Father John Hollowell — Prayer for Victims

June 2018 — Greencastle, Indiana Personal testimony about prayer and illness

Claimed prayer date

Summer 2018

Hollowell places the prayer in the confessional during the 2018 abuse-crisis summer.

First symptoms in the record

Seizure and spasm episodes before 2020 diagnosis

Public retellings differ in how tightly they compress the timeline, but all place the episodes before the Mayo Clinic diagnosis.

Diagnosis

Oligodendroglioma at Mayo Clinic

The public medical file becomes clearer in February 2020, when Mayo Clinic confirmed the tumor type.

Public record type

Priest’s testimony plus Catholic news reporting

The prayer itself is preserved through Hollowell’s own later account and interviews rather than through a witnessed record.

This page covers Fr. Hollowell's prayer claim — a separate page covers his Lourdes healing

Father Hollowell’s full story has two parts: (1) the prayer in 2018, documented here, and (2) his reported healing at Lourdes in 2022, documented on the Fr. Hollowell — Brain Tumor (2022) page. The two are inseparable in his account — the prayer is his theological explanation for why he got cancer; the Lourdes healing is his theological explanation for why it disappeared.

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Primary-source file

Archdiocesan report The Criterion: I embrace this willingly

The Archdiocese of Indianapolis report is one of the clearest public records of the 2018 prayer, the 2020 diagnosis, and Hollowell’s mission to pray for abuse victims during treatment.

archindy.org OSV interview Priest sees cancer diagnosis as a chance to suffer for abuse victims

This interview gives the strongest public symptom timeline, including the first treadmill spasm, the blog announcement, and the way Hollowell framed the prayer.

oursundayvisitor.com Register/CNA report Priest with Brain Tumor Offers His Suffering for Victims of Clergy Abuse

The Register version preserves the same prayer framing and the request for victims’ names so he could pray for them during recovery.

ncregister.com Retrospective narrative Crisis Magazine: The Miracle That Grew from the Ashes of 2018

This later narrative revisits the confessional prayer and the longer arc from the 2018 scandal summer to diagnosis, surgery, and later healing.

crisismagazine.com

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The Context

Father John Hollowell’s story begins in the summer of 2018, when the abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church was deepening almost week by week. On June 20, 2018, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was removed from public ministry after credible accusations, and soon afterward the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report detailed decades of abuse involving hundreds of priests and more than a thousand children.^[1]

Hollowell, then a parish priest in Greencastle, Indiana, later said that he had been following the crisis closely and writing about it. In that atmosphere, while sitting alone in the confessional at St. Paul the Apostle Parish, he made a private prayer he did not tell anyone about at the time.^[1] So the story begins not with cancer, but with a priest reacting to a national scandal and privately offering to suffer on behalf of victims.

Hollowell prayer file

1. 2018 Private prayer The prayer in the confessional is known only through Hollowell’s later retelling.
2. 2020 Tumor diagnosis The public medical layer becomes clearer with the Mayo Clinic diagnosis of oligodendroglioma.
3. Meaning Theological reading The claimed link between the two is Hollowell’s own interpretation, not a medical conclusion.

Open full graphic

This page is a testimony file about meaning and timing: a private 2018 prayer, a later tumor diagnosis, and Hollowell’s public claim that the cancer answered that prayer. Site explainer graphic

Public record shape The strongest public point here is the sequence, not the causation: a private 2018 prayer, later symptoms, and a documented 2020 tumor diagnosis.

The prayer-cancer connection is Hollowell’s own theological interpretation, while the timeline itself is what archdiocesan and Catholic news reporting can actually show.

The Criterion report Open source

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The Prayer

That private prayer became the interpretive center of the whole story, because Hollowell later looked back on his tumor diagnosis as the answer to it. According to his published account in Crisis Magazine and Our Sunday Visitor:^[1][2]

“Father, if I’m able to suffer for the victims — in imitation of You on the Cross — and offer my life in reparation for the crimes of priests, I do it willingly.”

He says he told no one about the prayer at the time and did not expect anything visible to follow.^[2] That matters because the prayer itself is not something other people documented in the moment. It is known through his later testimony.

