Healing Service If you want to experience Christ's
healing power in your life, please join
us for our parish healing service: Tuesday, January 1 at 10 a.m. inside the church
Many of us Catholics in the United States, and I include some priests in this number, neglect large portions of our faith. I am not talking about so-called cafeteria Catholicism.
We tend to reduce the faith to a morality, a spiritual pick me up or an eternal fire insurance policy, forgetting that our Catholic faith is a religion that is uniquely and primarily about healing wounded people.
When we actually read about what Jesus said and did in the Bible, we are surprised to see that more than half of it had to do directly with healing of body or soul. With this in mind, it makes sense that the first one thousand years of Christian art included many more depictions of Christ's miraculous healings than images of the Crucifixion.
This statement does not mean that there is anything wrong with having a Crucifix hanging in our homes or churches, but it does make us wonder why we don't know more about the Church's healing ministry. Even after the Cross has become the most popular Christian symbol, the Church continues to practice healing ministry, healing souls and bodies through the sacraments of Reconciliation and Anointing and sometimes even through miraculous cures.
Perhaps we shudder when we hear the world "miraculous," but anyone who visits mostly-empty pilgrimage shrines today sees hundreds of abandoned crutches as evidence that miracles do happen. My own experience as a penitent is that moral miracles take place in the confessional. Moreover, in anointing and praying with sick people as a priest, I have seen conditions change in ways that seem to be naturally inexplicable. Other priests that I know share similar experiences. It is just that fewer of us today ask God for miracles with true faith.
The spirit of our age tempts us to put more faith in our doctors, healthy living and therapists than we do in God.