Prayer, Healing, and Eucharistic Spirituality
© 2005 - Your Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Newspaper articles on the healing ministy
By Kimberly Winston
Excerpted from " Faith Beyond Faith Healing" with permission of the publisher, Paraclete Press
.Look at his hands and they are nothing special--long, lean fingers that taper gently from supple knuckles to manicured nails. His hands bear no remarkable scars, no memorable lines, no distinguishing marks at all that would seal them in anyone's memory for very long. They are graceful hands for a man, and he moves them in delicate arcs when he gestures, as he often does when he speaks.
But thousands of people testify that there is, in fact, something very special about the pale hands of Father Richard Bain, a 58-year-old Roman Catholic priest at Sacred Heart Church in the tiny town of Olema, Calif. Tens of thousands of people seek him out each year to receive a touch from those hands, which they believe bestow God's healing upon them.
For 15 years, Father Bain has traveled the country holding healing Masses and three-day parish missions. From his base in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, he has traveled from Vermont to Hawaii, Texas to Ohio. At his larger missions, a thousand people may show up, most of them in the hope that he can heal them or their loved ones of illness and disease.
Over the years, Father Bain has collected dozens of letters from people who believe he has helped cure them of everything from acne to cancer. A woman from Las Vegas writes that Father Bain took away pain she had after surgery. Another woman from San Bruno, Calif., said her husband was healed of an arthritic knee. A nun in San Francisco describes how, after a blessing from Father Bain, a 70 percent blockage in her cardiac artery disappeared. And Joe Illuzzi of West Hempstead, New York, writes that he and his wife, who were planning to resort to in vitro fertilization, conceived a child the usual way after Father Bain laid his hands on Mr. Illuzzi.
When asked about his gift of healing, he explains it away. "I don't think it is anything special," he says. "I think we all have this power. I prayed for these people the way I was taught to, and I really believe if anybody else did it, the same thing would happen."
Richard Bain was not always such a strong believer. Raised in the Roman Catholic Church in San Francisco, he entered the seminary at the age of 19. But he left after one year, feeling the atmosphere was "too repressive." Some years after graduating from the University of San Francisco, he stopped going to church entirely.
After school, he started a career in business, working for a San Francisco public utility. It was the early 1970s and the sexual revolution was in high swing. The 20-something Richard Bain swung right along with it. Somewhere between the singles bars and the discos, he let go of God. "That lifestyle is completely contrary to the gospel," he says. "You can only live that lifestyle for so long before you lose your faith, and that is what happened to me." He went so far as to declare himself an atheist. "In my own mind, I couldn't conceive of God. If I could conceive of a God, he was very far away from me and didn't care about me."
So he threw himself into his work, rising very quickly to become the youngest corporate officer at his public utility. Then one day, a female coworker invited him to come with her to a Bible study. A Catholic, she knew he had strayed from his faith and hoped to get him to return. And, hey, he admits, she was cute. "The reason I went was I was lonely," he says. "I didn't want to study the Bible. I just didn't have anything else to do that night."
Nothing monumental happened that night, but something took hold inside him. He remembers listening to the discussion and really enjoying it, and being surprised that he was enjoying it. After the meeting, he began thinking about God again. A couple of weeks later, while driving to Lake Tahoe "with a couple of girls," Richard Bain felt a very strong desire to go to confession. He and his friends stopped in Reno, and while they went to the casinos, he went to church.
But back in San Francisco, "I went back to my old ways," he says, going to bars, going home with women. Still, he continued attending the Bible study, and accompanied the group the night they decided to drop in on a gathering of charismatic Catholics at the old St. Ignatius High School, Bain's alma mater.
It was a revelation. Here were Catholic men and women--young, like himself--singing and dancing, swept up in the spirit of worship. There were guitars and tambourines, people raising their palms to God as they sang and prayed. And quite a few people spoke in tongues. There was an ecstasy in the worship that Bain had never experienced before. "There was just so much love," he says. "I felt something I had never felt before—the feeling of love, love of the Holy Spirit, and of God's presence."
The joy in the room instantly reawakened his faith and his desire to be back in the heart of the church. After the service, he waited in line to make his confession to one of the priests in charge. From that moment, he says, his promiscuity became a thing of the past.
Bain threw himself into the Catholic charismatic movement, attending its meetings every Saturday night. He signed up for an eight-week course on baptism in the Holy Spirit, an experience charismatics consider a necessary foundation for a close relationship with God.
In the first class, on a Saturday night, the instructor told everyone their lives were about to change. It was something Bain took very seriously. It was what he had come there seeking. Two days later, he got a call from a friend in Hawaii, offering him a high-paying job as an executive with a construction company. Remembering the words of the teacher on Saturday night, he took the job on the spot.
Before he left for Hawaii, Bain wanted to complete the eight-week course. He was afraid if he left without completing it, the new-found fervor of his faith would disappear. So a woman from the class came to his apartment to guide him through the final steps.
The two stood in Bain's living room, his bay windows offering a view of San Francisco at night. She began to pray for him, asking God to grant him the spiritual gifts that come with baptism in the Holy Spirit--the gift of healing, among them. They prayed for a while, Bain remembers, but he felt nothing special. Then she began to speak in tongues and asked him to mimic her. He did, still feeling nothing. She then began to sing in tongues and he sang along with her. Still, he felt just as he had before. Finally, she said to him, "Richard, you have received the Holy Spirit."
"I asked her why she thought so because I didn't feel anything," he says.
"And she said, 'Because you are singing in tongues.' And I said, no, I am not, I am just mimicking you. But something did happen because I was very peaceful about not feeling anything, and the old me would have been very disappointed. Then I said, 'Maggie, it is okay. I will receive the Holy Spirit when God wants me to.'"
At that instant, Bain recalls, a sudden gust of wind rushed by his window, rattling the glass. At the same time, he felt a rush run through him, from his head to his toes. "What I felt that night, it was unbelievable," he says. "It was just like in the Bible. I don't know if there were tongues of fire coming out of the top of my head, but I would not have been surprised if there were." He felt elated, drunk, and as high as he had ever been. He began talking, telling Maggie of what he felt coursing through him, and he noticed his words were slurred and that he was swaying from side to side. The effect lasted for days, and, he laughs now, his coworkers began talking behind his back about what a drunk he was.
With the rush of wind came a huge rush of faith. "After that, the sacraments came alive," he says. "The Bible became alive. I could sit and read the Bible for hours at a time. I found prayer very easy, too." Once he got to Hawaii, settling in Honolulu, Bain found another charismatic group and dove in. They met every Friday night. And every morning at six a.m., he went to Mass. One morning, just after receiving Holy Communion and taking its wafer on his tongue, he had a thought: "I can become a priest."
"I tried to put the thought out of my mind because I did not want to be a priest," he says. "I wanted some day to get married and have a family. Try as I might, I could not get it out of my mind. It just kept coming back."
It persisted long enough and strong enough that he applied to St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, California. Even there, though, he wasn't sure. "My first year in the seminary I remember walking alone on the grounds after dinner and thinking to myself, it's okay, I will quit at the end of the year," he says. "It was not until December of my second year that I finally got in touch with the call, and after that I really wanted to become a priest."
In 1977, in the middle of his second year at seminary, Father Bain attended a healing service held by the Rev. Francis MacNutt, a Catholic priest with a healing ministry of his own. At the service, Father MacNutt taught how to pray for the healing of the sick. The key, MacNutt taught, is for the healer to pray that his hands become the hands of Jesus.
At the time, Father Bain was taking communion to eight shut-ins in St. Kevin's Parish in San Francisco. The next time he made his rounds, he asked each person if they had any condition or ailment they wanted him to pray about. Most had arthritis. Whatever they told him it was, Father Bain placed his hands on them and prayed as Father MacNutt had taught him—as though his hands were the hands of Christ. As soon as his next visit with them, some of the shut-ins told him they were better. Much better. Even so, Father Bain didn't see this as anything special. "I didn't see it as a gift," he continues. "I saw it as something Jesus was doing and not me. All I was doing was praying." Then, he adds, "because I had lost my faith and then got it back, I think I got it back differently. I was much more open and not so surprised by what God can do."