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Publicly documented chronology

• Summer 2018: Hollowell says that while alone in the confessional at St. Paul the Apostle in Greencastle, he prayed to be allowed to suffer on behalf of victims of clerical abuse.^{[1] [2]}
• In the period before the 2020 diagnosis, he experienced a severe episode while running on a treadmill in the rectory, with light-headedness and a right-side body spasm lasting about a minute.^[2]
• During the following months, he experienced additional fainting, spasm, or seizure episodes and underwent medical work-up first for possible stroke and later for a lesion.^{[1] [2]}
• February 11, 2020: doctors at the Mayo Clinic confirmed an oligodendroglioma, and Hollowell publicly linked the diagnosis to the prayer he had made in 2018.^{[2] [3]}
• February 2020: he began asking abuse victims to send him their names so he could pray for them individually during surgery, recovery, and treatment.^{[1] [3]}
• March 13, 2020: surgery was scheduled at the Mayo Clinic, and Hollowell said he would take the list of victims’ names with him into that period of suffering and recovery.^[1]

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What Followed

In the period after the prayer, Hollowell experienced a series of seizure or spasm episodes, one public retelling describing five attacks lasting roughly ninety seconds each.^[1] These were initially attributed to possible stroke at St. Francis Hospital, Indiana. A second MRI at the Mayo Clinic in late 2019 identified a stable lesion consistent with a tumor rather than a stroke.

On February 11, 2020 — the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes — he received a confirmed diagnosis of oligodendroglioma at the Mayo Clinic.^[1]

At the time of his surgery on March 13, 2020, Hollowell had collected approximately 180 names of clerical abuse victims who had contacted him. He prayed for them individually before and during treatment.^[2]

His own framing of the connection, as published in the National Catholic Register, is explicit:^[2]

“I prayed in 2018 that if there was some suffering I could undertake on behalf of all the victims, some cross I could carry, I would welcome that. I feel like this is that cross, and I embrace it willingly.”

Father Hollowell tells the full story himself — including the prayer in the confessional, the diagnosis, and the Lourdes healing — in the video below:

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Documented facts and open questions

Claim	Status
The prayer was made in June 2018	Self-reported; no witnesses; not corroborated independently
Seizure/spasm episodes preceded the 2020 diagnosis	Consistent across the published timeline, though the sources summarize the exact onset differently
Oligodendroglioma diagnosis, February 11, 2020	Medically real — confirmed at Mayo Clinic
Causal connection between prayer and cancer	Not verifiable; a theological interpretation of temporal sequence
180 abuse victim names prayed for	Self-reported; consistent across multiple Catholic sources

Documentation notes

The prayer is known through Hollowell’s later published testimony in Catholic media. No witness is identified for the moment in the confessional itself.

The medical timeline that followed is clearer at the broad level: seizure or spasm episodes preceded the tumor diagnosis, and the Mayo Clinic diagnosis came in 2020. Hollowell interprets that sequence theologically, while public medical sources do not treat the prayer-cancer connection as a formal object of review.

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References

1. Archdiocese of Indianapolis, The Criterion. “I embrace this willingly: Priest offers suffering from brain tumor for victims of clergy sexual abuse.” February 28, 2020. Official archdiocesan report on Hollowell’s prayer, diagnosis, and plan to carry victims’ names into treatment. Available at: https://www.archindy.org/criterion/local/2020/02-28/hollowell.html
2. Brian Fraga, Our Sunday Visitor. “Priest sees cancer diagnosis as a chance to suffer for abuse victims.” February 17, 2020. Interview preserving the symptom timeline, the 2018 prayer framing, and the Mayo Clinic diagnosis. Available at: https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/2020/02/17/priest-sees-cancer-diagnosis-as-a-chance-to-suffer-for-abuse-victims
3. Catholic News Agency / National Catholic Register. “Priest with Brain Tumor Offers His Suffering for Victims of Clergy Abuse.” February 18, 2020. Public report preserving Hollowell’s own explanation of the prayer and his request for victims’ names. Available at: https://www.ncregister.com/news/priest-with-brain-tumor-offers-his-suffering-for-victims-of-clergy-abuse
4. K.V. Turley, Crisis Magazine. “The Miracle That Grew from the Ashes of 2018.” April 16, 2025. Retrospective narrative source for the confessional prayer and its place in the longer public story. Available at: https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-miracle-that-grew-from-the-ashes-of-2018