Religion: Malden’s Miracles

“Please do not kneel. Please, please, PLEASE, lady, don’t kneel there! Touch the stone and pass along. That’s all that is necessary. Pray in the chapel. Move along, now. Move along. . . .”

All last week the policemen on duty in Holy Cross Cemetery at Malden. Mass., had to admonish, direct and keep moving the great throngs who came to touch the lowly tomb of Patrick J. Power, a Catholic Priest dead for 60 years and now, to the faithful, a potent worker of healing miracles (TIME, Nov. 25).

Attendance in the third week of the wonder totalled well above a million. The crowds included Chinese, Jews, Irish, Gypsies, Southerners, Protestants, Boxer Jack Sharkey, Negro Boxer Sam Langford. So overrun was the cemetery that other graves were sadly desecrated, other funerals made impossible. Authorities had limited miracle-seeking hours between 7 a. m. and 5 p. m., then from 2 p. m. to 5 Pm.

Finally, with another swarming week-end at hand, William Henry Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, twice a visitor to the grave, decided to call a halt. Announced his secretary, Monsignor Francis A. Burke: “The situation at the cemetery in Maiden has become such that an investigation is being made into the whole question which has developed there during the past month.” Added Monsignor Burke: The gates of the cemetery would remain closed except for funerals until further notice. Iron workers under the direction of the Cardinal’s brother Edward, who is superintendent of the cemetery, fixed stout extra braces to the gates; then they were locked.

Cardinal O’Connell’s action in the matter was explained as follows: “By church precedent the duty of a Bishop at such times of spontaneous manifestations of faith is to stand aloof, whatever might be his personal opinions, and to give no evidence of approval until such time as events make it clear that the hand of God is at work.”

The reports of miraculous cures increased in number if not in clarity. One Louis Hanover begged more than $100 from the sympathetic crowd, flung down his crutches on the grave, cried out that he was cured, ran away. The policemen caught him, discovered his alias was Samuel Cohen. He was sent to the work farm for four months. Anna Bellard of Adams, Mass., made out an affidavit at the cemetery office saying she had walked and talked for the first time in five years. Twelve-year-old Rita Averman of Manhattan, blind since infancy, thought she saw light and moving shapes, etc., etc., etc.

Ira T. Royer, 35, of Manchester, N. J., visited the grave, went home and died of a tumor.

In France, too, a miracle was reported. Last week General Gaston de Sonis (1825-87), devout Catholic, daring soldier, veteran of African campaigns and of the War of 1870, was being considered as a candidate for beatification. The ecclesiastical tribunal which sat on his case ordered disinterment of his body. When the body was removed last week from its coffin in the crypt of Loigny Church, where it had lain since 1887, it was reported to be in a “miraculous” state of preservation—no rigor mortis, hair and skin “as natural as in life.” General de Sonis Was beatified.