First story

A non-denominational preacher who was a Protestant for 33 years and has now converted to Catholicism says he has experienced Eucharistic miracles in addition to stunningly miraculous healings.

The former pastor, Dr. Bob Rice of Santa Fe, New Mexico, first began 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 says.

The remarkable thing is 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 says, “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 says. But it did indeed — by the very name he was given — and after explaining what had happened to him, Rice stayed for the service that night. He 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 says. “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,” recounts 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 was 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,” says 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 laying 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 says. “It wasn’t long before I was knocking walls out to accommodate the crowds.”

There were 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 says — recalling another case in which a man had terminal lung cancer and had only three weeks to live. Rice asserts 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,” says 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 says 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 are extraordinary — even by the standards of those in the healing ministry. We submit them for your discernment. But did not Jesus do such miracles and grant the power of the Holy Spirit for us to follow in His footsteps?

In all, Rice started six different churches. He described himself as an independent charismatic preacher. In 1994 his first wife died, and Rice, who by now 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.”

[to be continued next Sunday]