St Joseph's Prayer Group Enfield - Meeting every Wed night at 7pm and Healing Mass first Friday of the month.Venue St Joseph's Catholic Church Liverpool Rd Enfield, Sydney. Johanna Bennett reports
“We see a lot of cancer. But we see a lot of miracles, too,” says Rose Twyman. There was a woman who came one night and sat before the Blessed Sacrament in her wheelchair during the prayers. Suddenly sh
e got up out of her chair and walked. Then there was the elderly lady who stopped Rose in the street one day and told her that her knee, that had been so painful for 20 years, was now pain-free after attending the healing prayer group that Rose runs at St Therese’s, Lakemba. More spectacularly, says Rose, is “a woman who came to us 18 months ago with only a few weeks to live and is still with us”. Rose is the prime organiser of a healing ministry at St Therese’s parish church. The ministry has a long history going back to the late 1970s, a time of renewal for the Church. Many similar ministries began at this time, but most have since fallen away, says Rose, who has taken over the Wednesday evening prayer group at St Therese’s and also organises the monthly healing Masses at the church, which, she says, are very popular. While the prayer group can be quite intense - the ministry is a charismatic one - the Masses are more regular affairs, the only factors distinguishing it from a normal Mass being the inclusion of healing prayers and a homily dedicated to healing. A recent Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Pell who, in his homily, addressed the need for mental as well as physical healing - something Rose has seen as being very necessary in her ministry because mental anguish can lead to physical problems. The Archbishop used the story of Israel and his sons in his homily, saying Israel’s problem was a common one, that of loving one child more than the others - Joseph of the many-coloured coat. This favouritism drew his brothers’ ire. They also hated Joseph because of his loving nature. Sometimes such a gift can provoke malice, said the Archbishop. But out of Joseph’s subsequent sufferings came healing, said Archbishop Pell, who drew a parallel with the sufferings of today’s society; a consequence of “pagan living” that sees people caught up in promiscuity, drug-taking, gambling and alcoholism, and leads to the breakdown of marriages. But healing can come out of this.
“People suffer these things, these great crises, and then having suffered, they then start to look to God, to Christ, to look for something to bring healing,” said the Archbishop. He said that as our society continued to suffer there was an opportunity for the Catholic community to show the healing power of Christ to those around them. But, at the same time, we should not be too hard on ourselves when it comes to our own sins, or shortcomings.
“Sometimes we can believe that God will forgive everybody else but us.”
Rose said the need to forgive oneself, as well as others, is a strong and constant theme in healing ministry; lack of forgiveness could be a great burden. This aspect of healing also feeds into another important part of healing work - the need to help others as well as oneself. This is important at St Therese’s, for example, where many members of the healing prayer group suffer from serious physical ailments but endeavour to help each other as well as themselves. The Lakemba group is 25-strong. It meets each week for prayers and there is a monthly healing Mass that regularly attracts up to 400 people, who come from as far afield as Wollongong, Taree and the Central Coast. The prayer group and the Masses attract people from a variety of ethnic groups, says Rose. She adds that, although the ministry is a charismatic one, it is true to Church teaching. Some healing groups have veered off and taken to suggesting that sick people come off their medication and ‘trust in God’ alone, she says, and there have even been suggestions that sick people are possessed by the devil. This is “dangerous nonsense”, says Rose. Her group never suggests that people go against their doctor’s advice, she adds. It seeks instead to build on doctors’ healing with healing prayers.
