EPISTLES

On Charismatic Healing Masses

Jesse Romero, a Catholic lay evangelist, known for his dynamic, Christ-centered preaching, offered a critique of the practice of “healing masses,” particularly as they developed within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal starting in the late 1960s.

In his interview with Father Dave Nix, a Catholic priest known for his missionary zeal, traditional liturgical focus, and outspoken defense of life and faith, argue that the concept of a “healing mass” often stems from a poor catechesis in theology and the sacraments, borrowing emotional and disordered practices from Protestant Pentecostal services.

They stress that the primary purpose of the Mass is for the healing of the soul through the Eucharist received in a state of grace, and they contrast the often-manic emotionalism of healing services with the quiet, sober, and austere tradition of the saints and the ancient rites.

But the focus of this post, however, is Jesse’s powerful statement on why we are so blessed to be Catholics: we belong to the greatest ‘miracle machine’ in the world—the Catholic Church.

He acknowledges that God can work miracles through anyone. However, he notes that even prominent Protestant pastors attest that the vast majority of miracles occur within the Catholic Church because of the Holy Eucharist.

Miracles in the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is really a miracle-making machine. When you look at the Catholic Church, there’s no other church like it… Only in the Catholic Church—not in Protestantism, not in Judaism, not in Islam—do you have what’s called the incorruptible bodies of saints. No religion has that.

Only in the Catholic Church do you have bona fide miracles of the Eucharist where the Holy Eucharist, the accidents, turn into the physical flesh of a piece of a human heart with the same blood type, and all of them with the same blood type, and the eucharistic miracles that have happened since the seventh century. They only happen in the Catholic Church.

You also have Marian apparitions. I think there’s been one or two in the Orthodox churches, Our Lady of Zeitoun in Egypt, but most of the Marian apparitions, the approved ones, have been in the Catholic Church. Not with the Protestants, not with Jews, not with Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Muslims.

People Raised from the Dead

The Catholic Church has another phenomenon that most people don’t know about. And there’s an old TAN book written on that topic. It’s called “Raised from the Dead” (Book Link: https://amzn.to/3L0T4mL). There’s been over 400 people that have been raised from the dead when a holy person in the Catholic Church has prayed for them or prayed over them.

For example… St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church. Her mom passed away, and she just wasn’t having it. She wasn’t ready for that to happen. She went over to see the corpse of her mother, apparently at the house, and she just started doing prayers of supplication and petition and crying out to the Lord, and the Lord raised her mom up from the dead. That’s well documented…

Most Miracles Occur in the Catholic Church

St. Rose of Lima raised four people from the dead within her lifetime as one of the earliest saints in the Catholic Church in the Americas. I’ve read also that St. Vincent Ferrer… He raised 27 people from the dead by praying over them.

So, the Catholic Church has miracles unlike any other church. Even Benny Hinn is on social media, on YouTube, saying—he was asked one day, and he’s got one of the big Pentecostal… when he was in his glory days, and he was asked one day in a big event with 25,000 Protestants there at the arena… as he was talking, he goes, “Do you know that more miracles occur in the Catholic Church than in any other church?”

You could have heard a pin drop amongst those 25,000 Protestants. He just said something that nobody’s ready to hear from one of the great gurus of the TBN channel. He said, “The reason more miracles occur in the Catholic Church than any other church is because they have the Holy Eucharist”.

And you can tell, and he, I think he makes a comment like, “I’m still—I’m still reading myself. I’m still reading through this”. So, he admitted that he’s still struggling with John 6 after 50 years of being a Protestant. He admitted that by far there are more miracles in the Catholic Church than in any other church by far…

A lot of the miracles that people claim to have, like in the Catholic Church, are medically verifiable. The Church takes their time to investigate. You know, people just say, “Oh, I went to this Healing Mass or Pentecostal service, and my leg grew two inches and I’m healed”. There’s no evidence for that.

On Fake Miraculous Healings

There’s a book that really exposes all this. There was a pastor from Calvary Chapel who actually converted to the Orthodox Church a few years ago, but he was a staunch Calvary Chapel pastor named Hank Hanegraaff. He wrote a book a couple of years ago. It’s called Counterfeit Revival (Book Link: https://amzn.to/4s1usLu).

What he did, he documented all the big players in the TBN channel, all the faith healers. And he documented because he want to go investigate the people that were saying, “I got healed at this event”. He went to go talk to them, and they were all saying basically, and all the testimonies are in this book, “Hey, I got paid $500 to say my leg grew two inches, that I was healed of cancer”. These people are all paid off.

What I’m saying is Hank Hanegraaff, a Protestant himself back then, basically exposes the charades of the Pentecostal movement. Most of it is fake. I’m not saying that God—of course God can work miracles and God could use anybody—but I’m just saying, by and large, there’s—there’s books that are documented that most of this is fake. And I would say the same thing probably happens in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. People claim things.

Reference: Romero, J. [Jesse Romero]. (2025, December 3). Healing masses myth: Fr. Dave Nix & Jesse Romero expose sacrament realities [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCpUMQxNiA0