book will seek to address these difficulties and answer questions like the following:
• Is Jesus really still healing people today?
• Are claimed miraculous healings authentic, and do they last?
• How do we know if God wants us to pray for healing?
• Who gets the gift of healing, and can I ask for it?
• How do I pray for healing?
• What if I pray and the person doesn’t get healed?
• How does prayer for healing relate to the saints and sacraments?
• Does the Lord heal broken hearts as well as bodies?
The Tsunami of Secularism
To understand clearly what God is doing in relation to healing, we need to consider it within the broader context of our times. Christians in every age are called to read the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the gospel.2 We ought to regularly ask questions like these: What events and currents of thought are influencing the hearts and minds of people of our time? What are the global trends that will have an impact on future generations? What is the Lord calling us to do in response? What is the Spirit saying to the churches? (cf. Rev 2:7).
In October 2012, bishops from around the world were gathered in Rome for a synod on evangelization — three weeks of intense discussions on the current state of the Church and how to mobilize Catholics to spread the gospel. In an address to his fellow bishops, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., used a striking phrase: a “tsunami of secularism,” he said, has engulfed the Western world.3 With that phrase he captured the drama in which the Church is living today. The last few generations have witnessed an abandonment of Christian faith and a secularization of society on a scale never before seen in history. Vast numbers of people baptized as Christians are no longer practicing the faith and no longer have any connection with Christ or the Church. Many are living a practical Deism: they believe that perhaps in some sense God exists, but that he does not intervene in human history or act directly in our lives. The universe is a closed system in which everything can be explained by the laws of physics and biochemistry.
With the loss of Christian faith has come the denial of basic moral truths such as the inviolable dignity of human life and the sanctity of marriage. At the same time, a new kind of militant atheism has arisen, which not only argues against the existence of God, but ridicules Christianity and condemns all religions as equally irrational and dangerous. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote:
In our days … in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel…. The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.4
The absence of God in our society leaves an inner void that people seek to fill with all kinds of counterfeits. There is a growing culture of narcissism, in which the highest values are ascribed to self-fulfillment, physical attractiveness, sexual freedom, and the accumulation of possessions. These empty pursuits have in turn led to a landscape of broken relationships, broken lives, loneliness, addiction, and the whole array of societal evils that St. John Paul II summed up as “the culture of death.”5
A recent news item illustrates this profound darkness. A Belgian woman named Nancy Verhelst grew up with parents who treated her with utter contempt. “I was the girl that nobody wanted,” she told a reporter. “While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. ‘If only you had been a boy,’ my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more.”6 Perhaps it is not surprising that as an adult Nancy renamed herself Nathan and sought to remake herself as a man. We can only imagine the hurt and confusion of this broken person. But instead of offering her hope and healing, the best that a godless, secular society could do for her was provide sex-change surgery. After the operation, instead of feeling the peace she longed for, Nancy was disgusted with what she saw in the mirror and felt like a monster. And at that point, the best that a godless, secular society could do for her was to end her life. On September 30, 2013, Nancy was killed in an assisted suicide by lethal injection under Belgium’s euthanasia law.
Truly, Satan is a tyrant — the thief who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). The world has become a war zone, where countless people are spiritually wounded and in dire need of help. A fierce battle is going on for the hearts and souls and minds of this generation. The stakes are high. What is going to meet the challenge of our times?
No human strategy or plan or program will suffice. It is God alone who holds the answer. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zech 4:6). The answer to the “tsunami of secularism” is nothing less than a tsunami of the Spirit — a proclamation of the gospel in the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by healings, signs, and wonders that tangibly demonstrate God’s love and convince people that Jesus Christ is truly alive.
The Call to a New Evangelization
As society has descended into spiritual and moral darkness, the Church has been sounding a trumpet call to Christ’s followers to let their light shine all the more brightly. For more than three decades the popes have been ringing out a summons to engage in a new evangelization — a renewed proclamation of the good news of Christ to the people of our time. The pontiffs have made clear that it is no longer only remote, unreached peoples who need to be evangelized but also, and especially, those in our own post-Christian society who no longer believe or practice the faith.
The summons actually began with Vatican Council II, when bishops and theologians were led to reflect deeply on the Church’s evangelical mission. For centuries Catholics had been accustomed to thinking of evangelizing as a specialty work carried out only by priests or religious who are called to the foreign missions. The Council declared that in fact it is the duty of every Christian.7 Following the Council, Blessed Pope Paul VI wrote an apostolic letter in which he affirmed, “Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize.”8
John Paul II coined the term “New Evangelization,” explaining that it is new not in content — it is the same gospel that has been preached for two millennia — but “in ardor, in method, and in expression.”9 It is new in ardor in that all Catholics need to be rekindled in a fire of zeal to proclaim Christ to others in both word and deed. It is new in method in that we must use methods adapted to our own time, including new and creative means of reaching people as well as up-to-date technologies. It is new in expression in that we cannot simply repeat formulas from the past but must speak in ways that touch the hearts and minds of this generation.
In 2001, John Paul II expressed the urgency of this task:
Over the years, I have often repeated the summons to the new evangelization. I do so again now, especially in order to insist that we must rekindle in ourselves the impetus of the beginnings and allow ourselves to be filled with the ardor of the apostolic preaching which followed Pentecost. We must revive in ourselves the burning conviction of Paul, who cried out: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).10
When Pope Benedict took office in 2005, he ensured that the New Evangelization would remain a long-term top priority for the Church, first by establishing a new Vatican department devoted to it, the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, and then by making it the theme of the 2012 World Synod of Bishops.
Pope Francis has given the call an even stronger urgency. In his apostolic letter The Joy of the Gospel, the follow-up document to the 2012 synod, he wrote:
The new evangelization calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized. Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training