A priest administers the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick during Sunday Mass in Saint Philippe du Roule Catholic Church in Paris, France. (Adobe Stock)

Assistants to the Divine Physician

Priests are called to be sharers in the Lord’s healing power

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Father George Stewart was feeling stuck. He had already been a priest for 21 years when he was assigned as pastor of St. Augustine – Our Lady of Victory in the Bronx. But in this impoverished inner-city parish, none of his usual bag of tricks seemed to work. He promoted Eucharistic adoration, organized parish pilgrimages, started a youth group and made use of media and technology, but without seeing any signs of the spiritual vitality he was hoping for.

In desperation, Father Stewart began to seek answers from the Lord. He read the book “The Cross and the Switchblade” (Berkley, $9.99), recounting the remarkable ministry of Pentecostal pastor David Wilkerson on the streets of New York. He watched “The Wild Goose,” a program by Father Dave Pivonka. And he began to ask: “Why is it that we have the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, but I’m not seeing healings? Why don’t I have the zeal of these people I’m hearing about?”

Father Stewart was not inclined toward charismatic spirituality. He even had an aversion to it, but he attended a priests’ retreat at Franciscan University and prayed for “baptism in the Spirit,” a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit in his life. He also attended a conference of Encounter Ministries, which trains and equips Catholics to exercise the gift of healing.

That was when Father Stewart began to discover the healing power of the Lord and how he, as a priest, could be an instrument of that power in a way that transformed the lives of his parishioners and his own priestly ministry.

A Mission of Healing

Most Catholics are familiar with the notion that two sacraments, reconciliation and the anointing of the sick, are sacraments of healing. Many are also aware that the Eucharist, in which Christ is truly present and gives us his own divine life, is the “medicine of immortality,” the deepest source of healing. But few realize the full implications that the whole mission of Christ and his Church is a mission of healing, in which the priest plays a privileged role.

The Church today is rediscovering this dimension of her life that was taken for granted in the early centuries but has long been neglected: the full power of the Holy Spirit and his gifts, including healing, to equip the ordained and all the faithful for their mission to bring Christ into the world. As St. Hilary of Poitiers wrote: “We who have been reborn through the Sacrament of Baptism experience intense joy when we feel within us the first stirrings of the Holy Spirit. … We receive abundant gifts of healing.”

In the Gospels, it is evident that healing is not peripheral but central to Jesus’ public ministry. In his inaugural sermon, Jesus sums up his mission as a mission of evangelization, healing and deliverance (cf. Lk 4:18-19). He is the one anointed by the Holy Spirit to be sent into the darkest places of human bondage, blindness, sickness, oppression, guilt and misery to proclaim the good news of salvation and to visibly demonstrate it by restoring people to the fullness of life and freedom. He then proceeds to do what he said. His healings show in a powerfully convincing way that he, the Messiah, really is victorious over sin and all its consequences, including sickness and death itself.

As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in “Instruction on Prayers for Healing” noted, “In the public activity of Jesus, his encounters with the sick are not isolated, but continual. He healed many through miracles, so that miraculous healings characterized his activity. … These healings are signs of his messianic mission. They manifest the victory of the kingdom of God over every kind of evil, and become the symbol of the restoration of health of the whole human person, body and soul.”

Jesus’ ministry fulfills the theme of salvation as a work of healing that runs throughout the entire Bible. It is God who sets right all that has gone awry as a result of the Fall, including the existence of sickness and suffering. In the Book of Exodus, after leading Israel out of slavery in Egypt, God gives a new revelation of himself: “I, the LORD, am your healer” (15:26). With this title, God indicates that healing springs from his very nature. He is the one who restores his people, wounded and broken by sin, to the fullness of life he always intended for them. Later, this revelation is deepened by the prophetic promises. The Lord will send a mysterious servant who will seem “stricken, struck down by God and afflicted,” yet it will be “our pain that he bore, / our sufferings he endured” (Is 53:4). And in his day, “the eyes of the blind shall see, / and the ears of the deaf be opened; / Then the lame shall leap like a stag, / and the mute tongue sing for joy” (Is 35:5-6).

Christ’s Incarnation and paschal mystery are the fulfillment of God’s promise of healing. Jesus’ very name means, “The Lord saves,” and the Greek word for “save,” sōzein, also means “heal.” Jesus embodies God’s identity as our healer on virtually every page of the Gospel. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “He has come to heal the whole man, soul and body; he is the physician the sick have need of” (No. 1503).

When Jesus commissioned the Twelve Apostles, he instructed them to proclaim the Gospel just as he had, not only in words but in deeds of healing that would demonstrate that the words were true: “As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons” (Mt 10:7-8). He gave the same command to the seventy disciples (cf. Lk 10:8-9), and just before his ascension into heaven he expanded the mandate to all his followers for all time: “These signs will accompany those who believe. … They will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mk 16:17-18).

