An internationally bestselling author and celebrity historian has revealed he was mysteriously cured of cancer after a desperate prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Tom Holland is the author of the histories Millennium and Dominion and with Dominic Sandbrook is co-host of The Rest is History podcast, one of the most-listened to podcasts in the English-speaking world.
At a talk hosted by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, Mr Holland confessed that his only two experiences of possible supernatural origin involved the Blessed Virgin Mary, joking that “God must have a sense of humour”.
Mr Brierley examined the anecdotes in a recent article for The Spectator, headlined “A Christian Revival is Under Way in Britain”.
Mr Holland qualified his remarks to the Catholic Herald by also saying there were potentially non-supernatural explanations for what he experienced – and that he still remains “stranded in the shadowlands between faith and existential despair”.
But he said that the mere possibility of believing that such experiences might have been of supernatural origin opened up for him a sense of how wondrous the universe could appear to a person who chose to make a leap of faith.
His first encounter happened while filming a documentary in the war-torn north of Iraq and he entered an abandoned church desecrated by Islamic State terrorists.
This church was located in an Iraqi town where years earlier Christians were crucified for their faith. The historian recalled that contemplating crucifixion propelled him into an “existential abyss”.
Mr Holland then described how while he was entranced and staring at a patch of rubble on the ground in front of him, a gust of wind carried a piece of paper bearing a sacred image of the Annunciation which fluttered precisely into his line of sight.
He picked the image up and beheld “the great wings of Gabriel sweeping backwards as he knelt before the Virgin”.
He described the feelings of the next few moments as ones of being in a “thin place” where the veil between our own world and potential realities beyond was more translucent.
“And I felt it was one of those thin places people talk about where the dimension of the heavenly suddenly seems incredibly close,” he revealed.
Mr Holland said that he felt strongly in this location the sense that something much like angels’ wings were brushing past his shoulders as they ascended and descended from other realms.
“It was a kind of sweet sense of intoxication,” he told Justin Brierley at the LICC, suggesting that his experience could have been due to dehydration but that he couldn’t dismiss its possible supernatural origin altogether.
“Perhaps everything was weird and strange. And the moment you accept that there are angels, then suddenly the world just seems richer and more interesting,” he said.
“Was I wrong when I focussed on the angel? Should I actually have actually focussed on the Virgin? Was she there?” he later asked himself.
Mr Holland subsequently described the second experiential religious encounter he had.
As Protestants in the audience laughed, he cautioned that audience members were potentially unlikely to enjoy what he would reveal next.
“I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk in this vein in a congregationalist church,” he said, “but it’s going to get worse I can tell you.”
Years later, in December 2021 the historian was diagnosed with cancer and his doctor insisted that it would be likely necessary that part of his gut be removed in an operation.
Over the Christmas period Holland attended services at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great in central London.
A former Augustinian priory and hospital – St Bartholomew’s is associated with the miraculous as it was founded after Rahere, an Augustinian friar, is said to have had a vision in which he was told by a heavenly messenger to found a church in the London area of Smithfield.
It is also the only place in London where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared.
She is recorded in the (still preserved) contemporaneous Book of Foundations as having appeared to a Catholic monk named Hubert. The book describes her, in a delicate and encouraging manner, telling him and the other monks off for not doing the liturgy correctly, urging them to return to the “pious reverence” of their traditional celebration of the “Mass”.
The Church, which was seized by the Protestants at the Reformation ceased to see any more of the miraculous signs or healings which were commonly until then associated with it. No known Marian apparition has occurred to Anglican clergy or laypeople.
Mr Holland, reeling from the recent diagnosis, and being both aware of the church’s history and someone who rarely prayed, knelt at the spot in the Lady Chapel of St Bartholomew’s where Our Lady is said to have appeared – and asked for help.
Mr Holland revealed that he hadn’t prayed since he was young, but thought he had nothing to lose.
“I went to this place where the Virgin appeared and gave this huge heartfelt prayer. Come on. Please. And all kinds of things went right from that point on.”
Within weeks, Mr Holland received medical confirmation that his bowel cancer had receded and he confessed bad trends in his life began to turn around.
“The cancer hadn’t spread… and therefore I didn’t need to have this chunk of my gut removed. Two years on I seem clear of it.”
“As a Protestant agnostic, the idea that I had had a Marian intervention seemed to me so sublimely funny [that] I thought if it’s true, God must have the most wonderful sense of humour,” he said.
In 2023, Mr Holland told Bishop Robert Barron at a public audience that his wife was a Catholic (who had rediscovered her faith only recently) and that a Jesuit priest they once knew was the saintliest person he had ever met.
The historian suggested to Bishop Barron that he furthermore believed that atheism was the “natural end-point” of Protestantism.
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