...
I visited Father Bain in his study, where an Orthodox icon of the Virgin Mary rests next to his computer. I wanted to ask him about the burden and responsibilities of being a healer. Why does he think God chose him for this work? How does he feel when someone he prays for does not improve, but perhaps dies? The questions seemed to perplex him.
"My responsibilities of being a healer," he says, "are all subject to my responsibilities as a priest, which include living a life that reflects God's love and God's goodness." Is that hard? "Not if you pray," he says. "If you have a deep, daily prayer life in which you are touched by the Spirit and you are being fed by that, it is very easy to live that life because you want to. That's not saying there aren't temptations. Padre Pio said there will always be temptations because God loves us. But if you have that deep prayer life, even with temptations, you will be at peace. You will be happy. It is only when your inner being isn't being fed by God that life becomes a struggle."
He never feels remorse when someone he prays for dies, because he knows that the healing comes from God, not from him. "All I can do is lay my hands on them," he says. "That is all I can do."
How does he answer, for himself and for the people he serves, why God heals some and not others? Why does God let bad things happen to people he supposedly loves?
"I really trust God," he says after a pause. "In all those hours of prayer, I have found that God is love. It is unbelievable how much he loves us."
Then, after another long moment in which cars whish by on Highway One outside the window, he adds, "It is a mystery. But it is a mystery in the mind, not in the heart. Your mind is never going to figure this out. We are never going to get an answer that will satisfy us. But we can get a feeling. I have had people leave the Masses with a light inside of them, with a peace. They know their loved one is going to be okay, whether they recover or not."
As for his gift being a burden, he replies, "No more than it is a burden to have children you love, and I love it. I have come to see that this is what God wants me to do, and when God gives you a burden, it is light."
If Father Bain has a gift for healing other people, he does not have that same gift when it comes to himself. About ten years ago, he developed tinnitus, a chronic condition that produces a loud ringing in the ears. It is triggered by exposure to loud noises and only abates with quiet. Now, he must avoid large gatherings of people, can no longer attend or conduct weddings or funerals, go to the movies, parties, restaurants, or travel widely. It also keeps him from preaching the way he would like to. He can't raise his voice above the level of conversation, but must use a microphone. He can't have organ music at his services, only the soft singing of five or six unaccompanied voices. He must wear earplugs at every service he attends or officiates.
Neither Father Bain nor his doctors can trace the physical cause of his case. One day it was just there. But Father Bain has a theory. "If a healer has an ailment, he is going to be able to better identify with the people who come to be healed," he explains. "It probably also keeps him humble—so he knows he is not God. I look back on the fifteen years of suffering and I thank God for it. It was a real blessing. And I think God will take it away—when I become humble enough."
Humility doesn't seem to be a problem for Father Bain. There is absolutely nothing of the showman about him. He has no hunger for attention. At every Mass he tells people right from the beginning that they are here for God's miracles, not his. On his ministry's website, there is only one small picture of him. "I don't want people to discover Father Bain," he explains. "I want people to discover the church and Jesus and God's love."
Father Richard Bain prays over worshippers
at a Healing Mass celebrated at Immaculate
Conception Chapel in San Francisco. More
than 1,000 packed the small church.
Photo by Maria A. Neff.
The gift of faith to heal
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March 9, 2000
By Mary Connell
Staff Writer
For two years, Mary Ann Serrano could take nothing by mouth. "Not food, not even water." Mary Ann, who lives in Dillon Beach, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
"My doctor told me to get my affairs in order, that I had two to four months to live. It was devastating," she said.
"But I've always been a person of deep faith," Mary Ann said. "Father Dick had become pastor at Sacred Heart Church in Olema. When he heard I was sick, he called. I went to him a few times and saw him every time I had a CT scan and went through chemotherapy and radiation."
Father Dick is Richard Bain, still pastor of Sacred Heart and St. Mary Magdalene Church in Bolinas. Father Bain is the director of the Healing Ministry of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, which he established in 1985 and which has grown exponentially. With each celebration of his Healing Masses, the word spreads, as it has through Mary Ann Serrano. Pews are packed in churches large and small.
"I'm cancer-free, a medical miracle," said Mary Ann, whose quest for a cure sent her to the prestigious M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where physicians also told her she had only months to live. Now she is one of thousands of men and women who attribute healings and cures to the work of God through the 57-year-old priest.
Mary Ann endured what she calls "absolutely brutal" therapies; she also decided to put her faith in God. There was no one single moment when she knew she would be healed. But every time Father Bain prayed for her, it became a greater certainty.
"Father Bain is the genuine article, exactly what a priest should be. Mass is holy, the consecration is happening, right then and there," she said.
Her experience has transformed 57-year-old Mary Ann. The founder of the seemingly secular West Marin Women's Investment Club, she learned how truly faithful her sisters in investment could be: "As soon as they found out I was sick, they started a prayer group for me."
She now devotes most of her time to to praying, preaching and furthering Father Bain's Healing Ministry. This week, her audience included a group of Presbyterian women.
And this Friday, March 10, Mary Ann will be on altar at Our Lady of Loretto Church in Novato when Father Bain returns to the Novato parish-his first assignment as a priest-to celebrate a Healing Mass. The service will begin at 7 p.m. with the rosary and other liturgies. Father Bain will celebrate the Mass at 7:30 and conduct the healing service following that.
Gregorian chants, a tonal form of prayer, will also be lifted up.
Quiet and self-effacing, Bain is modest about his ministry, which is becoming international; when the Eucharist is celebrated Friday night in Novato, a production crew from Global, the Brazilian version of 60 Minutes, will be filming.
Healing, in the popular culture, at least, seemed the province of Pentecostals and televangelists. But the Roman Catholic Church has always held that God can-and does - perform miraculous healings.
"Just look at the lives of the saints, whose canonization requires requires evidence of miracles," Father Bain said. "Miracles always involve healing."
His ministry had its beginnings at Our Lady of Loretto Church in Novato in the mid-1980s, when Father Bain invited another priest, Father Dennis Kelleher, to come to Novato. "I'd heard he was a great preacher," Bain said. The New York priest also had a healing ministry.
The Eucharist is an article of faith for Catholics; in receiving the consecrated host, the communicant is receiving Christ, who is God. The Eucharist is central, he says, to the healings.
In praying for an individual, Father Bain holds his or her head and prays.
"I pray with the intent that they will be healed and that God will work through me." Why they are healed "remains a mystery to me," he said.
He has prayed over thousands. The faithful-and the occasional faithless- have attributed their physical and emotional healing, from cancers to Alzheimer's to spinal cord injuries, to his healing.
His life and his ministry have been a pilgrimage-and evidence of God's grace. A native San Franciscan, he attended parochial schools before entering the seminary for a short time. He dropped out, finding seminary life too confining. So he went to the University of San Francisco, where he earned a degree in psychology. Along the way, he also lost his faith.
He went into the business world and spent several years as assistant corporate secretary of California Pacific Utilities in San Francisco, and production control manager of $360 million in real estate in Honolulu.
One day, a co-worker-a pretty co-worker-invited him to a Bible study. He went along and began his walk back to his faith and back to St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park. Richard Bain, ordained at the age of 37, was a "late vocation."
In 1992, Father Bain brought a priest friend, Father Dennis Kelleher, to Novato.
"I told him why I had stopped the healings. He said, "You can't do that. Pray, then leave it up to God.'"
He had attended his first healing Mass in 1977, "where the priest taught the congregation how to pray for healing."
His seminary experience had included taking Communion to six or seven elderly women on Saturdays.
