The happy couple pictured below are my mother and father upon their wedding day in Scotland back in 1967, writes David Kerr, Director of Communications for the Diocese of Lansing.
Meanwhile, the priest to their left is a family friend, Father John Fitzgibbons. Father Fitzgibbons was pivotal to the canonization of the 17th century martyr of the Scottish Reformation, Saint John Ogilvie, whose feast the Church celebrates today, March 10. Here’s the story:
John Ogilvie (1580 – 1615) was a Scottish Jesuit priest during the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Scotland which had begun with the 1560 Scottish Reformation Parliament.
A convert from Presbyterianism, Ogilvie was ordained to the priesthood at Paris in 1613. Later that year he gladly embraced the apostolic opportunity to return to his homeland to “unteach heresy” in a country where it was illegal to preach or practice Catholicism.
Within a year of his return, Ogilvie was betrayed, ambushed and arrested in Glasgow before being imprisoned, tortured and put on trial for high treason. On March 10, 1615, Father John Ogilvie was paraded through the streets of Glasgow and hanged at Glasgow Cross. He was 36 years old.
One witness to the execution, Baron Johann von Eckersdorff, a Protestant nobleman from Hungary, caught Ogilvie’s rosary beads as they fell from the scaffold. He later recalled: “Those rosary beads had left a wound in my soul; go where I would I had no peace of mind… At last conscience won the day. I became a Catholic.”
Popular devotion to the late Father Ogilvie soon spread. He was declared Venerable by the Church before the end of the century. He was then beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929. As for his canonization, that’s where Father Fitzgibbons enters our story.
John Fitzgibbons’ widowed mother lived next door to my maternal great-grandfather, Bernard Finegan, in Dublin. At that time, Ireland was a land with a surfeit of priestly vocations and, so, young John was ordained for the Archdiocese of Glasgow in Scotland in 1945. A new priest in a new country, the only person he knew in Glasgow was Bernard’s daughter, Concepta, my grandmother, who had moved to the city upon marriage in 1935. Hence a lifelong family friendship was cast.
By 1967, Father Fitzgibbons was serving in the parish of Blessed John Ogilvie in the Easterhouse neighborhood of Glasgow. At that time, it was on the only parish in the world dedicated to the martyr. Among the parishioners was a dock worker by the name of John Fagan.
Mr. Fagan had been diagnosed with stomach cancer two years previous. All treatment, including surgery, had proved futile such that the medics eventually told his wife, Mary: “There is nothing more we can do for your husband. Take him home and be good to him.”
Tending to him throughout was Father John Fitzgibbons. In January 1967, Father Fitzgibbons administered the Sacrament of the Sick to Mr. Fagan and gave a medal of Blessed John Ogilvie to his wife, suggesting she pin it to her husband’s pajamas. The family, and the parish, prayed unceasingly through Blessed John for a miracle.
Despite the heavenly petitions, however, John Fagan’s condition grew steadily worse. For seven weeks he had eaten nothing, yet he continued to vomit. His weight was down to 70 lbs. His stomach was distended by the cancerous tumor. Clearly he was dying.
On the afternoon of Saturday March 4, the family’s general practitioner, Dr Archibald Macdonald, told Mrs. Fagan that her husband wouldn’t survive the weekend. Mary continued to keep vigil by John’s bedside. At six o’clock on the Monday morning, she could detect little sign of life. Mrs. Fagan slumped in her chair, head in her hands, and dozed off. Three hours later, she was startled by a voice: “Mary, I’m hungry.” Her husband was alive. His cancer had vanished.
Soon after, Dr Macdonald arrived at the Fagan’s door and asked: “Is he gone?” When told that his patient was not only alive but eating a boiled egg, the good doctor seemed visibly shaken. “Good God, I don’t understand it,” he said.
After nine years of medical investigations, the Vatican ruled in February 1976 that John Fagan’s recovery from cancer could not be medically explained. It was a miracle.
Thus, on October 17, 1976, Pope Saint Paul VI canonized Saint John Ogilvie at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Among the many thousands of Scottish pilgrims were John and Mary Fagan… and Father Fitzgibbons too. Saint John Ogilvie, pray for us!
