He was able to return to diaconate classes with a warning from his doctor that his improved condition was not likely to last long.
Nine months later he said he found out that Cardinal Newman gives you just what you ask for. The day after the last class, “the pain returned in all its fury,” he said.
Surgery was scheduled for Aug. 9, 2001 with the chief of spinal surgery at New England Baptist Hospital, Dr. Robert Banco, the best in the United States, he said.
“I prayed to Newman daily,” he said.
His doctor told him recovery would be months, possibly years, because the dura mater in his spine was not only compressed but torn up.
It was three weeks before the fourth-year diaconate classes were to begin. “I’ve got to try to walk,” Mr. Sullivan told his nurses.
“It took me 10 minutes to get myself to the edge of the bed. … the pain was constant,” he said. “I couldn’t get up. I was in agony. … I was brought to prayer. The same simple prayer. ‘Please Cardinal Newman help me to walk so that I can return to classes and be ordained.’
“Then something unbelievable happened. You talk about the communion of saints ... that experience I had approached that concept.
“Suddenly, I felt tremendous heat ... and a tingling feeling all over my body. I also felt a tremendous sense of peace and joy. … I was totally consumed, totally engulfed in what I have believed and will always believe was God’s presence. I had no willpower of my own. I was just totally captivated.
“I realized I was standing up, standing with no pain … I could walk normally,” he said.
The nurse offered him a walker, then a cane; but he needed neither. He walked up and down the corridors of the hospital with the nurse telling him to slow down. “How could I slow down?” he asked with a chuckle.
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He was discharged that day, went on to diaconate classes, and was ordained a year later, on Sept. 14, 2002, the feast of the triumph of the cross.
On the same day as his ordination he was notified by email that the fathers at the Birmingham Oratory had voted to formally initiate the beatification process for John Henry Newman and they would take his case to Rome.
Deacon Sullivan said he took that as a sign.
Printed with permission from the Catholic Free Press, newspaper for the Diocese of Worcester, Mass.