"I would ask them if they had any pain," Bain recalled. "Well, people that age do have pain. I prayed the way the priest had taught me and their pain went away."
In 1986, former Archbishop John Quinn appointed Bain to head a new Healing Ministry.
Still, he had doubts.
Bain suspended his healings for a time after one person he had prayed for recovered, then experienced a relapse and "suffered terribly."
But in 1992, a priest friend, Father Dennis Kelleher, told him he couldn't stop.
"He said, "You can't do that. You pray and leave it up to God.'"
He was at Our Lady of Loretto for more than four years but the large parish left him little time for his healing ministry. It wasn't until he was transferred to St. Kevin's Church in San Francisco that he had the time to devote to healing.
Not long afterward, Father Bain's ministry was featured on KGO-TV's A.M. San Francisco.
"After that, the phone rang off the hook."
Bain has taken his self-supporting ministry around the country, leading three-day missions and conducting healing Masses and services. His network of prayer stretches far and wide-thanks, in part, to his Web site,
www.parishmissions.com
Bain said he is the recipient of two gifts, the charismatic gift of healing but also the gift of priesthood.
"The far greater gift is that I am a priest and can celebrate the Mass. Sometimes I get phone calls from people who say they would prefer to see me privately. I tell them the Mass offers the gift of the Eucharist and of hundreds of people praying. When I leave, I tell people that healing is available every day of the week. You can sit in church; Jesus is in the tabernacle. You don't need Father Bain. God's greatest gift to us is the Mass and Eucharist. People don't know what they're missing out on. The sacraments are a gift from God."
So too is grace: Bain says that "While faith is important, it's not necessary. I've had people with absolutely no faith at all and they were healed. It's just amazing. I heard a Protestant minister say that 'Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus and how much faith did Lazarus have? He was dead.'"
He says he believes Catholics are conditioned to think that "anyone who is involved in a healing ministry is either a saint or a nut, so they think they can't be called to do this. But you don't have to be a saint."
The list of those who say they have experienced healing is a long one.
It includes Paulette Borg of Novato, who attributes her cure from epilepsy 19 years ago to God's work through Father Bain.
And Doris Barbagelata of Belmont, who saw her brother, Norman Chatfield, brought back from the abyss.
An invalid unable to feed himself or walk, completely incontinent, anxiety-ridden and afflicted with a palsy, Chatfield was enveloped in prayer and had a nurse, a caregiver who believed in him. Today he travels and enjoys life with his family.
Bain said he "sometimes feels something, other times doesn't," at the healings. It's very tiring. If I'm praying over 400 or 500 people, it doesn't make any difference. It's God doing it, and the prayers of the people, not me. Nine hundred people praying, that's what makes it powerful."
Reprinted with permission from the March 9, 2000 issue of the Novato Advance News. All Rights Reserved.
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Priest's healing hands credited with miracles
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February 20, 2000
By Elizabeth Fernandez
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Faithful: He's cured epilepsy, cancer
He's said to cure ailments from Alzheimer's and cancer to shin splints and spiritual malaise. He's got a Web site, a devoted legion of followers and a growing reputation nationally as a miracle maker.
One day this month, more than 1,000 penitents jammed a small San Francisco church to attend his most recent healing service.
Following a brief laying-on of hands, many departed with renewed hope.
"I just found out a month ago I have throat cancer," said Anthony Spina, a Mill Valley truck driver. "Now I feel I will get some help."
All of which is rather startling considering that Father Richard Bain was once a fast-tracking businessman and an avowed atheist.
Now he's a Roman Catholic priest living in the Marin County hamlet of Olema, a 57-year-old, self-effacing cleric who seems imperturbable in the face of the litany of cures credited to him.
"The first five or six years I was in this ministry I questioned it," says Bain, pastor of Sacred Heart Church. "I'd say this is crazy, I don't have a gift for healing. I guess it was because I'm a skeptic. Now I know I have the gift of healing. I would never have said that 10 years ago."
He's got no idea how or why the cures occur. Nor does he attempt to validate them in any scientific fashion. All credit, Bain says simply, goes to God.
Healing the absent
"I'm open to doing this and God wants somebody to do this," he says. "This will be a highly unpopular thing to say but it is real easy. I think anybody can do it. I'm just a little better at it because I've done it for 20 years."
Some healings take a few days, others are like an instant zap.
"Once a woman came up with her arm locked against her body, it was paralyzed," says Christopher Hegarty, a Novato author and management consultant who assists at Bain's services. "She was prayed over, she left, then she came back screaming, 'Father, look at my arm and hand.' They looked normal. She kissed him on the cheek and ran out."
Whether the healings involve infections or infertility, depression or spiritual rejuvenation, faith seems to be helpful, but not essential. Nor is actual presence.
Jan Cahill, a former computer consultant in Marin, says she carried a list with 97 names on it to a service last October. One of those people - a 94-year-old woman in San Geronimo - recovered nearly overnight from a cataract complication, Cahill says.
"There are no rules," Bain explains. "I once prayed over a man who looked at me as if I was a nut."
Some of the believers
But from believers, testimonials are copious.
There's Paulette Borg, a 55-year-old Novato resident who says Bain cured her epilepsy 19 years ago, a condition she'd suffered from for a dozen years.
There's Mary Ann Serrano, 57, a homemaker near Tomales who says that in the summer of '98, she was given four months to live. Then Bain prayed over her.
"The doctors say I'm cancer-free," Serrano says. "I say I'm healed. . . . I ask myself why am I alive now? I can't answer that but I say thank you God."
There's also Dan Farley, 44, a Nicasio carpenter who has diabetes, 80 percent hearing loss, and arthritis so severe he couldn't work. Last month, after Bain held a healing service in Olema, Farley says he went back to work.
"I was kinda skeptical, but I'm game for anything," Farley says. "I did the prayers and he touched my head. . . . A few days later I thought gosh dang it, it doesn't hurt. I tell my family, 'You make up your own mind whether he healed me or if it went away on its own.' If he could have healed my hearing, that would have been even better. But I'm planning on going back. Who knows?"
A healing service
The small church in San Francisco, perched on a hillside above Army Street, bulges. The devoted pack the pews, aisles, the second floor loft. There are so many at the Immaculate Conception chapel this day - 1,037 all counted - that Bain dispenses with his usual routine and launches directly into the healing portion.
Some of the faithful tote photos of loved ones needing help, some carry canes, some are in wheelchairs.
Among them is Maria, 36, a San Francisco mother who has difficulty walking, speaking or using her arm after a stroke last summer.
"I'm hoping God helps me," she says.
Jeannette, a San Francisco mother, pushes her 6-year-old son who was born autistic and retarded.
"I brought him for Father's blessing," she says. "Father has a gift."
Moving swiftly but solemnly, Bain pauses with each kneeling person, placing one hand over each head - two at a time.
"You're not coming forward to get something," Bain tells the congregation. "We are coming up for prayer, that we be open to a gift."
Hesitant student of priesthood
For a while Bain himself couldn't have been more closed.
Born and raised in San Francisco, he joined the seminary at age 19, but dropped out "because I felt it was repressive."
After graduating from the University of San Francisco, he fell from the church entirely.
"I thought everything the Catholic Church taught was baloney, medieval nothing," Bain says. "I didn't just leave the church, I became an atheist."
He worked as a corporate officer for a local utility, then as a production manager for a Honolulu realty firm, overseeing a $360 million budget.
One day, a young woman invited him to a Bible study.
"I only went because she was pretty and I was lonely," he laughs.
That day, Bain began his journey back to God. When he was 33, he enrolled at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, but was still saddled with doubts
"I didn't want to be a priest, I had experienced too much of life," he says. "I wanted a family, to make money. . . . The only way I got through my first year was by saying I'll quit at the end of the year.
"When I was ordained a deacon, I got cold feet because you have to say a vow of celibacy."
