Jack Traynor

Here is an instantaneous and scientifically inexplicable healing that is not included in the list of 70 Lourdes miracles – the case of Jack Traynor. It can only be described as divine intervention. Here is his story.

Background

Jack Traynor was an Irishman living in Liverpool, England who fought in World War I. On May 8, 1915, he was wounded in the head and chest by machine gun fire. A bullet ripped through the inner side of his upper right arm and lodged under the collarbone, paralyzing his right arm. Three times he was operated on in an attempt to sew together the severed nerves in the upper arm. All three operations failed. While on a hospital ship Traynor suffered his first epileptic attack, and they became more frequent as time went on.

Amputation of his right arm was advised since it appeared the torn and shrunken nerves could never be repaired. Traynor would not consent.

In November 1916, another doctor tried unsuccessfully to suture the nerves. Traynor was discharged from the service and determined to be 100% permanently disabled. He spent months in various hospitals as an epileptic patient. In April 1920, a doctor concluded that the epilepsy was probably the result of head wounds suffered in the war and operated on the skull. The operation left Traynor with an open hole about an inch wide in his skull, exposing his brain. A silver plate was inserted to shield the brain, but the epileptic condition was no better after the operation, with seizures occurring as often as three times daily.

“Both legs were partly paralyzed, and nearly every organ in Traynor’s body was impaired.” For eight years he had been confined to a wheel chair, living with his wife and children in a house on a disability pension. He would sit for hours outside the house and had to be lifted from his bed into the chair and back again.

Lourdes

It was then that he made the decision, against the advice of his doctor and priest, to journey to Lourdes with a 1,200-person pilgrimage from Liverpool. His doctor and priest were afraid the trip would be too difficult and that he would die on the journey. He ignored their pleadings.

“The year 1923 – the eighth after he became a casualty in Gallipoli [Turkey] – found him leading this helpless existence. I have counted the names of ten doctors through whose hands he had passed up to then. The result of all their efforts and examinations was to prove that he was completely and incurably incapacitated. Unable to stand or walk, subject to frequent epileptic fits, with three open wounds, one of them in his head, without the power of feeling or movement in his torn and shrivelled [sic] right arm, he was indeed a human wreck. Somebody arranged to have him admitted to the Mossley Hill Hospital for Incurables on July 24th, 1923. But by that date Jack Traynor was to be in Lourdes.”

As he arrived to board the train from Liverpool he was joined by other pilgrims and, because of the publicity he had received in the local newspapers, people mulled about him and he missed the first train. He boarded the second.

Traynor later recalled that he could. . .

“remember practically nothing of the journey, except seeing a number of sick people on stretchers beside me on platforms and docks, some of them bleeding, all of them suffering. I believe that I was very sick on the way. Three times they tried to take me off the train in France to bring me to a hospital, as I seemed to be dying. Each time there was no hospital where they stopped, and the only thing to do was to go on again, with me still on board.”

At Lourdes he was cared for by two Protestant young ladies from Liverpool who happened to be in Lourdes just by chance. They had recognized him as the person sitting outside his house all the time. On July 24, 1923, he was examined by three doctors who had accompanied him and the other Liverpool pilgrims. Their signed statement is on record and they found him to be suffering from:

1.  “Epilepsy [“We ourselves saw several attacks during his journey to Lourdes”];

2.  Paralysis of the radial, median and ulnar nerves of the right arm;

3.  Atrophy of the shoulder and pectoral muscles;

4.  A trephine opening in the right parietal region of the skull; in this opening, about 2.5 cm. [one inch], there is a metal plate for protection;

5.  Absence of voluntary movement in the legs and loss of feeling;

6.  Lack of bodily control.”

While at Lourdes he suffered more epileptic seizures and hemorrhages. One of the pilgrims even wrote Traynor’s wife that there was no hope for him and that he was expected to die in Lourdes.

Healing

On July 25th it happened. The following quotations are directly from Jack Traynor.

“I was wheeled down [to the baths] to wait my turn. There were many to be bathed and we all wanted to be finished before the afternoon procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which began at four o’clock. My turn came, and when I was in the bath, my paralysed legs became violently agitated. The brancardiers [volunteers at Lourdes who assist the sick in their journey] became alarmed once more, thinking that I was in another fit. I struggled to get on my feet, feeling that I could easily do so, and wondered why everybody seemed to be against me. When I was taken out of the bath, I cried from sheer weakness and exhaustion.

“The brancardiers threw my clothes on hurriedly, put me back on the stretcher and rushed me down to the square in front of the Rosary Church to await the procession. Practically all the other sick were already lined up. I was the third last on the outside, to the right as you face the church.

“The procession came winding its way back, as usual, to the church, and at the end walked the Archbishop of Rheims, carrying the Blessed Sacrament. He blessed the two ahead of me, came to me, made the sign of the cross with the monstrance and moved on to the next. He had just passed by when I realized that a great change had taken place in me. My right arm, which had been dead since 1915, was violently agitated. I burst its bandages and blessed myself – for the first time in years.

“I had no sudden pain that I can recall and certainly had no vision. I simply realized that something momentous had happened.”

Traynor was taken back to the hospital. There the three doctors who had examined him the day before examined him again. They reported, “We find that he had recovered the voluntary use of his legs; the reflexes exist. There is intense venous congestion of both feet, which are very painful. The patient can walk with difficulty.”

Traynor continues:

“The chimes in the basilica above the Rosary rang the hours and half-hours as usual through the night, playing the air of the Lourdes ‘Ave Maria.’ Early in the morning I heard them ringing, and it seemed to me that I fell asleep at the beginning of the ‘Ave.’ It could have been a matter of only a few seconds, but at the last stroke I opened my eyes and jumped out of bed. First, I knelt on the floor to finish the rosary I been saying, then I dashed for the door, pushed aside the two brancardiers and ran out into the passage and the open air. Previously I had been watching the brancardiers and planning to evade them. I may say here that I had not walked since 1915 and my weight was down to eight stone [112 lbs].

