First story

A non-denominational preacher who had been a Protestant for 33 years and had converted to Catholicism said he had experienced Eucharistic miracles in addition to stunningly miraculous healings.

The former pastor, Dr. Bob Rice of Santa Fe, New Mexico, had begun a healing ministry as a 26-year-old truck driver living in California. Raised a Baptist, Rice was a lukewarm believer and former Marine when one night in 1967 he “heard” God speak to him in his thought pattern. “The voice woke me up, and told me He wanted me to go to the Full Gospel Rescue Mission in San Diego,” he had said.

The remarkable thing was that Rice had never heard of it; he didn’t know if such a place even existed. He didn’t know what to think and tried to push it out of his mind, but that day during lunch the same voice spoke the same words to him! “It was so real,” he had said, “that I had to do something about it.”

Rice decided to do as he was told and went with a friend to San Diego, looking in the part of town they thought might have a rescue mission. It did. When they asked a man on the street, he gave them directions to a mission with the precise name Rice had heard. “I didn’t even know if it existed,” he had said. But it indeed did — by the very name he was given — and after explaining what had happened to him, Rice stayed for the service that night. He was shocked when the pastor of the mission, Winnie Smith, announced to the congregation that Rice–who had never preached a word in his life, and didn’t even know the Bible that well–would be the speaker.

Startled and afraid, Rice took to the pulpit with no idea of what to talk about or even how to formally pray. “I had absolutely no clue what I was going to do,” he had said. “When I got to the pulpit I opened my Bible and just laid it down on the pulpit–opened to no particular place, because I didn’t know anything about it. I prayed a very simple prayer, telling the Lord these were His people and that if there was anyway He could use me, there I was. Use me.

“I then had this thought going through my mind. I didn’t know if it was Scripture or something I had read, but there was this thought going through my mind, and when I looked back down at my Bible, I couldn’t believe my eyes: I began to read the same words going through my mind. It was Mark 16:17, where it says signs shall follow those who believe, that ‘in My Name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues… they shall lay hands upon the sick and they shall recover.'”

Suddenly, the same voice that had spoken to him that morning spoke to him again. “It said, ‘Bob, there’s a woman out there tonight who’s blind and I want to restore her sight.’ I thought, ‘What?’ But it was so real I told them that I believed there was a woman out there who was blind and God wanted to restore her sight.”

When Rice asked if there was a woman who was blind, a female way in the back corner of the mission raised her hand.

Rice was “scared stiff” but did what came naturally. He asked her to come forward and asked if she really believed she could be healed. When she said yes, Rice reached out, touched the woman on the forehead, and said, “In the Name of Jesus, receive your sight.”

“The next thing I knew, the lady was laying on the floor,” recounted the former truck driver. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done now.’ I had never seen anyone rest in the Spirit. It was the first time. A few seconds later, she started to cry out, ‘I can see! I can see!'”

It had been the first of three remarkable healings that night. “Then the same voice spoke to me again and said there was a man who was deaf in his left ear,” said Dr. Rice. “I saw what happened the first time and decided to try it again.” Announcing that he was told there was a man with the ear problem, another hand went into the air and a man stepped forward. Rice asked him if he too believed he could be healed — getting the same affirmative answer — and repeated the prayer, touching the man on the forehead. “Boom. He was lying on the floor. Here this guy is laying on the floor and he got up a few minutes later and he had his hearing.”

Lastly was a woman with hands and knuckles gnarled with arthritis. “the Lord told me to have her stand there with hands raised where everyone could see her hands and to praise Him, and that’s what I told her to do. As she started to praise Him, we saw those hands just open up and those knots on her knuckles just dissolve before her eyes. That’s how my healing ministry was launched 37 years ago.”

But that was hardly the end of the story. In fact, it was just the beginning. He became a pastor — taking over a church with but three people. “I started finding everything I could in the Bible and preached healing, healing, healing, healing — and every time I preached, somebody got healed,” he said. “It wasn’t long before I was knocking walls out to accommodate the crowds.”

There had been more healings: first dozens, then hundreds, then allegedly thousands.

“I started operating in the gifts of the Spirit and didn’t even know there were gifts of the Spirit,” he said — recalling another case in which a man had terminal lung cancer and had only three weeks to live. Rice asserted that he was “told” these specific details without knowing the man, and the man confirmed them, explaining that he had to get special permission from the doctor to even be there — to be released from the hospital for the healing service!