Attempt at healing
While still in seminary, Bain attended a healing service and decided to "try" helping a woman with arthritis. "I felt heat coming through my hand," he remembers.
He kept at it and discovered that "everyone I prayed over got healed."
Ordained in 1980 at age 37, Bain says he finally found his calling.
Six years later, then Archbishop John Quinn appointed him to run a healing program. Bain now takes his self-supporting ministry from New York to Hawaii and has a Web site, www.parishmissions.com.
Yet when it comes to his own health, Bain seems powerless. He suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and from tinnitus, a debilitating ringing in his ears.
"I (believe) God is allowing the tinnitus to remain," he says quietly. "It has helped keep me humble and allowed me to be more empathetic."
While the archdiocese does not formally certify Bain's cures as miracles, spokesman Tom Burke praises the priest.
"Father Bain is a great evangelist, he believes in the love of God and he takes it to others," says Burke. "These occurrences, whether at Father Bain's Masses or in everyday life, come from God. . . . People are healed, we think that is wonderful, however it happens, whenever it happens."
However, some criticize Bain's lack of medical proof.
Patrick O'Reilly, a UCSF psychologist and former head of Bay Area Skeptics, says illnesses are often cyclical, and sometimes subside after a patient visits a faith healer.
"A lot of times, people assume it was because of the faith healer when the symptoms would have gone away anyway," says O'Reilly.
"I believe Father Bain is sincere but incredibly naive. . . . Faith is a marvelous thing but people are attributing all sorts of wonders to their faith when there are rational explanations - they may have a serious illness and are attributing a lessening of the symptoms to a complete healing or they may have had something that was going to go away anyway."
Bain says perhaps only 25 to 35 percent of the healings can be attributed to divine intervention.
"Some are healed by God," he says. "Some are the placebo effect. If some people are healed because of the placebo, that is wonderful. My reason for being here is to teach people about God and his love. The healings just happen."
Reprinted with permission from the February 20, 2000 issue of the San Francisco Examiner. All Rights Reserved.
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Priest works some wonders
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May 29, 2000
By T.T. Nhu
Mercury News
On a balmy East Bay evening, close to 1,000 people show up for the Rev. Richard Bain's appearance at All Saints Church in Hayward. Bain is known as ``the healing priest'' and has performed Masses throughout the country where people say they've been cured of a variety of illnesses after he has prayed over them.
``You're not coming forward to get something,'' Bain tells his audience. ``We are coming up for prayer so that we'll be open to a gift that is beyond comprehension. We will all be healed by the Eucharist; we don't need anything more.''
Bain, pastor of a small church in Marin County, has been conducting these Masses since 1985, when he founded the first and only healing ministry for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. His Web site (www.parishmissions.com) includes comments from people who claim to have been cured of diseases from Alzheimer's and terminal cancer to insomnia, cataracts and diabetes.
Bain doesn't really know what to make of all this. He has no idea how or why the cures may occur. Nor does he attempt to validate them in any scientific fashion. All credit, Bain says simply, goes to God.
``I've never really been taken by it or seen it as anything out of the ordinary,'' he says. ``To this day, it's a mystery why I'm doing it. Yet the more you do it, the more you become more open to the possibilities. First it's like a little stream, then it becomes a massive river.''
Bain's superiors at the Archdiocese of San Francisco praise his work, but downplay any notion of a spiritual cure-all.
``Father Bain is a great evangelist, he believes in the love of God and he takes it to others,'' said Tom Burke, a spokesman for the archdiocese. ``As far as we're concerned, Richard Bain hasn't healed anyone, because all good comes from God. The fact that people get together at the Mass is the beginning of a marvelous opportunity.''
In Hayward last week, the supplicants who made their way to the altar two by two would agree wholeheartedly. Bain and an associate priest from All Saints Church placed their hands over foreheads -- two people at a time. Bain prayed with his eyes closed for about three seconds before moving on. The other priest, perhaps because he's not as practiced, lingered for 10 to 15 seconds.
People in wheelchairs, on crutches, a blind person with a dog, mothers with babies in their arms, all lined up for a moment with Bain. Upon seeing a young woman with cerebral palsy struggle to the altar with an attendant, Bain stepped toward them in the aisle and embraced them both. At the end of the hourlong blessing, Bain called three women holding babies to the altar for a special blessing that he reserves for children who have problems such as autism or brain damage.
Eladio di Tico of Union City was on crutches. He didn't come for himself, though. He came for his wife, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. Surrogates often come for those who cannot attend the service. Di Tico said that he had e-mailed Bain in advance, describing his wife's condition. The next day, the insurance company approved his wife's treatment. ``Now that's some kind of miracle,'' di Tico said with a big smile.
At the end of the Mass, after everyone had left, a shy woman wearing a wool cap, suffering from late-stage cancer, waited for Bain to bless her. He held her head to his, praying with silent fervor, then blessed her bottle of water. It was her second healing Mass, she says, although she doesn't have much hope of recovery. She takes comfort in the special interest Bain gives her.
Bain got started as ``the healing priest'' in a rather mundane way. While he was still a seminarian 22 years ago, he attended a healing Mass presided by the Rev. Francis McNutt in San Francisco. Healing Masses are traditional in the Catholic Church, a ritual that involves more faith than healing. Bain decided to use this technique when taking the Eucharist to elderly shut-ins.
The first person he helped was a woman who said she was having stomach pains so severe that she wanted to jump out a window. ``I could feel the heat coming out of her pain,'' he said. Putting his hands on her stomach, he said ``open up the passages and release the gas,'' and the woman let out a long sigh.
``I heal gas pains,'' joked Bain.
As he continued blessing for the sick, he discovered that ``everyone I prayed over got healed.'' He began to conduct healing Masses. In 1985, San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn appointed him director of the healing ministry of the San Francisco archdiocese. It's a one-man operation.
Bain is a deeply spiritual man. He acknowledges that nowadays ``a high percentage don't get healed at all.'' But he says ``everyone is changed by the experience of a healing Mass.''
He estimates that perhaps 25 percent heal spontaneously following his ministrations. However, it's the spiritual solace that matters more. He cites the example of a friend who had terminal cancer but lost his fear of dying from going to the service.
``It's too bad that people aren't more open to healing, although we're far more spiritual now than 20 years ago because all this materialism isn't working,'' says Bain.
He should know. Bain worked as a corporate officer for a local utility, then as a production manager for a Honolulu real estate firm. At 33, after a spell of atheism, he returned to the church and enrolled at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park.
Bain is careful about how he describes his apparent spiritual powers.
``The emphasis is not on some special person with some special gift,'' he says. ``The emphasis is on prayer and the healing love of Jesus that comes to us in the sacraments. I frequently hear from people who have attended a Mass for the first time who say `Father, that was wonderful. It was not at all what I expected.' ''
Dr. Wallace Sampson, a retired professor of clinical medicine, teaches a course on alternative medicine at Stanford University. He views claims of religious healing with skepticism.
``There's no evidence that anyone's been healed by a religious ceremony,'' said Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. ``For example, cancer cells can die. Sometimes spontaneous remission or unexplained regression occurs. It's biological, not theological.''
For his part, Bain doesn't dwell on the miracle-like aspects that sometimes occur -- such as the woman whose paralyzed arm unlocked after he blessed her. His approach is matter-of-fact.
``Fifteen years ago I would spend much more time with each person. Sometimes the blessings would take up to two hours,'' he says.
``Later, I came to appreciate the importance of the whole congregation joining with me in prayer during the blessings. I shorten the time that I pray with each person. The blessing now never takes more than a half hour. The service is now over by nine o'clock. Most of us have to get to work the next day.''
Yet Bain is helpless when it comes to his own health. He suffers from tinnitus, a debilitating ringing in his ears that persists despite years of seeking alternative treatment.
``It keeps me in proper relationship with God,'' he says. ``It has helped keep me humble and allowed me to be more empathetic.''