The Church’s mission is, then, like Christ’s, a mission of healing. The image of the Church as a “field hospital,” often used by Pope Francis, expresses this biblical mandate. As the Catechism notes: “The Church … believes in the life-giving presence of Christ, the physician of souls and bodies. This presence is particularly active through the sacraments, and in an altogether special way through the Eucharist, the bread that gives eternal life and that St. Paul suggests is connected with bodily health” (No. 1509).

Conduits of Healing Power

If Jesus is the divine physician who has come to restore his people to the fullness of life — physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually — then priests are called to be sharers in and visible conduits of the Lord’s healing power. What are some ways that priests can more fully carry out this mission?

First, priests are often particularly aware that today we live in a world of profound woundedness. A culture that rejects God and his plan for human flourishing inevitably becomes a culture of death, in which human life is cheapened, relationships flounder, the family breaks down and many are left hurting, confused, lonely, alienated, anxious and depressed. Even with all the advances in modern medicine, a global pandemic has shown just how little we can manage, even our physical health. In such a culture, people need more than ever to personally encounter a Savior who is alive, who acts in power to heal and save today just as he did 2,000 years ago in Galilee. In every aspect of ministry, then, priests can call upon the Holy Spirit and depend radically on him, asking with expectant faith that he manifest his power in visible and life-changing ways.

In preaching, priests can keep in mind that they are speaking to the walking wounded and that the word of God, when preached with clarity and the conviction of faith, has in itself tremendous power to heal. “He sent forth his word, and healed them” (Ps 107:20, RSV).

The word of God reveals who God really is as our all-powerful and merciful Father; how all-sufficient is the grace of redemption in Christ to cleanse us from all sin and its effects; and what is our deepest identity as God’s beloved sons and daughters. The word heals the mind sickened by the lies and distortions of today’s culture. As the African American spiritual proclaims, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”

 

Father Simon Adigwe anoints a woman with the oil of the sick following a healing Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City May 23, 2022. The liturgy coincided with the veneration of the relics of St. Bernadette during their visit to the cathedral. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

In celebrating the sacraments, priests can have a confident expectation that if they open the door to the Lord Jesus in faith, he will heal more often than we might suppose — interiorly and even physically. Often priests need to help stir people’s faith. Jesus sometimes asked those who desired healing, “Do you believe that I can do this?” (Mt 9:28). This does not mean giving the sufferer a guarantee of immediate healing, but simply helping him or her turn to the Lord with confident, childlike trust in his love for them and his power to heal.

One Sunday, my friend Father Francis Martin sought to arouse faith in his congregation as he administered the anointing of the sick to a parishioner suffering from a brain tumor. The following day, when the man went for further medical tests, the doctors were astounded to find there was no tumor. A friend of mine, a mother of several children, was healed of a deep-seated fear of pregnancy when a priest prayed over her during the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Another woman testified that, at a healing service, she received prayer for debilitating brain fog due to long COVID-19, and the next day, upon receiving the blood of Christ at Mass, she felt her head begin to pulsate and vibrate, and she was completely healed. The sacraments can be amazingly life-changing encounters with Jesus, the divine physician.

Praying for Healing

Priests can also take advantage of opportunities to pray spontaneously for healing. Sometimes this means stepping out of one’s comfort zone. When a person asks for a blessing, a priest can offer to lay hands and openly pray for healing if it is evident that the person is suffering from some ailment. When someone in a difficult situation comes for counsel, the priest can offer to pray for healing from inner wounds. A pastor can also encourage his parishioners to make spontaneous prayer for healing a normal part of the life of the parish any time someone mentions an infirmity or a sickness.

In the Bronx, Father Stewart began to see a whole new dimension of the Lord’s healing power as he continued to pursue the Lord. He began to pray persistently for physical as well as interior healing. For a long time — about two years — nothing happened. Then, one day after Mass, one of his parishioners, a nurse from Nigeria, fell down a flight of steps, twisting her ankle. She was in severe pain, with the ankle swollen to twice its size, when Father Stewart prayed over it with great determination. To his and her astonishment, the ankle shrank before their eyes, and all the pain disappeared. She gave her testimony the following week at Mass. It was only the first of what have now been hundreds of healings through his prayer and that of his parishioners.

As Father Stewart says: “It’s like pulling tissues out of a box. The first one is always the hardest. Then they come more easily.”

The parish now holds a monthly healing service and makes prayer for healing a central part of its mission to seek the lost. Teams of people regularly go out into the streets to evangelize and pray with whoever is in need. The goal is not healing in itself, but that people would personally encounter Jesus the healer and come to know him as Savior and Lord. The whole atmosphere of the parish is changing.

As for Father Stewart’s priesthood, it has also been transformed. As he says: “I have a joy I haven’t had in many, many years. This whole ministry has become an adventure. Every day, I say, ‘I can’t wait to see what God is going to do today.’” 

DR. MARY HEALY is a professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit and a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Among her numerous books is “Healing: Bringing the Gift of God’s Mercy to the World” (Our Sunday Visitor, $18.95).

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