“We went ahead and prayed for him and it felt like the Lord touched him,” said Rice. “As soon as it was over, he had to go back to the hospital. But three weeks later, he came to the church again to testify that the next morning, they had run some tests on him and could not find a trace of that cancer. It was gone.”

Rice said the Lord spoke to him again and told him the man was missing a rib. “I asked him why he was missing a rib, and he told me that when the doctors worked on him, they took the rib out because they had to take the lung out and put it back in. But the rib they couldn’t put back. We prayed for him again and he felt this tremendous burning going around his chest. He came back several weeks later with a set-up of before and after x-rays. God had put that rib back in that man’s chest.”

The claims were extraordinary — even by the standards of those in the healing ministry. We submit them for your discernment. But had not Jesus done such miracles and granted the power of the Holy Spirit for us to follow in His footsteps?

In all, Rice had started six different churches. He described himself as an independent charismatic preacher. In 1994 his first wife had died, and Rice, who by then was in the state of Washington, moved to Arizona to be near a son. There he eventually met a Catholic woman and remarried. The members of a new church he pastored resisted the fact that his wife was an “unsaved” Catholic, and Dr. Rice decided to leave the church and become a Catholic — “one of them.”

Second story

When we left off, we were speaking of Dr. Rob Rice, a Pentecostal minister who had converted to Catholicism. That had occurred five years ago this coming Easter. Before that, for 33 years, he had been a healing minister in non-denominational churches — a gifted man who had seen hundreds, even “thousands,” of miraculous healings.

When his first wife had died and he remarried, it had been to a Catholic woman, and this eventually led to his conversion — and a continuation of the remarkable events. Those at his Pentecostal church wouldn’t accept his wife, and so he had left and began exclusively attending Catholic Mass. About three months after resigning his church, he had begun feeling uncomfortable that he couldn’t receive Communion, and so he had begun his journey into Catholicism.

Still, Rice wasn’t convinced that Communion was really Christ’s actual Body and Blood. He had looked upon it as symbolic. At the same time, he had kept thinking of the biblical passage that we must eat His Body and drink His Blood. And also 1 Corinthians 11:23-33, where Jesus had said “this is My Body, this is My Blood.”

“The Lord began dealing with me that this occurs when the Catholic priest consecrates,” he had said. When he had asked why a Protestant minister couldn’t do the same, it had been given to him that only a priest can do so because a priest is in the apostolic line of succession. “It’s because a priest is in that succession that he has the authority to pray over the bread and wine,” said Dr. Rice. “When Martin Luther was excommunicated in 1520, that broke the apostolic line of succession. Every Protestant denomination is a split from a split from a split. And they all stem from Luther.”

That doesn’t mean God isn’t in the Protestant community, noted Rice (he had seen many miracles there himself; the Holy Spirit had been present), although he maintained that there was no way that Protestants could have Communion that was anything more than symbolic.

But getting back to his story: it had been after being a Catholic for about a year that Rice, a former truck driver and pastor of six churches, had happened to encounter exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. “Now what is this?” thought the former minister, who still possessed a few anti-Catholic biases — and still had his doubts about the real Presence.

But they were to be dispelled that day. “As I sat there looking at the Blessed Sacrament, all of a sudden the face of Christ had appeared to me in the center of the Blessed Sacrament,” he asserted. “I said, ‘All right, Lord, I get the picture!'”

Now — as a lay Catholic evangelist, when he and his wife conducted a healing service — the Blessed Sacrament was exposed and they draped a cloth around the base of the monstrance, hanging it over the front of the altar. “That cloth was to represent the hem of His garment,” said Dr. Rice, who traveled across America conducting parish missions. “We prayed a prayer of agreement with the person. It’s a simple prayer saying, ‘Father I agree with my sister in prayer. I ask You Lord to grant unto her the desires of her heart. Lord let Your healing virtue flow, in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,’ and I touched them on the cheeks and said, ‘Be healed, in Jesus’ Name.'”

Where his healing had occurred during Pentecostal services, now they occurred before the Blessed Sacrament.

Rice saw the Catholic Church as a “sleeping giant.” “The longer I’m Catholic and the more I study it, the more I become absolutely convinced that the Catholic Church is awesome,” said the former Protestant. “The Catholic Church always had been the apostolic church — and we ought to be acting like it. Signs and wonders and miracles and everything that took place in the Church 2,000 years ago should be happening today, because the Church hasn’t changed. In Matthew Chapter 10 He had called the apostles together and given them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out and heal all manner of sickness. In Mark 16 He says in My Name they shall cast out devils, speak with new tongues, take up serpents, they shall lay their hands upon the sick and they shall recover. In John 14:12: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth in Me the things that I do, he shall do also.’

