By Catherine Sheehan
Catholic News Service
SYDNEY — Exactly 10 years to the day — July 18, 2018 — Ricky Peterson of Kansas City, Kansas, knelt once more at the tomb of St. Mary MacKillop in suburban North Sydney, Australia, this time with a prayer of thanksgiving for the seemingly miraculous event that had changed his life a decade earlier.
Peterson, 57, first knelt at the tomb as a pilgrim during World Youth Day in 2008 and offered a prayer he will never forget: that through the intercession of Australia’s first saint, God would heal him of the Parkinson’s disease he had endured for nine long years.
“I said, ‘Mary, I’m asking you to pray with me again tonight. Lord, I would love nothing more than to leave this Parkinson’s and tremor buried beside Mary, if it’s your will. I’m going to go out and praise your name,’” Peterson recalled.
It was only 10 minutes later when the father of five was on the train, traveling with his youngest daughter back to their host family that he first noticed that the tremor in his right arm had disappeared.
“I kept checking every 30 seconds and I was like, ‘It’s still gone, it’s still gone,’” he said.
Despite his amazement and certainty that he’d been healed, he didn’t say a word to anyone.
It was during the final Mass at Randwick Racecourse, celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI, that while holding hands with her father, Jessica noticed the tremor was gone.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Your hand didn’t shake at all.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it hasn’t since Friday night.’ We both started crying.”
Peterson’s wife Maura said when he phoned from Australia to tell her the news, she was filled with gratitude and “pure joy.”
The couple spoke to The Catholic Weekly, newspaper of the Sydney Archdiocese, at Mary MacKillop Place in North Sydney on their return visit of gratitude. It was Maura’s first visit to Australia.
“It was thanksgiving for a new future that we had given up on,” she said. “A month before, we had been talking about whether I should quit my job to care for him and whether we could afford financially to do that. So we had the future we had dreamed of back. So it was thanksgiving and just pure joy.”
Peterson said the Sisters of St Joseph, the saint’s order, documented what had happened to him and told him that if the second miracle being investigated for the canonization was not approved, then his case was one of two they would “start moving forward.” It proved unnecessary, however, as the second miracle — the healing from lung and brain cancer of Australian Kathleen Evans — eventually was approved.