“Forgiveness is the foundation for all healing” —Forgiveness & Inner Healing by Betty Tapscott and Father Robert De Grandis, S.S.J.
Having never attended a Healing Service before, I really wasn’t sure what to expect from the Healing the Whole Person (HWP) weekend, led by the team at the John Paul II Healing Center, held at the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi this past September 19-21.
As a life-long Christian–I converted to Catholicism while studying at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1990s–I was certainly aware of the physical, spiritual and emotional healing central to the Church’s life and 2,000 year tradition, but I must admit that I had not encountered anything quite like what I experienced at the HWP retreat.
Opinions about these sorts of retreats vary. I can only speak about my own experience, of course, but I walked away from the weekend encouraged by what I heard. I may have gone into the encounter with certain preconceived notions, but I left with a much clearer sense of what I–what we, as the Body of Christ–need to do to bring healing to our world.
According Pope Benedict XVI, “healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christianity. When understood at a sufficiently deep level, this expresses the entire content of redemption” (Jesus of Nazareth, 176). It is this “sufficiently deep level” that I believe can serve as a roadmap for the “great springtime for Christianity” that Pope Saint John Paul II first wrote about in his 1990 encyclical letter Redemptoris Missio.
In order for us to understand healing, properly speaking, we must reflect on its true meaning. There are many definitions of healing, both secular and religious, but perhaps the best definition is “an ongoing encounter with God’s love and truth that brings us into wholeness and communion.” It is no coincidence that Dr. Bob Schutts, founder of John Paul II Healing Center, defines healing in relation to “wholeness” and “communion.”
It is for this very reason the U.S. Bishops have put forth a three-year plan to revive our understanding of and devotion to the Most Holy Eucharist, for there can be no healing outside of the Eucharist. In fact, as Dr. Schutts reminded us, “the whole history of salvation is God’s intervention into the world to bring healing to our entire being.”
As Catholic Christians, we believe that the human person is a unified whole. The Catholic Church rejects dualism, which views the body and soul as separate entities. The body and soul come into existence together at conception. In fact, “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body” (CCC, 365).
When writing about the National Eucharistic Congress this past summer, I wrote about our historic divisions. We are a divided people, to be sure. But our divisions are more fundamental than we realize. We are broken, both individually and collectively. We long to be made whole.
As we approach another divisive election, let us be reminded that we are called to bring love and healing to a broken world. As Pope Francis recently reminded us, “We must participate in politics because politics is one of the highest forms of charity because it seeks the common good” (emphasis added). We should strive to bring wholeness to our world, but we should always be guided by love.
Our politics is divisive. But as Christians, we are called to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We are also called to forgive, for there can be no healing without forgiveness. And this, for me, was the biggest takeaway from the Healing the Whole Person retreat, namely, that the greatest impediment to our own healing is unforgiveness.
Contrary to popular opinion, forgiveness is not weakness. It is, in fact, heroic. As St. Ambrose of Milan famously wrote, “No one heals himself by wounding another.” We all need healing, each and every one of us. But, lest we forget, as the Body of Christ we, too, participate in the healing mission of the Church. “Christ and his Church thus together make up the ‘whole Christ’ (Christus totus). The Church is one with Christ” (CCC, 795).
If we are to bring about “a new springtime in the Church,” then we must rededicate ourselves to the healing mission of the Church. We are being called to Walk With One this year, but “we can’t give what we don’t have.” For us to truly be instruments of God’s healing grace, we must first walk with Jesus. God is calling all of us into a deeper relationship with Him.
Healing is not simply something that happens to us; we must participate in our own healing. Healing, like salvation, is a process by which we come closer to God throughout our whole life as we participate in the sacraments and the grace that comes through them. We cannot earn our salvation, just like we cannot heal ourselves, but we can participate in both.
As Pope Saint John Paul II reminded us in Redemptoris Hominis, “The mission of Christ the Redeemer, which is entrusted to the Church, is still very far from completion. As the second millennium after Christ’s coming draws to an end, an overall view of the human race shows that it is still only beginning and we must commit ourselves wholeheartedly to its service.”
The call to evangelize is part of our baptismal mission. It is for this reason that Bishop Checchio is asking all parishioners to attend an Evangelization Workshop this fall. Emboldened by the past two years, and inspired by the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage/Congress, let us come together this fall, so that we might be instruments of God’s healing.
As Bart Schutts noted at the end of the retreat, “you don’t get strong by looking at the gym.” The heart is a muscle. It is also God’s “dwelling place” (CCC, 2563). As we look to 2025–the Year of Jubilee–and beyond, let us exercise our hearts by forgiving those who have hurt us and, in so doing, bring the healing power of Jesus to our broken world.
Adam Carlisle serves as diocesan Secretary for the Secretariat of Evangelization and Communication.