“The Catholic Church is the apostolic Church. If people would understand what the Catholic Church really is, people would not be leaving the Church to look for greener pastures. When people leave the Catholic Church, they go to the Pentecostal or charismatic churches because they’re looking for something that they’re not receiving at home. They need to study their Bible and their Catechism. If they were to study that and discover what our faith is really about, they would not be looking for greener pastures. And if our Protestant brothers and sisters knew the truth about the Catholic Church, they would no longer be Protestants.”

“On the day of Pentecost,” he continued, “when the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the 120, there had not been one person there from the First Assembly of God. There had not been one there from Four Square Pentecostal Church of God. The ones who had been there were the founders of the Catholic Church.”

In the two years that he had been conducting Catholic healing, Dr. Rice had logged 39 testimonies of people who had cancers that were healed, four blind who allegedly had received their sight, and three who had come out of wheelchairs.

“I do everything I can now to lead people to the Eucharist for healing,” he said. “My main message is being healed through the Mass, because if Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist — which He is — and if Jesus is God — which He is — and if God can’t be separated from His power, which He can’t, then that same power that had been available 2,000 years ago, that had caused the blind to see and the deaf to hear and the lame to walk, that power that had cast out devils, cleansed the lepers, and raised the dead, that power that had spoken this entire universe into existence, is also present in the Holy Eucharist because Jesus is the Holy Eucharist.”

In fact, Dr. Rice asserted that on one occasion there had been an accident victim who was thought to have been dead for about an hour — declared so by the police, ambulance paramedics, and upon arrival at the emergency room — and “woke” after Dr. Rice’s had visited his body at the hospital, put his hands on the man, and rebuked the “spirit of death.”

He said many remained ill because they were wrongfully and unworthily taking the Eucharist. Other reasons included unforgiveness in the heart — or simply because a healing was not yet in God’s plan or timing. “I believe that God can heal anybody of anything,” he said. “Believe me, there is nothing that God can’t do.”

Dr. Rice related an incredible miracle that allegedly had occurred at St. Paul’s Church in Damascus, Maryland. “What happened was that the priest had asked my wife Anita if she would like to do the readings and me if I would like to serve the Precious Blood,” recounted the former pastor. “Well, when it had come time to serve, there were about twenty people left in the line, and there was this young boy, maybe 12 or 13 years old, who had come up to me. I went to serve him and there was probably an inch or an inch and a half of the Precious Blood still left in the cup, and this kid just chug-a-lugged it.

“I was looking at this empty cup, and I was mad. I said, ‘Lord, this isn’t right. Some of these people are going to want to receive you and they’re not going to be able to. Lord, could you see to it that everyone who wants to receive can?”

What had happened next we submit for your own discernment.

“I saw this woman starting to walk towards me and I looked up at her, looked back at the cup, and there was this sip of the Precious Blood at the bottom of the cup!” said Dr. Rice. “I went ahead and served her and saw another woman walking towards me. I looked back at the cup, and there was another sip at the bottom. That had happened seven times. Every person who had wanted to receive the Precious Blood had been able to receive it!”

At the cathedral in Venice, Florida, Dr. Rice said that the pastor had dropped a Host without knowing it, as he had been administering Communion to one of the servers. It had fallen out of the ciborium without his noticing it. “So when Anita and I had gone up to receive Communion, I leaned over to the priest and said, ‘Father, you dropped Jesus on the floor.’ He got this blank look on his face, just stunned, and I said, ‘May I have the privilege of rescuing Our Lord from the floor?’ and he said, ‘Yes, of course.’

“And so I went up to the sanctuary area, leaned over, and picked Jesus up off the floor, then went back down around the front of the altar and bowed before the altar and consumed the Eucharist. I went back to my seat and sat down and then knelt forward.

“When I had done so, a flood of the Presence of God had hit me like I have never felt in my life. Never had I felt His Presence like that time. I was bouncing off the walls for three hours. It was just awesome.” And this former Pentecostal knew why: “When we consume the Holy Eucharist,” he said, “we are consuming the God Who spoke this entire universe into existence.”

[Bookstore resources: Secrets of the Eucharist and Holy Mass]