Reprinted with permission from the May 29, 2000 issue of the San Jose Mercury News. All Rights Reserved.
By Kimberly Winston
Excerpted from " Faith Beyond Faith Healing" with permission of the publisher, Paraclete Press
.Look at his hands and they are nothing special--long, lean fingers that taper gently from supple knuckles to manicured nails. His hands bear no remarkable scars, no memorable lines, no distinguishing marks at all that would seal them in anyone's memory for very long. They are graceful hands for a man, and he moves them in delicate arcs when he gestures, as he often does when he speaks.
But thousands of people testify that there is, in fact, something very special about the pale hands of Father Richard Bain, a 58-year-old Roman Catholic priest at Sacred Heart Church in the tiny town of Olema, Calif. Tens of thousands of people seek him out each year to receive a touch from those hands, which they believe bestow God's healing upon them.
For 15 years, Father Bain has traveled the country holding healing Masses and three-day parish missions. From his base in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, he has traveled from Vermont to Hawaii, Texas to Ohio. At his larger missions, a thousand people may show up, most of them in the hope that he can heal them or their loved ones of illness and disease.
Over the years, Father Bain has collected dozens of letters from people who believe he has helped cure them of everything from acne to cancer. A woman from Las Vegas writes that Father Bain took away pain she had after surgery. Another woman from San Bruno, Calif., said her husband was healed of an arthritic knee. A nun in San Francisco describes how, after a blessing from Father Bain, a 70 percent blockage in her cardiac artery disappeared. And Joe Illuzzi of West Hempstead, New York, writes that he and his wife, who were planning to resort to in vitro fertilization, conceived a child the usual way after Father Bain laid his hands on Mr. Illuzzi.
When asked about his gift of healing, he explains it away. "I don't think it is anything special," he says. "I think we all have this power. I prayed for these people the way I was taught to, and I really believe if anybody else did it, the same thing would happen."
Richard Bain was not always such a strong believer. Raised in the Roman Catholic Church in San Francisco, he entered the seminary at the age of 19. But he left after one year, feeling the atmosphere was "too repressive." Some years after graduating from the University of San Francisco, he stopped going to church entirely.
After school, he started a career in business, working for a San Francisco public utility. It was the early 1970s and the sexual revolution was in high swing. The 20-something Richard Bain swung right along with it. Somewhere between the singles bars and the discos, he let go of God. "That lifestyle is completely contrary to the gospel," he says. "You can only live that lifestyle for so long before you lose your faith, and that is what happened to me." He went so far as to declare himself an atheist. "In my own mind, I couldn't conceive of God. If I could conceive of a God, he was very far away from me and didn't care about me."
So he threw himself into his work, rising very quickly to become the youngest corporate officer at his public utility. Then one day, a female coworker invited him to come with her to a Bible study. A Catholic, she knew he had strayed from his faith and hoped to get him to return. And, hey, he admits, she was cute. "The reason I went was I was lonely," he says. "I didn't want to study the Bible. I just didn't have anything else to do that night."
Nothing monumental happened that night, but something took hold inside him. He remembers listening to the discussion and really enjoying it, and being surprised that he was enjoying it. After the meeting, he began thinking about God again. A couple of weeks later, while driving to Lake Tahoe "with a couple of girls," Richard Bain felt a very strong desire to go to confession. He and his friends stopped in Reno, and while they went to the casinos, he went to church.
But back in San Francisco, "I went back to my old ways," he says, going to bars, going home with women. Still, he continued attending the Bible study, and accompanied the group the night they decided to drop in on a gathering of charismatic Catholics at the old St. Ignatius High School, Bain's alma mater.
It was a revelation. Here were Catholic men and women--young, like himself--singing and dancing, swept up in the spirit of worship. There were guitars and tambourines, people raising their palms to God as they sang and prayed. And quite a few people spoke in tongues. There was an ecstasy in the worship that Bain had never experienced before. "There was just so much love," he says. "I felt something I had never felt before—the feeling of love, love of the Holy Spirit, and of God's presence."
The joy in the room instantly reawakened his faith and his desire to be back in the heart of the church. After the service, he waited in line to make his confession to one of the priests in charge. From that moment, he says, his promiscuity became a thing of the past.
Bain threw himself into the Catholic charismatic movement, attending its meetings every Saturday night. He signed up for an eight-week course on baptism in the Holy Spirit, an experience charismatics consider a necessary foundation for a close relationship with God.
In the first class, on a Saturday night, the instructor told everyone their lives were about to change. It was something Bain took very seriously. It was what he had come there seeking. Two days later, he got a call from a friend in Hawaii, offering him a high-paying job as an executive with a construction company. Remembering the words of the teacher on Saturday night, he took the job on the spot.
Before he left for Hawaii, Bain wanted to complete the eight-week course. He was afraid if he left without completing it, the new-found fervor of his faith would disappear. So a woman from the class came to his apartment to guide him through the final steps.
The two stood in Bain's living room, his bay windows offering a view of San Francisco at night. She began to pray for him, asking God to grant him the spiritual gifts that come with baptism in the Holy Spirit--the gift of healing, among them. They prayed for a while, Bain remembers, but he felt nothing special. Then she began to speak in tongues and asked him to mimic her. He did, still feeling nothing. She then began to sing in tongues and he sang along with her. Still, he felt just as he had before. Finally, she said to him, "Richard, you have received the Holy Spirit."
"I asked her why she thought so because I didn't feel anything," he says.
"And she said, 'Because you are singing in tongues.' And I said, no, I am not, I am just mimicking you. But something did happen because I was very peaceful about not feeling anything, and the old me would have been very disappointed. Then I said, 'Maggie, it is okay. I will receive the Holy Spirit when God wants me to.'"
At that instant, Bain recalls, a sudden gust of wind rushed by his window, rattling the glass. At the same time, he felt a rush run through him, from his head to his toes. "What I felt that night, it was unbelievable," he says. "It was just like in the Bible. I don't know if there were tongues of fire coming out of the top of my head, but I would not have been surprised if there were." He felt elated, drunk, and as high as he had ever been. He began talking, telling Maggie of what he felt coursing through him, and he noticed his words were slurred and that he was swaying from side to side. The effect lasted for days, and, he laughs now, his coworkers began talking behind his back about what a drunk he was.
With the rush of wind came a huge rush of faith. "After that, the sacraments came alive," he says. "The Bible became alive. I could sit and read the Bible for hours at a time. I found prayer very easy, too." Once he got to Hawaii, settling in Honolulu, Bain found another charismatic group and dove in. They met every Friday night. And every morning at six a.m., he went to Mass. One morning, just after receiving Holy Communion and taking its wafer on his tongue, he had a thought: "I can become a priest."
"I tried to put the thought out of my mind because I did not want to be a priest," he says. "I wanted some day to get married and have a family. Try as I might, I could not get it out of my mind. It just kept coming back."
It persisted long enough and strong enough that he applied to St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, California. Even there, though, he wasn't sure. "My first year in the seminary I remember walking alone on the grounds after dinner and thinking to myself, it's okay, I will quit at the end of the year," he says. "It was not until December of my second year that I finally got in touch with the call, and after that I really wanted to become a priest."
In 1977, in the middle of his second year at seminary, Father Bain attended a healing service held by the Rev. Francis MacNutt, a Catholic priest with a healing ministry of his own. At the service, Father MacNutt taught how to pray for the healing of the sick. The key, MacNutt taught, is for the healer to pray that his hands become the hands of Jesus.
At the time, Father Bain was taking communion to eight shut-ins in St. Kevin's Parish in San Francisco. The next time he made his rounds, he asked each person if they had any condition or ailment they wanted him to pray about. Most had arthritis. Whatever they told him it was, Father Bain placed his hands on them and prayed as Father MacNutt had taught him—as though his hands were the hands of Christ. As soon as his next visit with them, some of the shut-ins told him they were better. Much better. Even so, Father Bain didn't see this as anything special. "I didn't see it as a gift," he continues. "I saw it as something Jesus was doing and not me. All I was doing was praying." Then, he adds, "because I had lost my faith and then got it back, I think I got it back differently. I was much more open and not so surprised by what God can do."
