Secret Service: Order of Malta quietly casts a long, spiritual shadow

CORRECTED JULY 21, 2014 — Even before a Catholic organization that is the world’s oldest continuous order of chivalry took her to a landmark shrine, Stephanie Bozylinski Flaherty considered herself to be the beneficiary of divine providence.

Diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in April 2004, Flaherty was given two to three years to live. She kept beating the disease, but last October endured brain surgery for the sixth time. Afterward, her neurosurgeon had no explanation for the pathology report that could not locate the lesion found in an earlier MRI.

“I didn’t want to say that it was the Lord,” Flaherty said.

Her considerable stock in the power of prayer had included asking for the intercession of what she describes as charismatic “elders” at the Catholic Community of St. Francis Xavier in Hunt Valley.

“After my last surgery, I was asked to talk to their prayer group,” Flaherty said. “After I told them my story, Kay Kness said, ‘You need to talk to the Knights of Malta.’ ”

Flaherty had never heard of the lay order that was promoting religious liberty nine centuries before the conclusion of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ third annual Fortnight for Freedom July 4.

She did not know of their giving, of the time and money they donate to accompany those in need of physical and spiritual healing to Lourdes, France, where pilgrims by the thousands seek a miracle similar to the visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary who appeared to Bernadette Soubiros 18 times in 1858.

That lack of notoriety for the Knights, it seems, is by design.

According to “The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman Catholic Church,” the “Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta” dates to A.D. 1070, when it was established to care for pilgrims during the Crusades. It received papal recognition in 1113. The order has been a naval power, forced from the Holy Land, Rhodes and then Malta – by Napoleon Bonaparte – and has been headquartered in Rome since 1834.

There are approximately 13,500 Knights and Dames, including 51 in the Baltimore area, but the order is not listed in the Archdiocese of Baltimore directory.

Monsignor Richard E. Cramblitt, Flaherty’s pastor at St. John the Evangelist in Hydes, was impressed by the order when he served at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Mount Washington.

“It was Ligia Remick,” he said, of a since-deceased Dame, “who told me, ‘We do a lot of good work. We do not trumpet it.’

“The Order of Malta is one of the world’s most efficient organizations of charitable care, and it’s all done privately. The Knights don’t go out and raise money. They don’t advertise themselves. They just do it.”

Its local ranks include leading Catholic philanthropists, who tell of being recruited by patriarchs named Baird or Deering.

Knights and dames, rather than spend on another club membership, devote themselves to fulfilling the order’s charism, of caring for the poor and the sick.

Health Care for the Homeless launched a mobile clinic, a large van that has two examination rooms, in Baltimore July 8. Its partners in the project include Mercy Medical Center and a donor from the Order of Malta, who asked to remain anonymous.

“Their investment made this project possible,” said Kevin Lindamood, president and CEO of Health Care for the Homeless.

The Order of Malta recently became active in prison ministry. It operates 20 hospitals, including one in Haiti, and a birthing hospital in Jerusalem, near its roots.

“It is a stone’s throw from where Jesus was born,” Monsignor Cramblitt said. “The majority of the women are Palestinian. Nobody is turned away. Here is a Roman Catholic religious order, providing medical care to mostly non-Christian women, all in the name of Jesus.”

Then there are resources it musters for its annual pilgrimage.

The order’s main annual gathering is in May, in Lourdes, where members travel as support for “malades” – in French, sick people.

Those from the United States must be able to handle a trans-Atlantic flight, but their journey begins the previous winter, with rigorous medical and pastoral screening. In Baltimore, the latter has occurred at Mercy since 2012.

“By the time the candidates get here, they have already been clinically vetted and cleared,” said Father Thomas R. Malia, assistant to the president for mission at Mercy. “We have a team of physicians and nurses, to determine whether people could benefit from a trip to Lourdes.”

Sitting at the dining room table at her home in White Hall, Flaherty, 47, does not appear to be someone whose medical history, condensed for a layman, runs two single-spaced pages.

“There are people who look far worse than me,” Flaherty said, of her fellow malades. “They’re in wheelchairs, on oxygen tanks. When the invitation came to go on this pilgrimage, I told them, ‘I won’t go if my daughter can’t come.’ She was a part of this.”