RENOWNED healing priest Fr John Rea is back in Perth for the fifth time and is set to help people suffering from physical and mental afflictions once again.
Scores of people around the world have attributed miraculous healings to the prayers of New Zealand’s Marist priest over the past 40 years.
Several remarkable cases have been well documented, including cures of cancer and infertility, the repair of broken bones and restoration of sight.
Despite the large number of healings that have occurred, Fr Rea says each individual case still brings him great joy.
“When I hear of a healing, I get a great surge of joy every time,” he says. “It’s a mystery of course, because it’s in the Lord’s hands, I just see myself as a kind of catalyst. It’s not me, it can’t be.
“What I believe the Lord is doing with me is replicating his own public life. I’m a professional preacher as a priest, and the preaching is accompanied by signs and wonders. Why signs and wonders? To make the truth more acceptable to people who are perhaps in some doubt. Also the signs and wonders draw a crowd.”
And crowds will indeed flock to the healing Masses that Fr Rea will lead at various parishes over the next three weeks.
He says before he prays with individuals after Mass, he makes a general prayer for healing as part of the thanksgiving after Communion.
After the prayer he prophetically announces some of the conditions or illnesses that will be healed. “[The Lord] gives me some insight into some of the things he’s going to heal,” he explains.
“It might be ‘There are three people here with arthritis, one of these is a lady, she’s in her fifties, the arthritis is in her hips, she’s wearing a green dress.’ So it’ll be detail like that.”
When asked where these insights come from, Fr Rea says he doesn’t get visions or hear voices, but simply gets an “impression”.
“I usually spend about an hour in the afternoon praying, preferably before the Blessed Sacrament, asking the Lord to tell me some of the things he’s going to heal that night, and that’s when the impressions come and I jot them down,” he says.
Sometimes Fr Rea will also specify a time frame within which the healing will take place.
“This comes from something I picked up from reading a book by a Korean evangelical pastor, in which he spoke about the importance of being exact in what you’re asking for,” he says.
“I give the Lord a deadline to make the prayer more exact.”
Fr Rea has been the “catalyst” for healings since attending a charismatic retreat in 1973. It was during this retreat that he was suddenly asked to take over the prayers for healing when the retreat director became unwell.
Some time later, Fr Rea was informed that a man whom he had prayed for who was unable to focus his eyesight due to a stroke had been miraculously healed.
But Fr Rea says lay Catholics have an even greater ability than priests to be instruments of healing.
“The Lord gives his charisms to whomever he wants,” he says, adding, “Lay hands and see what happens.”
“You need the charism of healing, which is one of the charismatic gifts the Lord gives. And the usual way to get charismatic gifts is to be baptised in the Holy Spirit.”
He describes this baptism as an “adult consecration and dedication of oneself to God”.
“It enables the spirit that has been living inside us since we were baptised in water to come out and act through us, and it acts through what are called charismatic gifts,” Fr Rea says.
But being a part of the charismatic movement is not the only way to be an instrument of healing.
“You don’t have to be in charismatic renewal, it’s just a movement that helps the whole thing along,” Fr Rea says.
“If you are baptised in the spirit, and a lot of people are without realising it, they’ve made some sort of adult commitment of themselves, the Lord can flow through them.”
Fr Rea, who considers himself a preacher rather than a healer, says while God uses him mainly for physical healings, inner healings are often more important.
“A lot of the things we pray for we may not see any visible sign of, like praying for the conversion of people,” he says.
“There can be a profound change and they’ve turned away from a life of sin to a life of virtue and you don’t even know about it.”
The only things Fr Rea says he can’t do anything about are curing people of the seven deadly sins.
“You can’t be healed from pride, envy, greed, anger, gluttony, lust or sloth,” he says.
“You’ve got to die to those things… people have got to practise self-denial in order to get rid of the roots of sin, you can’t be healed from them.”
The 81-year-old priest prays daily for the inner conversions of many people, including celebrities and media personalities.
“I pray every day for Madonna, I pray for Sinead O’Connor, Shirley MacLaine… and a number of people on radio and television in New Zealand,” he says.
But it’s not only the rich and famous who need healing, in fact, everyone needs healing of some sort, Fr Rea asserts.
“For example, everybody in their lives has experienced rejection, so they need to be healed from rejection,” he says.
“They need to be healed from fears. Some people have a spirit of rebellion, they need to be healed from that, so there are a lot of interior things.”
The healings that Fr Rea has witnessed generally occur anytime between at the instant the prayer is recited to three weeks later.
But there have also been cases where Fr Rea has prayed for years before the healing occurs.
Although some people are never healed, Fr Rea says that’s not up to him to decide.
“Everybody will be healed ultimately… but nobody can give a full answer to [why some people are healed and other’s aren’t], it’s a big mystery,” he says.
One may wonder if Fr Rea uses a particular format for his healing prayers, but he says he leaves that to the Holy Spirit.
“The prayer’s always brief, I don’t want to get my own personality intruding on God’s work,” he says.
There is, however, one common denominator present in a healing – faith.
“Someone has to have faith, and it doesn’t seem to matter very much who it is,” Fr Rea says.
“It can be the person doing the praying, it can be the person who’s being prayed with, or it can be a friend, and there are examples of all three in the New Testament.”
While Fr Rea is constantly amazed at the miracles he witnesses, doctors and sceptics remain doubtful even when presented with an unexplainable healing.
“Doctors find it very hard to think outside the frame of their medical science, most of them find it very hard to accept a physical healing,” he says.
“I suppose we’ve got to confront them with many healings for that to happen. If they’re honestly seeking truth, eventually they’ll have to accept that this is the hand of God.”
And Fr Rea intends on doing just that, by helping the healing of as many people as possible.
“I’ve got a number of conditions that may come to people as they age, but I’ve got no intention of giving up what I’m doing,” he says.