I’m not a Catholic, so the recent election of a new Pope is for me merely a curiosity. My neighbor, with whom I frequently converse, is a retired principal of a Catholic school, and a ‘lay deacon’ (I think that’s his correct title) of a local Catholic church.
Between talking to him about his church, and having been a professor at a law school affiliated with a Catholic university (Barry), I have at least a rudimentary understanding of that denomination of Christianity. Having read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I know something of the early history of the Catholic church.
Other reading informed me of the church’s checkered role in European politics over many centuries .
Though I subscribe to no particular religious doctrine, I appreciate that faith is an important part of many people’s lives. I also believe in Divine intervention — because I observed manifestations of it during my prosecutorial career.
Here are the three most profound examples.
In April, 1997, there was a two-car, head-on, collision that killed four people. I prosecuted the woman whose gross negligence caused the accident.
An Angel appeared at that accident scene. I swear the following is true.
In the course of my preparation for trial, I was contacted by a photo-journalist who worked as a ‘stringer’ for local television stations. I knew him from previous cases, and he had always been credible — which was relevant to this incident.
He was a few miles from the crash site when he saw the emergency vehicles responding, so he followed them — because documenting such things on film is what he does for a living. He arrived on the scene within minutes after the paramedics, and began filming.
Part of his film was used by a local station that evening. He offered me all of his footage, including parts he did not share with the television station, without further comment.
While watching the unedited footage, I noticed a gray-haired woman kneeling at the head of the critically injured survivor as he was being treated by the paramedics. She was holding his head in her hands, and apparently saying something to him that was not picked up on the recording.
No such woman appeared in any of the police reports, nor had the only two witnesses to the accident mentioned her to me when I interviewed them. If that gray-haired woman had witnessed the accident it would be important to my prosecution, so I wanted to interview her.
I asked the videographer if he happened to get her name. That’s when things got strange. His response was (as close as I recall) “Gary … until I reviewed the video, I never saw that woman. She was not there when I filmed it. I haven’t shown this to anyone else.”
Having worked many traffic accidents in my time as a paramedic, I knew it would be highly unusual for medics to have permitted a civilian next to a victim they were attending. So I showed them the video. Both said they never saw her.
Neither did any of the officers and firemen at the scene. Nor did the two accident witnesses.
The location of the accident was a road through a wetland, with nothing but marsh grass for miles on both sides. The nearest road from which the woman could have walked was an Interstate over a mile away.
She could have arrived at, and left, the scene only by vehicle… which would have been impossible because by the point in time when she appears on film, the road had been blocked off in both directions.
So there, on film, was a gray-haired woman comforting the survivor. Yet no one present at the scene, including the person filming from ten feet away, saw her. The survivor, unconscious at the time, had no memory of her. He was the only one in that vehicle not dead at the scene.
When I told Mrs. Beatty that tale, and showed her the video, as soon as she saw the woman she said “That’s an Angel!”
I know a thing or two about evidence — and there is absolutely none to refute that conclusion.
***
On August 12, 2000, in the early morning darkness a degenerate (whose name I won’t mention) surreptitiously entered the home of the Frisky family in Titusville, Florida. It was later learned he was obsessed with the teenage daughter who lived there — the younger sister of one of his acquaintances.
When the intruder was unable to get through the teenager’s locked bedroom door, he entered the room of her 11-year-old sister, who woke up screaming. The awakened parents encountered the him in the hallway.
He’d brought a large knife with him that he then used to slash the mother’s throat, and stab the father multiple times before stabbing the 11-year-old to silence her, then fleeing the home. From inside her locked room, the teenage object of his lust called 911. The mortally wounded father managed to make it to a neighbor’s doorstep, calling for help, before dying.
The younger sister was dead at the scene. The teenage target of the attacker’s lust hid in her room and survived.
I was the on-call Assistant State Attorney the night of that murder, and went to the scene. By the time I arrived, the still-alive mother had been transported to the hospital. There was more blood (mostly where the mother had fallen) than at any other murder scene I’d ever viewed, live or in photos. From the description of the mother’s wound, told to me by the next-door neighbor, the first responding officer, and one of the paramedics, plus the amount of blood she obviously lost, I didn’t believe she could survive, so I contacted the State Attorney and advised him we had a triple homicide.
I hadn’t counted on the power of prayer.
A few days later, our office was notified the mother was likely to recover. When I spoke with the trauma surgeon who had operated on her, I complimented him on what appeared to be a superb job of saving her life.
He told me that in his career he’d had two cases where there was no medical explanation for how a trauma patient had survived, and that this was one of them. Her survival, he said, could only be attributed to “Divine intervention!’
We learned the family were devoutly religious. From the morning of the crime, members of the family’s church congregation had been holding a prayer vigil for the mother.
She subsequently testified at the degenerate’s trial. He was convicted, and sentenced to death.
Over a decade later, on appeal, that death sentence was commuted to life without parole. The ‘loophole’ which resulted in that legal abomination has since been closed — but the degenerate’s life sentence stands.
If there is a heaven, and hell — and I hope there are — that family and the degenerate won’t meet in the hereafter.
***
In 2002, a priest at a Catholic church in Cocoa Beach was attacked and severely beaten in front of the altar.
Again, I was the prosecutor on call, so I went to the scene and (the following day) to the hospital where the priest was in critical condition.
At the hospital I saw the priest who had not regained consciousness, spoke with the staff, and reviewed the medical chart to determine if this might become a homicide, or if the priest might survive (having learned my lesson about Divine intervention).
The hospital was to notify me if the priest regained consciousness sufficiently to give me a statement — though I didn’t anticipate that would be any time soon. Again, I hadn’t factored in the power of prayer.
The next day I was advised the priest was conscious, and significantly improved. When I arrived at his hospital room his brother, and another priest, were present. They had been praying by his side since the previous evening.
The charge nurse told me the staff were astounded at how quickly the priest had improved over the previous twelve hours. She used the word “miracle”.
The defendant — a non-Catholic religious zealot whose motive wasn’t entirely clear — was convicted of the attack.
I don’t know the religion of the survivor of the car crash who was comforted by the Angel. The mother who survived the attack on her family belonged to an evangelical Christian church… and the priest was Catholic.
So based on my personal experience, denomination appears to be irrelevant. What seems to matter is faith, and prayer.
If the new Pope is all about faith, and stays out of secular politics — unlike many of his predecessors failed to do, at the cost of countless lives — then I wish him well.