...
I visited Father Bain in his study, where an Orthodox icon of the Virgin Mary rests next to his computer. I wanted to ask him about the burden and responsibilities of being a healer. Why does he think God chose him for this work? How does he feel when someone he prays for does not improve, but perhaps dies? The questions seemed to perplex him.
"My responsibilities of being a healer," he says, "are all subject to my responsibilities as a priest, which include living a life that reflects God's love and God's goodness." Is that hard? "Not if you pray," he says. "If you have a deep, daily prayer life in which you are touched by the Spirit and you are being fed by that, it is very easy to live that life because you want to. That's not saying there aren't temptations. Padre Pio said there will always be temptations because God loves us. But if you have that deep prayer life, even with temptations, you will be at peace. You will be happy. It is only when your inner being isn't being fed by God that life becomes a struggle."
He never feels remorse when someone he prays for dies, because he knows that the healing comes from God, not from him. "All I can do is lay my hands on them," he says. "That is all I can do."
How does he answer, for himself and for the people he serves, why God heals some and not others? Why does God let bad things happen to people he supposedly loves?
"I really trust God," he says after a pause. "In all those hours of prayer, I have found that God is love. It is unbelievable how much he loves us."
Then, after another long moment in which cars whish by on Highway One outside the window, he adds, "It is a mystery. But it is a mystery in the mind, not in the heart. Your mind is never going to figure this out. We are never going to get an answer that will satisfy us. But we can get a feeling. I have had people leave the Masses with a light inside of them, with a peace. They know their loved one is going to be okay, whether they recover or not."
As for his gift being a burden, he replies, "No more than it is a burden to have children you love, and I love it. I have come to see that this is what God wants me to do, and when God gives you a burden, it is light."
If Father Bain has a gift for healing other people, he does not have that same gift when it comes to himself. About ten years ago, he developed tinnitus, a chronic condition that produces a loud ringing in the ears. It is triggered by exposure to loud noises and only abates with quiet. Now, he must avoid large gatherings of people, can no longer attend or conduct weddings or funerals, go to the movies, parties, restaurants, or travel widely. It also keeps him from preaching the way he would like to. He can't raise his voice above the level of conversation, but must use a microphone. He can't have organ music at his services, only the soft singing of five or six unaccompanied voices. He must wear earplugs at every service he attends or officiates.
Neither Father Bain nor his doctors can trace the physical cause of his case. One day it was just there. But Father Bain has a theory. "If a healer has an ailment, he is going to be able to better identify with the people who come to be healed," he explains. "It probably also keeps him humble—so he knows he is not God. I look back on the fifteen years of suffering and I thank God for it. It was a real blessing. And I think God will take it away—when I become humble enough."
Humility doesn't seem to be a problem for Father Bain. There is absolutely nothing of the showman about him. He has no hunger for attention. At every Mass he tells people right from the beginning that they are here for God's miracles, not his. On his ministry's website, there is only one small picture of him. "I don't want people to discover Father Bain," he explains. "I want people to discover the church and Jesus and God's love."
Father Richard Bain prays over worshippers
at a Healing Mass celebrated at Immaculate
Conception Chapel in San Francisco. More
than 1,000 packed the small church.
Photo by Maria A. Neff.
The gift of faith to heal
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March 9, 2000
By Mary Connell
Staff Writer
For two years, Mary Ann Serrano could take nothing by mouth. "Not food, not even water." Mary Ann, who lives in Dillon Beach, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
"My doctor told me to get my affairs in order, that I had two to four months to live. It was devastating," she said.
"But I've always been a person of deep faith," Mary Ann said. "Father Dick had become pastor at Sacred Heart Church in Olema. When he heard I was sick, he called. I went to him a few times and saw him every time I had a CT scan and went through chemotherapy and radiation."
Father Dick is Richard Bain, still pastor of Sacred Heart and St. Mary Magdalene Church in Bolinas. Father Bain is the director of the Healing Ministry of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, which he established in 1985 and which has grown exponentially. With each celebration of his Healing Masses, the word spreads, as it has through Mary Ann Serrano. Pews are packed in churches large and small.
"I'm cancer-free, a medical miracle," said Mary Ann, whose quest for a cure sent her to the prestigious M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where physicians also told her she had only months to live. Now she is one of thousands of men and women who attribute healings and cures to the work of God through the 57-year-old priest.
Mary Ann endured what she calls "absolutely brutal" therapies; she also decided to put her faith in God. There was no one single moment when she knew she would be healed. But every time Father Bain prayed for her, it became a greater certainty.
"Father Bain is the genuine article, exactly what a priest should be. Mass is holy, the consecration is happening, right then and there," she said.
Her experience has transformed 57-year-old Mary Ann. The founder of the seemingly secular West Marin Women's Investment Club, she learned how truly faithful her sisters in investment could be: "As soon as they found out I was sick, they started a prayer group for me."
She now devotes most of her time to to praying, preaching and furthering Father Bain's Healing Ministry. This week, her audience included a group of Presbyterian women.
And this Friday, March 10, Mary Ann will be on altar at Our Lady of Loretto Church in Novato when Father Bain returns to the Novato parish-his first assignment as a priest-to celebrate a Healing Mass. The service will begin at 7 p.m. with the rosary and other liturgies. Father Bain will celebrate the Mass at 7:30 and conduct the healing service following that.
Gregorian chants, a tonal form of prayer, will also be lifted up.
Quiet and self-effacing, Bain is modest about his ministry, which is becoming international; when the Eucharist is celebrated Friday night in Novato, a production crew from Global, the Brazilian version of 60 Minutes, will be filming.
Healing, in the popular culture, at least, seemed the province of Pentecostals and televangelists. But the Roman Catholic Church has always held that God can-and does - perform miraculous healings.
"Just look at the lives of the saints, whose canonization requires requires evidence of miracles," Father Bain said. "Miracles always involve healing."
His ministry had its beginnings at Our Lady of Loretto Church in Novato in the mid-1980s, when Father Bain invited another priest, Father Dennis Kelleher, to come to Novato. "I'd heard he was a great preacher," Bain said. The New York priest also had a healing ministry.
The Eucharist is an article of faith for Catholics; in receiving the consecrated host, the communicant is receiving Christ, who is God. The Eucharist is central, he says, to the healings.
In praying for an individual, Father Bain holds his or her head and prays.
"I pray with the intent that they will be healed and that God will work through me." Why they are healed "remains a mystery to me," he said.
He has prayed over thousands. The faithful-and the occasional faithless- have attributed their physical and emotional healing, from cancers to Alzheimer's to spinal cord injuries, to his healing.
His life and his ministry have been a pilgrimage-and evidence of God's grace. A native San Franciscan, he attended parochial schools before entering the seminary for a short time. He dropped out, finding seminary life too confining. So he went to the University of San Francisco, where he earned a degree in psychology. Along the way, he also lost his faith.
He went into the business world and spent several years as assistant corporate secretary of California Pacific Utilities in San Francisco, and production control manager of $360 million in real estate in Honolulu.
One day, a co-worker-a pretty co-worker-invited him to a Bible study. He went along and began his walk back to his faith and back to St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park. Richard Bain, ordained at the age of 37, was a "late vocation."
In 1992, Father Bain brought a priest friend, Father Dennis Kelleher, to Novato.
"I told him why I had stopped the healings. He said, "You can't do that. Pray, then leave it up to God.'"
He had attended his first healing Mass in 1977, "where the priest taught the congregation how to pray for healing."
His seminary experience had included taking Communion to six or seven elderly women on Saturdays.
"I would ask them if they had any pain," Bain recalled. "Well, people that age do have pain. I prayed the way the priest had taught me and their pain went away."