“Dr Marley was outside the door. When he saw the man over whom he had been watching during the pilgrimage, and whose death he had expected, push two brancardiers aside and run out of the ward, he fell back in amazement. Out in the open now, I ran towards the Grotto, which is about two or three hundred yards from the ‘Asile.’ [the hospital] This stretch of ground was gravelled then, not paved, and I was barefoot. I ran the whole way to the Grotto without getting the least mark or cut on my bare feet. The brancardiers were running after me but they could not catch up with me. When they reached the Grotto, there I was on my knees, still in my night clothes, praying to Our Lady and thanking her. All I knew was that I should thank her and the Grotto was the place to do it. The brancardiers stood back, afraid to touch me.”

When Traynor took off the last of his bandages on returning from the Grotto on the morning of July 26th, he found every one of his sores healed.

“Early in the morning of July 27th the three [same] doctors examined Traynor before the pilgrimage left Lourdes. Their statement says that:

1.  He can walk perfectly;

2.  He has recovered the use and function of his right arm;

3.  He has recovered sensation in his legs;

4.  The opening in his skull has diminished considerably.

5.  There have been no more epileptic crises.”

Returning to Liverpool

The news of Traynor’s instant cure was telegraphed to the Liverpool newspapers.

Traynor continues:

“My wife went down to the station with her friend, Mrs Reitdyk. It seemed as if all Liverpool had gathered there. The people had seen the news of the miracle in the evening papers and had come down to see me. There were extra police on duty to handle the crowd, while railway officials stood at the entrance to the platform to keep the people from rushing the train.

“With difficulty my wife and her friend reached the platform gate, where she told the official that she was Mrs Traynor and asked to be allowed through.

“Well,” replied the man, ‘all I can say is that Mr Traynor must be a Mohammedan, because there are seventy or eighty Mrs Traynors on the platform already!’”

A permanent cure

Traynor concludes his testimony:

“I am in the coal and haulage business now [1937]. I have four lorries or trucks and about a dozen men working for me. I work with them. I lift sacks of coal weighing around 200 pounds with the best of them and I can do any other work that an able-bodied man can do. But officially I am still classified as 100 per cent disabled and permanently incapacitated!

“I never accepted a penny from anybody at the time of my cure or after it. I came back from Lourdes penniless, except for my way pension. I have never permitted any money to come to my family in connection with my cure or the publicity that has followed it. Nevertheless, Our Lady has improved my temporal affairs, too, and thanks be to God and to her, I am now comfortably situated, and my children are all well provided for. Three of them have been born since my cure, one a girl whom I have named Bernadette.

“The two non-Catholic girls who looked after me when I came to Lourdes joined the Church as the result of my cure. Their family at home in Liverpool followed their example, and so did the Anglican minister of the church they had been attending. I know of another parson who would like to follow suit, only that he is a marred [sic] man with a family. A large number of conversions in Liverpool have resulted from the miracle.

“I go to Lourdes now every year and work as a brancardier there. I have gone twice and three times in one season.”

Epilogue

This account was compiled and written by the Reverend Patrick O’Connor, Missionary of St Columban, who met Traynor in 1938. Traynor was then a robust 224 lbs and in perfect health. All quotations are from Father O’Connor. He concludes his narrative:

“The official report, issued by the Medical Bureau at Lourdes on October 2nd, 1926, declared that ‘this extraordinary cure is absolutely beyond and above the powers of nature.’

“The most striking part of this multiple miracle is probably the instantaneous cure of the right arm. The nerves had been severed for eight years. Four surgical operations had revealed that they were truly severed and had failed to reunite them. More than mere suture would be necessary before the arm could feel and move again; the shrunken nerves would need to go through a long process of regeneration A feat that expert surgery had failed four times to do and a process that requires months of gradual restoration were achieved instantaneously as the Blessed Sacrament was raised over John Traynor.

“Another group of experts testified – though unconsciously – to the miracle. These were the doctors and officials of the War Pensions Ministry. These gentlemen, after years of examination, treatment and inspection, certified that John Traynor was incurable, and they showed the strength of their conviction by awarding him full disability pension for life. They have never revoked that decision.

“As I was about to publish this account, news has come that John Traynor died on the eve of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1943. The cause of his death was hernia, in no way related to the illness and wounds of which he was cured in Lourdes. For more than twenty years he lived a vigorous life, every moment of which he owed to the miracle of July, 1923. For more than twenty years he was a standing, stalwart testimony to the power of Almighty God and the efficacy of the intercession of Mary Immaculate. In his rugged person he presented a tangible argument with which unbelief could not wrestle without being overthrown. For some this miracle has brought the surrender which is a gain and a victory. Others – it has happened from the beginning and will happen to the end – have taken flight from the facts, in one direction or another.

“Miracles such as the cure of John Traynor are, of course, rare, while they are real. They point the way not to a wide-open exit from all physical suffering but rather to the spiritual recoveries and triumphs that are certain to come from unhesitating faith and a childlike approach to Jesus Christ, through Mary, His Mother and ours.”

All quotations are from Father O’Connor’s account entitled I Met a Miracle — The story of Jack Traynor, by the Reverend Patrick O’Connor, missionary of St Columban.

Why are so many not miraculously cured, but others are? We can’t possibly answer that question, but perhaps Jack Traynor was cured just to help you believe.

Some websites and references

• Miraculous Healings
• I Met a Miracle — The story of Jack Traynor

Footnotes and Attributions

Picture of John Traynor retrieved from Miracles of Lourdes website.

Last modified July 26, 2019