c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ At 52 she has a quick, gap-toothed smile, a ruddy, open face and despite more than 30 years in the United States, the speech rhythms of her Northern Irish heritage. She wears sensible shoes and the plain brown cotton habit of a Catholic nun in the Sisters of St. Clare, which she joined as a girl of 15. In conversation, her voice occasionally drops to nearly a whisper conveying a sense of mystery, or wonder, a remnant perhaps of her old skills talking to children. She used to teach kindergarten.

Yet she is in demand. Her schedule is booked for two years: Japan and Africa recently, New Orleans now, then off to Johannesburg soon to talk before groups of people in small churches or large conference centers. They include priests and bishops, lay believers, and more than a smattering of those ordinary souls who approach Sister Briege McKenna with a polite, show-me skepticism.

McKenna has a worldwide reputation in some Catholic circles as a sometime healer _ or, more precisely, they believe she is one God has singled out and made an instrument to show himself.

Lorraine Polito, who now lives in Kenner, La., first encountered her in Lake Charles 25 years ago. Both were young women then _ McKenna not yet 30, a little tentatively just starting what would become a global ministry. Polito was a young mother with three children and a potentially serious problem: a worrisome growth in her neck digging into to her jawbone.

Doctors had seen it and did not hide their concern, Polito said in an interview.

“They said it was too dangerous to biopsy because the area is full of nerves and such. They wanted to do just one operation where they’d look at it and take it out if they had to.”

So there was no diagnosis yet. “But they told me to be prepared for it to be malignant,” she said.

The night before her final pre-operative office visit with the surgeon, a friend collected Polito and took her to hear McKenna at a local church, Polito said.

McKenna spoke for a short time about Jesus Christ and prayed for everyone in the audience and their needs.

“I didn’t feel anything special then or later,” Polito said.

“But the next day at the doctor’s office, he found the growth had shrunk by half. A week later it was gone completely.”

There never was an operation.

“He said it was extremely rare for something like that to resolve itself” so quickly and completely Polito said.

“I accepted that as God’s hand,” said Polito. “Whether it was a miraculous healing, I don’t know. But I felt it was just a step, one of the things God does to bring us to him. That night the Lord called us into a deeper relationship that has changed our lives, my husband’s and mine.”

That Lake Charles service was Polito’s first encounter with the Catholic charismatic movement, a band of believers within the church who emphasize the presence of the Holy Spirit in everyday life and the daily possibility of miracles, conversions and divine assistance.

To the extent she has a gift of healing, inviting people into the kind of life-transformation that overtook Polito seems to be its purpose, McKenna said in an interview during a visit to St. Dominic Church in New Orleans, where she preached earlier this month.

“When you sit before a meal do you eat the knife and fork?” she asks. “No, you use them to bring food to your mouth. I am the Lord’s knife and fork.”

In that sense, she said, physical healing is only a small part of what is being offered through her.

Beyond that, said McKenna, as in the case with Polito, is an entry into a deeper life-changing spiritual awakening in which a healing is merely an introductory calling card.

“In fact, the danger is that people begin to think it’s you with the power,” she said. “I tell them you don’t have to be believe in me. I’m not in the Bible. But I want you to focus on the Lord and get energy from the Lord.”

Over the years McKenna has also developed a reputation for giving retreats for priests and clergy, for listening to their troubles, encouraging their spirituality.

It is said she is not above occasionally delivering a stiff reprimand.

She regards the all-male priesthood as a gift not to be questioned.

“When you come to sacraments, they are not about equality,” she said. “I have not the right to stand before God and say, ‘I want _ I need _ the power to make you present in the Eucharist,” she said. “I am totally convinced _ totally _ that the church is guided by the Holy Spirit in this.”

McKenna’s own story, like many others in ministry, is one of almost reluctant conversion.

As a young nun she was stricken with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis so severe it began to deform her hands and feet.

Her sisters in the convent in Ireland occasionally immobilized her hands and feet in plaster splints. She got a transfer to Florida hoping its heat would soothe her discomfort.

The humidity made the inflammation worse. She lived on cortisone. Her knees, particularly her right knee, became swollen and deformed, she said. Not yet 30, she was increasingly crippled. Life in a wheelchair became a real possibility.

Moreover, she entered a period of spiritual aridity in which she wondered whether there was more to the life of a religious than the thin gruel she was then experiencing.

At an ecumenical retreat in a hotel conference center in Orlando one December day in 1970, eyes closed, she breathed the prayer, “Jesus, please help me,” she says in her book, “Miracles Do Happen,” (Servant Publications.)

She claims she felt a touch on her forehead, a sense that she was being “peeled, like a banana,” and was immediately and completely healed, including the visible deformities.

“At that moment, the resurrection,” she said. “I knew Jesus was alive, that he was right there.”

And over the next few years, McKenna says she came to learn that she had been given a gift to do the same if, she said, she could point the way to the source of the power.

In some ways McKenna is at the shadowy margin in the population of those who claim the gift of healing. She travels the world in an entourage of two _ herself and her companion, the Rev. Kevin Scallon. And the substance of her message is distinctively Catholic Christianity in that she asks her audiences to attend the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

Her healing services are so low-key as to be barely recognizable. She is not showy. She does not lay on hands. Those who have attended her services do not expect to see the lame and halt throw off their crutches.

She simply speaks to the people, prays with them, and then, sometimes, things begin to happen in the privacy of people’s lives, she said.

Home, such as it is, is near Tampa, Fla., not far from the home base of Benny Hinn, another purported faith healer, and a Pentecostal, who fills stadiums and draws chartered buses filled with the sick and hopeful from hundreds of miles away.

“People who go to Benny are beautiful people who want healing. And Jesus allows it,” she said. “I worry sometimes only that some healers become more important than Jesus.”

DEA END NOLAN