In 1986, former Archbishop John Quinn appointed Bain to head a new Healing Ministry.
Still, he had doubts.
Bain suspended his healings for a time after one person he had prayed for recovered, then experienced a relapse and "suffered terribly."
But in 1992, a priest friend, Father Dennis Kelleher, told him he couldn't stop.
"He said, "You can't do that. You pray and leave it up to God.'"
He was at Our Lady of Loretto for more than four years but the large parish left him little time for his healing ministry. It wasn't until he was transferred to St. Kevin's Church in San Francisco that he had the time to devote to healing.
Not long afterward, Father Bain's ministry was featured on KGO-TV's A.M. San Francisco.
"After that, the phone rang off the hook."
Bain has taken his self-supporting ministry around the country, leading three-day missions and conducting healing Masses and services. His network of prayer stretches far and wide-thanks, in part, to his Web site,
www.parishmissions.com
Bain said he is the recipient of two gifts, the charismatic gift of healing but also the gift of priesthood.
"The far greater gift is that I am a priest and can celebrate the Mass. Sometimes I get phone calls from people who say they would prefer to see me privately. I tell them the Mass offers the gift of the Eucharist and of hundreds of people praying. When I leave, I tell people that healing is available every day of the week. You can sit in church; Jesus is in the tabernacle. You don't need Father Bain. God's greatest gift to us is the Mass and Eucharist. People don't know what they're missing out on. The sacraments are a gift from God."
So too is grace: Bain says that "While faith is important, it's not necessary. I've had people with absolutely no faith at all and they were healed. It's just amazing. I heard a Protestant minister say that 'Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus and how much faith did Lazarus have? He was dead.'"
He says he believes Catholics are conditioned to think that "anyone who is involved in a healing ministry is either a saint or a nut, so they think they can't be called to do this. But you don't have to be a saint."
The list of those who say they have experienced healing is a long one.
It includes Paulette Borg of Novato, who attributes her cure from epilepsy 19 years ago to God's work through Father Bain.
And Doris Barbagelata of Belmont, who saw her brother, Norman Chatfield, brought back from the abyss.
An invalid unable to feed himself or walk, completely incontinent, anxiety-ridden and afflicted with a palsy, Chatfield was enveloped in prayer and had a nurse, a caregiver who believed in him. Today he travels and enjoys life with his family.
Bain said he "sometimes feels something, other times doesn't," at the healings. It's very tiring. If I'm praying over 400 or 500 people, it doesn't make any difference. It's God doing it, and the prayers of the people, not me. Nine hundred people praying, that's what makes it powerful."
Reprinted with permission from the March 9, 2000 issue of the Novato Advance News. All Rights Reserved.
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Priest's healing hands credited with miracles
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February 20, 2000
By Elizabeth Fernandez
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Faithful: He's cured epilepsy, cancer
He's said to cure ailments from Alzheimer's and cancer to shin splints and spiritual malaise. He's got a Web site, a devoted legion of followers and a growing reputation nationally as a miracle maker.
One day this month, more than 1,000 penitents jammed a small San Francisco church to attend his most recent healing service.
Following a brief laying-on of hands, many departed with renewed hope.
"I just found out a month ago I have throat cancer," said Anthony Spina, a Mill Valley truck driver. "Now I feel I will get some help."
All of which is rather startling considering that Father Richard Bain was once a fast-tracking businessman and an avowed atheist.
Now he's a Roman Catholic priest living in the Marin County hamlet of Olema, a 57-year-old, self-effacing cleric who seems imperturbable in the face of the litany of cures credited to him.
"The first five or six years I was in this ministry I questioned it," says Bain, pastor of Sacred Heart Church. "I'd say this is crazy, I don't have a gift for healing. I guess it was because I'm a skeptic. Now I know I have the gift of healing. I would never have said that 10 years ago."
He's got no idea how or why the cures occur. Nor does he attempt to validate them in any scientific fashion. All credit, Bain says simply, goes to God.
Healing the absent
"I'm open to doing this and God wants somebody to do this," he says. "This will be a highly unpopular thing to say but it is real easy. I think anybody can do it. I'm just a little better at it because I've done it for 20 years."
Some healings take a few days, others are like an instant zap.
"Once a woman came up with her arm locked against her body, it was paralyzed," says Christopher Hegarty, a Novato author and management consultant who assists at Bain's services. "She was prayed over, she left, then she came back screaming, 'Father, look at my arm and hand.' They looked normal. She kissed him on the cheek and ran out."
Whether the healings involve infections or infertility, depression or spiritual rejuvenation, faith seems to be helpful, but not essential. Nor is actual presence.
Jan Cahill, a former computer consultant in Marin, says she carried a list with 97 names on it to a service last October. One of those people - a 94-year-old woman in San Geronimo - recovered nearly overnight from a cataract complication, Cahill says.
"There are no rules," Bain explains. "I once prayed over a man who looked at me as if I was a nut."
Some of the believers
But from believers, testimonials are copious.
There's Paulette Borg, a 55-year-old Novato resident who says Bain cured her epilepsy 19 years ago, a condition she'd suffered from for a dozen years.
There's Mary Ann Serrano, 57, a homemaker near Tomales who says that in the summer of '98, she was given four months to live. Then Bain prayed over her.
"The doctors say I'm cancer-free," Serrano says. "I say I'm healed. . . . I ask myself why am I alive now? I can't answer that but I say thank you God."
There's also Dan Farley, 44, a Nicasio carpenter who has diabetes, 80 percent hearing loss, and arthritis so severe he couldn't work. Last month, after Bain held a healing service in Olema, Farley says he went back to work.
"I was kinda skeptical, but I'm game for anything," Farley says. "I did the prayers and he touched my head. . . . A few days later I thought gosh dang it, it doesn't hurt. I tell my family, 'You make up your own mind whether he healed me or if it went away on its own.' If he could have healed my hearing, that would have been even better. But I'm planning on going back. Who knows?"
A healing service
The small church in San Francisco, perched on a hillside above Army Street, bulges. The devoted pack the pews, aisles, the second floor loft. There are so many at the Immaculate Conception chapel this day - 1,037 all counted - that Bain dispenses with his usual routine and launches directly into the healing portion.
Some of the faithful tote photos of loved ones needing help, some carry canes, some are in wheelchairs.
Among them is Maria, 36, a San Francisco mother who has difficulty walking, speaking or using her arm after a stroke last summer.
"I'm hoping God helps me," she says.
Jeannette, a San Francisco mother, pushes her 6-year-old son who was born autistic and retarded.
"I brought him for Father's blessing," she says. "Father has a gift."
Moving swiftly but solemnly, Bain pauses with each kneeling person, placing one hand over each head - two at a time.
"You're not coming forward to get something," Bain tells the congregation. "We are coming up for prayer, that we be open to a gift."
Hesitant student of priesthood
For a while Bain himself couldn't have been more closed.
Born and raised in San Francisco, he joined the seminary at age 19, but dropped out "because I felt it was repressive."
After graduating from the University of San Francisco, he fell from the church entirely.
"I thought everything the Catholic Church taught was baloney, medieval nothing," Bain says. "I didn't just leave the church, I became an atheist."
He worked as a corporate officer for a local utility, then as a production manager for a Honolulu realty firm, overseeing a $360 million budget.
One day, a young woman invited him to a Bible study.
"I only went because she was pretty and I was lonely," he laughs.
That day, Bain began his journey back to God. When he was 33, he enrolled at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, but was still saddled with doubts
"I didn't want to be a priest, I had experienced too much of life," he says. "I wanted a family, to make money. . . . The only way I got through my first year was by saying I'll quit at the end of the year.
"When I was ordained a deacon, I got cold feet because you have to say a vow of celibacy."
Attempt at healing
While still in seminary, Bain attended a healing service and decided to "try" helping a woman with arthritis. "I felt heat coming through my hand," he remembers.
