “The plate was excruciatingly painful,” he said. “It was very hard to live with.” The third surgery was followed by nine months of chemotherapy and radiation.  Faithful laity pray and hope for a few shepherds of the Church willing to forge a new path. They don’t seek a New Springtime, or a synodal way. They seek a reckoning, a purification through fire.Tweet This

Now the deeper story begins. There was a time when Fr. Hollowell thought the pain and aftershocks of his brain surgery might have been the lion’s share of his own share of the victims’ pain; his poured-out libation. He had no idea then. The priest who asked God to nail the victims’ pain to his body didn’t know God would allow him to become the victim of sexual abuse. 

In the year that followed, Fr. Hollowell began to suffer in the same manner as survivors, as if he became transmogrified into one who had been repeatedly sexually abused by a priest. The same aftershocks that haunt victims rained down on him like sheets of lightning. 

When he returned to Annunciation parish in Brazil, Indiana, to celebrate his first Mass after surgery, he felt something unfamiliar begin to rise in him. As he stepped to the altar, the first strike came. For the first time in his life, he was in the grip of a full-blown panic attack.

With trembling hands, racing heart, and bathed in sweat, he stumbled through what would become the most garbled, fragmented Mass of his priesthood. When it was over, he left the sanctuary without a word, returned to his rectory, and stayed in bed for three days.

He once prayed: Lord, as you took our suffering to the Cross, give me theirs. And God gave.

Panic attacks? Check.

The chemo, relentless—made him vomit. Check.

He became suicidal after withdrawal from the opioids that dulled the pain. Check.

For the first time in his life, Fr. Hollowell was clinically depressed. He withdrew from his closest friends and family, retreating into the empty guest bedroom of Fr. Meyer’s rectory. But even Fr. Meyer, the priest who quietly cared for him during his Dark Night, at times wasn’t wanted.

On the days Fr. Hollowell tried to leave his room, anxiety surged like tidal waves. Even joining Fr. Meyer for the Liturgy of the Hours left him tense and on edge. And on the better days—those rare mornings when the fog seemed to lift—he felt it: a sudden, invisible tug, like Satan himself, snapping him back into his tomb of seclusion.

Depression. Check.

Anger. Check.

Torment and fear. Check.

Feelings of shame and isolation. Check.

But, in persona Christi, he had asked to become the victim, obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 

“God allowed me exactly what I asked for,” he said. 

I experienced some of what the victim does…In time, the violence of it all became my only consolation. Because I knew God, I thought then, was helping the victim survivors through it, in His own way. 

This is what redemptive suffering looks like, what the saints, Peter, Paul, and the Church preach and have always understood. The prosperity gospel is not part of our Catholic Church. St. Peter said (1 Peter 2:21) that “Christ suffered for each of us, leaving us an example that we should follow.”

In time, Fr. Hollowell managed to pass through his ordeal, and he began to celebrate Masses again at the end of 2021, when he was asked by doctors to report for MRI scans every three months. In the winter of 2022, as the pieces to his priesthood began to come back together, a scan showed the tumor had returned, joined by a second cancerous tumor on his pituitary gland.

Doctors wanted him to begin a second round of radiation and chemotherapy. Fr. Hollowell, however, said no. “At this point, I was fine with dying,” he said last week. 

It was the prayer I made to our Lord in 2018: “If I’m able to suffer for the victims in imitation of You on the Cross, and offer up my life in reparation for the crimes of priests, I do it willingly.”

He scheduled a solo trip to Lourdes in June of 2022, to see if he might be one of the thousands who claim to have received healing from visiting the shrine and having the waters unearthed by Bernadette poured over his scarred head. Humbly, he also had carried another thought to Lourdes: “If I became healed, I thought it might help draw some of the victims, family members, and friends who had fallen away from the practice of faith back to church,” he said. 

Two weeks after his return, a few of his parishioners told him he was looking great, vibrant and stronger. Then, an MRI showed that his oligodendroglioma was gone. The growth on his pituitary gland had stopped growing. As you read this sentence, nothing is there anymore. Everything has vanished.

Three years later, Fr. Hollowell, uncomplainingly, obliges a panel of doctors in Lourdes, who’ve asked him to send them all of his latest discs of MRIs and radiology reports until further notice.

“The world rejects the redemptive work of suffering,” Fr. Hollowell said last week. 

Hopefully, if things proceed like they are—and a miracle is approved—the world will see that, yes, in fact, suffering is not only redemptive, but that it can save. Maybe those who doubt will be open to seeing that suffering is not only not meaningless—but even that asking for it brings unexpected results with enormous value.

To close, let us circle back to the Sunday Mass at Annunciation parish in June of 2018, just days after Fr. Hollowell was told of McCarrick’s sin and of the American bishops who kept it quiet. He walked to his ambo and began his homily with these words:

“Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture,” he said, repeating the passage in Jeremiah a half dozen more times in his homily. 

The wound in the Church continues to be infected and it oozes with fresh pus this week…In one sense, I can say that I’m not even sure I can fault people who leave. It is all so awful. But I want to challenge us to do something, I want to challenge you to run back into the building that’s on fire and help to put it out, and help to rebuild. 

He urged his flock to turn away from the scandals and sin. “God says, ‘I will deal with those shepherds. Woe to them.’”

Then he closed his homily by speaking words of hope to the thousands upon thousands of victim-survivors. 

“I will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands to which I have driven them, and bring them back to their meadow, and there they shall increase and multiply. I will appoint shepherds for them who will [Fr. Hollowell raised his voice here] shepherd them, so that they no longer fear and tremble.” (Jeremiah 23:3-4)

The year 2018 will be marked in stone. It was the year when vast swaths of American Catholics finally saw what had long lurked in the shadows—that the spotless, incorruptible Bride of Christ had been beset by hidden evil and corruption. For millions of the faithful, the veil was torn. But as God is merciful, so, too, are American Catholics. 

In this, Rome’s Jubilee Year of Hope, faithful laity see the Catholic Church at a hinge point. They struggle to raise children in a world indifferent to God. They see their sons and daughters growing up in a moral winter, exposed each day to dark ideologies, secular modernism, reengineered ideas of virtue, and caught in the surging, soul-numbing, and drowning waves of technology. A growing number of young Catholics now identify as Nones. Few shepherds work to find and bring them back. 

Faithful laity pray and hope for a few shepherds of the Church willing to forge a new path. They don’t seek a New Springtime, or a synodal way. They seek a reckoning, a purification through fire: the kind that burns everything sinful, unsacred, and worldly in the Church to the ground and brings it back to Pentecost day, A.D. 33, where willing saints like John Hollowell once roamed and willingly died to proclaim the resurrected Christ—where they still live today, like a miracle of light for these dark days.