Doctor Cites ‘Power Greater Than Us’

Sometimes healers get healed. At least that seems to have been the case with Richard Bingold — whose conversion story we featured some years ago.

Richard, who is now in his seventies, and founded what he calls the Miraculous Pilgrim Rosary Healing Ministry, received a hip replacement in 2005 and, shortly afterwards, while praying at a church in Rouses Point, Vermont, suffered a vertical shear of bone in such a way that it made a loud cracking sound (or something did).

It was from what doctors call the greater trochanter, and in essence what it meant was that there was now a space between crucial bone connections — one that doctors said could never heal by itself.

They might try, said the doctors, to wire it together. And Bingold agreed. He was limping. He had been in pain for 26 months. There was a 17-millimeter difference in the lengths of his legs.

X-rays were taken days before the surgery (as they had also been taken for several years), and that’s when one of the doctors, Daniel M. Ward, of Longwood Orthopedic Associates in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, called to report the impossible — that the shear of bone had by itself become reattached to the spot from which it has split — closing an eight-millimeter space between one part of the hip and what is known as the partial lateral.

He told Richard that several surgeons were shown the x-rays and were astonished. “I am a devout Catholic,” the surgeon told Bingold. “And in all my years of surgery and experience, this could only happen through Divine intervention.”

In fact, the most remarkable part of the story is that a surgeon went on the record about his astonishment. Doctors are usually extremely reluctant to acknowledge a potential supernatural factor. Surgeons are perhaps more so.

“The x-rays were reviewed prior to surgery and it was quite clear that based on his change in his symptoms, essentially now he was pain free and was not limping,” wrote Dr. Ward in a formal letter dated April 29 this year. “I had inquired to Richard about what he had done and essentially he had been praying about his hip and hoping that there was some sign that the path he had chosen in his life was the correct path.”

Bingold once ran a lucrative private-investigation firm (with Eddie Egan of French Connection fame) in South Florida but converted after a close brush with death in a boating accident during a stakeout. He now travels widely, ministering and leading pilgrimages to places such as Medjugorje in Bosnia, Hercegovina.

Continued the doctor: “At this time I do not have a good explanation medically why the trochanteric piece and his extreme disability, which had been present for almost two and a half years, suddenly became dramatically better. From a scientific and medical standpoint I cannot explain this. I have been doing orthopedic surgery now and have been involved in orthopedics for almost twelve years and cannot explain why this essentially went on to be a healed trochanteric fragment at this time. Richard has his beliefs as to why this happened and I would agree that this is quite possibly a power much greater than ours.”