He kept at it and discovered that "everyone I prayed over got healed."
Ordained in 1980 at age 37, Bain says he finally found his calling.
Six years later, then Archbishop John Quinn appointed him to run a healing program. Bain now takes his self-supporting ministry from New York to Hawaii and has a Web site, www.parishmissions.com.
Yet when it comes to his own health, Bain seems powerless. He suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and from tinnitus, a debilitating ringing in his ears.
"I (believe) God is allowing the tinnitus to remain," he says quietly. "It has helped keep me humble and allowed me to be more empathetic."
While the archdiocese does not formally certify Bain's cures as miracles, spokesman Tom Burke praises the priest.
"Father Bain is a great evangelist, he believes in the love of God and he takes it to others," says Burke. "These occurrences, whether at Father Bain's Masses or in everyday life, come from God. . . . People are healed, we think that is wonderful, however it happens, whenever it happens."
However, some criticize Bain's lack of medical proof.
Patrick O'Reilly, a UCSF psychologist and former head of Bay Area Skeptics, says illnesses are often cyclical, and sometimes subside after a patient visits a faith healer.
"A lot of times, people assume it was because of the faith healer when the symptoms would have gone away anyway," says O'Reilly.
"I believe Father Bain is sincere but incredibly naive. . . . Faith is a marvelous thing but people are attributing all sorts of wonders to their faith when there are rational explanations - they may have a serious illness and are attributing a lessening of the symptoms to a complete healing or they may have had something that was going to go away anyway."
Bain says perhaps only 25 to 35 percent of the healings can be attributed to divine intervention.
"Some are healed by God," he says. "Some are the placebo effect. If some people are healed because of the placebo, that is wonderful. My reason for being here is to teach people about God and his love. The healings just happen."
Reprinted with permission from the February 20, 2000 issue of the San Francisco Examiner. All Rights Reserved.
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Priest works some wonders
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May 29, 2000
By T.T. Nhu
Mercury News
On a balmy East Bay evening, close to 1,000 people show up for the Rev. Richard Bain's appearance at All Saints Church in Hayward. Bain is known as ``the healing priest'' and has performed Masses throughout the country where people say they've been cured of a variety of illnesses after he has prayed over them.
``You're not coming forward to get something,'' Bain tells his audience. ``We are coming up for prayer so that we'll be open to a gift that is beyond comprehension. We will all be healed by the Eucharist; we don't need anything more.''
Bain, pastor of a small church in Marin County, has been conducting these Masses since 1985, when he founded the first and only healing ministry for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. His Web site (www.parishmissions.com) includes comments from people who claim to have been cured of diseases from Alzheimer's and terminal cancer to insomnia, cataracts and diabetes.
Bain doesn't really know what to make of all this. He has no idea how or why the cures may occur. Nor does he attempt to validate them in any scientific fashion. All credit, Bain says simply, goes to God.
``I've never really been taken by it or seen it as anything out of the ordinary,'' he says. ``To this day, it's a mystery why I'm doing it. Yet the more you do it, the more you become more open to the possibilities. First it's like a little stream, then it becomes a massive river.''
Bain's superiors at the Archdiocese of San Francisco praise his work, but downplay any notion of a spiritual cure-all.
``Father Bain is a great evangelist, he believes in the love of God and he takes it to others,'' said Tom Burke, a spokesman for the archdiocese. ``As far as we're concerned, Richard Bain hasn't healed anyone, because all good comes from God. The fact that people get together at the Mass is the beginning of a marvelous opportunity.''
In Hayward last week, the supplicants who made their way to the altar two by two would agree wholeheartedly. Bain and an associate priest from All Saints Church placed their hands over foreheads -- two people at a time. Bain prayed with his eyes closed for about three seconds before moving on. The other priest, perhaps because he's not as practiced, lingered for 10 to 15 seconds.
People in wheelchairs, on crutches, a blind person with a dog, mothers with babies in their arms, all lined up for a moment with Bain. Upon seeing a young woman with cerebral palsy struggle to the altar with an attendant, Bain stepped toward them in the aisle and embraced them both. At the end of the hourlong blessing, Bain called three women holding babies to the altar for a special blessing that he reserves for children who have problems such as autism or brain damage.
Eladio di Tico of Union City was on crutches. He didn't come for himself, though. He came for his wife, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. Surrogates often come for those who cannot attend the service. Di Tico said that he had e-mailed Bain in advance, describing his wife's condition. The next day, the insurance company approved his wife's treatment. ``Now that's some kind of miracle,'' di Tico said with a big smile.
At the end of the Mass, after everyone had left, a shy woman wearing a wool cap, suffering from late-stage cancer, waited for Bain to bless her. He held her head to his, praying with silent fervor, then blessed her bottle of water. It was her second healing Mass, she says, although she doesn't have much hope of recovery. She takes comfort in the special interest Bain gives her.
Bain got started as ``the healing priest'' in a rather mundane way. While he was still a seminarian 22 years ago, he attended a healing Mass presided by the Rev. Francis McNutt in San Francisco. Healing Masses are traditional in the Catholic Church, a ritual that involves more faith than healing. Bain decided to use this technique when taking the Eucharist to elderly shut-ins.
The first person he helped was a woman who said she was having stomach pains so severe that she wanted to jump out a window. ``I could feel the heat coming out of her pain,'' he said. Putting his hands on her stomach, he said ``open up the passages and release the gas,'' and the woman let out a long sigh.
``I heal gas pains,'' joked Bain.
As he continued blessing for the sick, he discovered that ``everyone I prayed over got healed.'' He began to conduct healing Masses. In 1985, San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn appointed him director of the healing ministry of the San Francisco archdiocese. It's a one-man operation.
Bain is a deeply spiritual man. He acknowledges that nowadays ``a high percentage don't get healed at all.'' But he says ``everyone is changed by the experience of a healing Mass.''
He estimates that perhaps 25 percent heal spontaneously following his ministrations. However, it's the spiritual solace that matters more. He cites the example of a friend who had terminal cancer but lost his fear of dying from going to the service.
``It's too bad that people aren't more open to healing, although we're far more spiritual now than 20 years ago because all this materialism isn't working,'' says Bain.
He should know. Bain worked as a corporate officer for a local utility, then as a production manager for a Honolulu real estate firm. At 33, after a spell of atheism, he returned to the church and enrolled at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park.
Bain is careful about how he describes his apparent spiritual powers.
``The emphasis is not on some special person with some special gift,'' he says. ``The emphasis is on prayer and the healing love of Jesus that comes to us in the sacraments. I frequently hear from people who have attended a Mass for the first time who say `Father, that was wonderful. It was not at all what I expected.' ''
Dr. Wallace Sampson, a retired professor of clinical medicine, teaches a course on alternative medicine at Stanford University. He views claims of religious healing with skepticism.
``There's no evidence that anyone's been healed by a religious ceremony,'' said Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. ``For example, cancer cells can die. Sometimes spontaneous remission or unexplained regression occurs. It's biological, not theological.''
For his part, Bain doesn't dwell on the miracle-like aspects that sometimes occur -- such as the woman whose paralyzed arm unlocked after he blessed her. His approach is matter-of-fact.
``Fifteen years ago I would spend much more time with each person. Sometimes the blessings would take up to two hours,'' he says.
``Later, I came to appreciate the importance of the whole congregation joining with me in prayer during the blessings. I shorten the time that I pray with each person. The blessing now never takes more than a half hour. The service is now over by nine o'clock. Most of us have to get to work the next day.''
Yet Bain is helpless when it comes to his own health. He suffers from tinnitus, a debilitating ringing in his ears that persists despite years of seeking alternative treatment.
``It keeps me in proper relationship with God,'' he says. ``It has helped keep me humble and allowed me to be more empathetic.''
Reprinted with permission from the May 29, 2000 issue of the San Jose Mercury News. All Rights Reserved.