A World War One sailor has been formally recognised as the first Brit to have been miraculously healed at Lourdes, the Catholic holy site.
Liverpudlian sailor John Traynor suffered from paralysis, epilepsy and paraplegia following severe trauma experienced during the first World War.
Traynor, born in 1883, served in the merchant navy before joining the Royal Navy in the First World War.
Just three months after the war began, he was wounded in Bruges in October 1914, and was later hit with machinegun fire during the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.
These horrific injuries left him suffering from epilepsy and his right arm paralysed. A botched operation in 1920 made his condition worse, and he we was partially paralysed from the legs down.
Having suffered for years under his conditions, he travelled to Lourdes, in southwest France, in the hopes that he would be cured.
The town became a holy site for the Catholic faith after a peasant girl called Bernadette Soubirous reportedly saw the Virgin Mary in visions, who asked her to build a chapel and dig down into the Pyrenees to free a spring.
This spring became a site of pilgrimage for the sick to pray and drink from the spring in the hopes that their condition would be cured.
Liverpudlian sailor John Traynor (pictured) suffered from paralysis, epilepsy and paraplegia following severe trauma experienced during the first World War
File image of pilgrims visiting the Our Lady of Lourdes statue in the cave at Massabielle, Lourdes, France
Traynor is reported to have bathed in the waters nine timed during his pilgrimage.
It is claimed that he was ‘instantaneously and dramatically’ cured of his conditions during his trip.
The Most Rev Malcolm McMahon, the Archbishop of Liverpool, told worshippers that Traynor’s healing was ‘absolutely outside and above the forces of nature.’
McMahon said that Traynor’s healing was never actually officially claimed by the Catholic church.
‘It was thought that there was insufficient contemporaneous evidence to establish that the cure of John Traynor could not be attributed to medical interventions or be explained according to medical science’, he said.
But following a review of files held at the Lourdes archives, a reference to Traynor’s healing was foun in a 1926 report in the shrine’s journal by Dr August Vallet, the then-president of the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations.
Vallet declared that ‘the process of this prodigious healing is absolutely outside and above the forces of nature’.
As a result, McMahon said: ‘Given the weight of medical evidence, the testimony to the faith of John Traynor and his devotion to Our Blessed Lady, it is with great joy that I declare that the cure of John Traynor, from multiple serious medical conditions, is to be recognised as a miracle wrought by the power of God through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.’
John set up his own coal delivery business after he was cured
In this file photo taken on August 15, 2018, Catholic pilgrims pose in front of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary during the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption, in the French Southwestern pilgrimage city of Lourdes
After Traynor returned to Liverpool, he started a coal delivery business, which he ran until his death in 1943.
While an estimated 200million people have visited Lourdes since 1860, the Catholic church has officially recognised just 69 healings.
The process for official recognition is rigorous.
Of the estimated 35 claims that are brought to the Lourdes Medical Bureau, the body in charge of investigating miracles at Lourdes, every year, almost all of them are dismissed.
Three to five are investigated more thoroughly, with the Bureau examining the patients, any case notes and any tests.
If a case has legs, then it is brought to the attention of the International Lourdes Medical Bureau (ILMB), a panel of 20 experts who examine the case and make a claim of whether a healing is medically inexplicable.
Though the ILMB cannot say whether a healing was a miracle, it refers rulings to the Bishop of the diocese where the cured person lives, who consults with the Vatican and makes a decision on whether a cure is a miracle.
