By Gretchen Keiser

When Jesus walked the earth 2,000 years ago, Scripture says He healed people of all types of illnesses. That “tremendous gift of healing” is within the Church today, according to Father Edward McDonough, since today Jesus “lives and carries on His ministry in His Mystical Body” and Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and forever.

The Redemptorist priest from Boston will be starting his ninth year of full-time work in the healing ministry this December, at the age of 61 and 35 years after being ordained a priest. Throughout his visit to the archdiocese last week, he took every opportunity during services and between to talk about the ministry of healing in the church and his certainty that healing ministry should be a regular and central part of the Christian community’s life.

While Father McDonough is renowned as having a particular gift of healing and services at his home parish, Mission Church in Boston, regularly draw several thousand people, he is soft-spoken and often jesting about his own role. He says that the reason he’s so good at explaining the healing ministry is that he’s groped along over the last eight years, growing in understanding about how a healing ministry comes about and the way that it fits into the life of the church.

Father McDonough grew up in Boston, the only boy in a family of five and had already decided to become a priest when he was a teenager. He also experienced a physical healing as a teenager, when he miraculously recovered from a severe case of pneumonia after he was anointed by a priest from the Mission Church. The Mission Church, which is cared for by the Redemptorists, is a shrine to Our Mother of Perpetual Help and, according to Father McDonough, has a 100-year-old tradition of healing.

Yet, it wasn’t until 1974, after he became active in the Catholic charismatic renewal, and after he had worked as a Redemptorist priest and pastor for 25 years, that Father McDonough began praying for healing as part of a charismatic prayer group. Even then, Father McDonough said, when people he prayed with began to experience physical healing, it took him time to accept this ministry. “It took me about three years to get into the ministry of healing after I knew the Lord was using me,” he said

Several members of his family have worked very closely with him in the healing ministry. Sister Priscilla McDonough, his sister and a religious, accompanies him and works closely with him in healing services and in organizing volunteers who answer a prayer phone line daily in Massachusetts. The healing ministry began in the home of another sister, Mary E. Sheehan, who was a co-founder with her brother. The new communications center of the healing ministry has been named as a memorial to Mrs. Sheehan, who died recently.

After beginning the healing ministry, one of the difficulties he encountered, Father McDonough said, was the concern that because of the gift of healing “people would think I was a different kind of person than I am.” Sometimes people, even subconsciously, think more of a person with the gift of healing than they should, assuming saintliness or a high degree of piety, he said.

“I’m not a saint,” Father McDonough said. He paused then to add, “I would like to be” but acknowledged that he has not achieved great accomplishments in prayer and the supernatural experiences that the lives of the saints speak of.

As the healing ministry has progressed and developed, he said, he has discovered that people are able to focus correctly on the Lord Jesus as the healer and not on the person who is an instrument of God. “It turns out that most people don’t think you’re a saint,” he said. “Most people realize it’s God and God can do anything.”

Father McDonough sees a need for the Church to grow in its understanding of the healing ministry and in its expectations about the healing ministry. It is not that the Church has not believed in healing, he observed, but that the idea of healing was accepted primarily as occurring through special people – the saints – or through relics of the saints or holy places and shrines.

There wasn’t an expectation that if Christians come together and prayed healing would occur or that healing would ooccur regularly in the life of the church, he said.

One of the consequences of the Second Vatican Council within the Church, he said, was that it expressed the view that the Church can expect to see operating today the same gifts of charisms as were present in the time of Jesus Christ and in the early Christian church described in the Scriptures.

Father McDonough believes that through baptism, confirmation and the other sacraments Catholics receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit within, much as a child has within him all the potential to be an adult. In his view, all who have received the Holy Spirit have received the gift of healing, just as they have received all the other gifts of the Holy Spirit. But not everyone has received the gift to the same degree, he observed. Not everyone, in other words, is being called into a full-time healing ministry, although all can pray for healing.

But beyond what can be discussed, there is also a great deal that remains mysterious and which Father McDonough readily acknowledges is out of his hands and beyond his understanding. “I don’t know exactly how the healing comes,” he said, “I say ‘through a prayer’ but was it my prayer?” Because of the oneness of the Body of Christ, he continued, it could well be the prayers of someone who is not even present at the healing service, but praying in support of it.

The significant aspect, he believes, is that the gift of healing is present in the Body of Christ and that it is present as a sign of God’s salvation and love. It is a gift “that’s enriching and embellishing the church,” he said, and a gift that needs the “support and guidance” of the bishops and priests of the church in order for it to flourish.