Conference in Batesville focuses
on healing power of Jesus

By Sean Gallagher

BATESVILLE—Nearly 500 people from throughout the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and nearby areas of Ohio and Kentucky gathered on Feb. 19 at Batesville High School to learn about the healing power of Jesus Christ.

The conference, “Healing through the Power of Jesus Christ,” was arranged by the evangelistic team of St. Nicholas Parish in Ripley County.

The main speaker of the day was Johnette Benkovic, founder and president of the evangelization apostolate Living His Life Abundantly International and the founder of Women of Grace, a Catholic apostolate for Christian women.

S.A.C.R.E.D. (Sacrifice, Advocate of Life, Christ-centered, Roman Catholic, Evangelization, Defender of the Faith), an independent apostolate located in Batesville, also helped sponsor the event.

Benkovic shared with the audience her experiences of God’s healing power in her life, suggested ways that they can do so and warned about “counterfeit healing techniques.”

After noting that any illness in life is ultimately an effect of [Original] sin in the world, she shared the good news that God wants to heal us and return us to wholeness of body, mind and spirit.

“There is no sin that is greater than God’s mercy,” Benkovic said. “We give him the misery of our lives. He takes it. And he hands back to us gifts of love, gifts of faith, gifts of hope. Our Father God is all about the business of restoring his people.”

Giving credit to God for all healing, Benkovic, noted that he often does this through human agency.

“I want you to hear that only God can heal us,” she said. “Sometimes he uses doctors, sometimes he uses medicines, sometimes he uses mental health counselors, sometimes he uses psychiatrists and psychologists. And all of that is an action of God’s love for us, to bring us to holiness.”

While noting that God works to heal us through conventional medicine, Benkovic said that healing also comes to us from God through the Church.

“But of ultimate importance, [God] gives us the spiritual help that we need,” she said. “And he does it through holy mother Church, and through the sacraments, and through the priesthood who ministers those sacraments to us, and through the holy sacrifice of the Mass, and through our prayer.”

Benkovic emphasized the importance of these spiritual aids because she argued that the spiritual world can have a significant impact—for good or ill—upon the integrated health of body, mind and soul. The Holy Spirit can bring healing while the devil and other evil spirits are real and can oppress us.

She has shared this message through books, on TV and radio, and before audiences throughout the world since she began her ministry nearly 20 years ago. But she noted that it was only in the past year that she was challenged beyond her imagination “to begin to walk the walk of the talk that I would talk.”

In March 2004, her son, Simon, was killed in a traffic accident while he was visiting her and her husband in Florida while on leave from serving in the Army in Iraq.

Showing from her own experience that emotional anguish can be expressed through physical pain, Benkovic noted that after learning of her son’s death, she felt a pain in her womb that she compared to labor pains.

After noting that this pain still returns occasionally, she said that she once asked God in prayer how long she would continue to experience it.

“And deep down in the bottom of my heart, where St. Francis de Sales says we hear the voice of God, I heard the voice,” Benkovic said. “And he said, ‘Child, you labored to give your son physical life. Will you not labor now to give him spiritual life as well?’ ”

Nearly a year later, she still naturally suffers the wounds of the loss of her son. The wounds that she received because of it have not yet been entirely healed. But this fact led her to share an important message with her audience.

“Suffering has value,” Benkovic said. “Suffering has merit. What a paradox, that God would right the situation of original sin—that produced death—by death itself.

“What a tremendous paradox that the torment and the confusion caused in the life of man would become the matter he would use to effect the redemption of man. The cross of Christ is a paradox. And not only did that cross redeem mankind and each one of us, but that cross [also] redeemed suffering.”

While she acknowledged that it does not contradict the truth of the redemptive suffering to seek to alleviate our pains and illnesses, Benkovic warned her audiences to avoid “counterfeit healing techniques” such as so-called "healing touch."

Arguing that while such methods might be presented in Catholic terminology and as offering many goods, she said that they can actually be harmful and are based on a worldview that contradicts those that are acceptable within the Christian tradition.

“If we were to weigh what was being presented to us against the revealed truth of sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church, we would not fall into the trap,” Benkovic said.

But no matter what threats these other methods may pose, and no matter how great our own physical, emotional or spiritual trials might be, Benkovic stressed that as followers of Christ we have no reason to fear.

“Should we be afraid? No,” she said. “We have nothing to fear. Greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world.” †