How to Pray for Healing: Asking God to Heal You and Others

1. Does God Still Heal Today?

Yes, God still heals today. The Catholic Church teaches that Christ, the physician of souls and bodies, keeps on healing through his Church, and that the Holy Spirit "gives to some a special charism of healing so as to make manifest the power of the grace of the risen Lord" (CCC 1508). The same Lord who touched lepers in Galilee is alive, and he hears you tonight.

The evidence runs through two thousand years. Peter took a man lame from birth by the hand at the Beautiful Gate, and the man stood up and walked (Acts 3:1-10). Paul laid his hands on the father of Publius on Malta and he recovered (Acts 28:8). The Church still requires medically verified miracles in most causes for beatification and canonisation, and the Lourdes Medical Bureau has examined reported cures for well over a century. God has never stopped. So stop wondering whether he still heals, and start asking him.

He heals through surgeons and antibiotics too, and through the sacrament of the sick, and through the healing of memories and marriages. Ask for all of it. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Bring your body and your soul to Christ now.

2. How Did Jesus Heal in the Gospels?

Jesus healed constantly, personally and with compassion. Matthew sums up his ministry in Galilee as "teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people" (Matthew 4:23). Read the accounts slowly and a pattern emerges that teaches you how to pray.

He invites you to ask plainly

Blind Bartimaeus shouted until the crowd told him to be quiet, and then he shouted louder. Jesus stopped and asked him, "What do you want me to do for you?" (Mark 10:51). Jesus already knew. He wanted the man to say it. So say it. Name the diagnosis, the pain, the fear, and ask.

He heals through the faith of friends

Four men carried a paralysed friend to the house where Jesus was teaching, dug through the roof, and lowered him down. "And when Jesus saw their faith," Mark writes, he spoke to the paralytic (Mark 2:5). The man's own faith is never mentioned. If you are too sick or too tired to pray, let others carry you.

He heals weak faith

A father brought his convulsing son and cried out, "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). Jesus healed the boy anyway. Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to begin (Matthew 17:20). Honest, struggling faith is welcome.

He heals in stages and from a distance

At Bethsaida Jesus laid hands on a blind man twice; after the first prayer the man saw people "like trees, walking," and after the second he saw clearly (Mark 8:22-25). A Roman centurion asked him only to say the word, and his servant was healed at that hour without Jesus entering the house (Matthew 8:5-13). Healing can be gradual, and prayer works across any distance.

He heals the whole person

Jesus forgave the paralytic's sins before he told him to walk (Mark 2:5-12). He touched the leper whom everyone else avoided (Mark 1:40-42). He called the woman who touched his garment "Daughter" and sent her away in peace (Mark 5:25-34). He sent ten healed lepers to show themselves to the priests (Luke 17:14). Christ heals bodies, and he also restores dignity, community and friendship with God.

3. What Does the Bible Promise About Healing?

The Bible promises that God is a healer, commands the Church to pray for the sick, and promises that the prayer of faith is powerful. God named himself at Marah: "I am the LORD, your healer" (Exodus 15:26). The psalmist blesses the Lord "who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases" (Psalm 103:3).

James 5:14-16 is the Church's charter for praying over the sick. The "elders" are the presbyteroi, the word from which "priest" comes, and the Catholic Church reads this passage as the scriptural root of the Anointing of the Sick (CCC 1510). Verse 16 widens the call to every believer: confess, pray for one another, and expect God to act.

Mark 16:17-18 records Jesus promising that signs will accompany those who believe, among them that "they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover." This passage sits in the longer ending of Mark (16:9-20), which is missing from two of the oldest complete Greek manuscripts, and many scholars think it was added early in the Church's history. The Catholic Church receives it as inspired, canonical Scripture all the same, and the laying on of hands for the sick is attested elsewhere in the New Testament (Luke 4:40; Acts 28:8).

Isaiah 53:5 says of the Suffering Servant, "with his wounds we are healed." Matthew applies the prophecy directly to Jesus' healing ministry: he healed all who were sick "to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: 'He took our illnesses and bore our diseases'" (Matthew 8:16-17). Peter applies it to sin and salvation: "By his wounds you have been healed" (1 Peter 2:24). Section 6 explains how Christians weigh the two readings.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10 is the necessary counterweight. Paul begged the Lord three times to remove a "thorn in the flesh," and the answer came: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Paul also left his co-worker Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20) and told Timothy to take a little wine for his frequent ailments (1 Timothy 5:23). The apostle who saw extraordinary healings (Acts 19:11-12) knew that God sometimes says wait, and sometimes says no. Pray with all of these passages open in front of you.

4. The Anointing of the Sick

The Anointing of the Sick is the sacrament Christ gave his Church for the seriously ill, and it is the first place a Catholic should go for healing. The Catechism opens its teaching with the words of Vatican II: "By the sacred anointing of the sick and the prayer of the priests the whole Church commends those who are ill to the suffering and glorified Lord, that he may raise them up and save them" (CCC 1499). The Church "believes and confesses that among the seven sacraments there is one especially intended to strengthen those being tried by illness" (CCC 1511).

Who should receive it, and when

Any Catholic who has reached the use of reason and begins to be in danger of death from sickness or old age should receive it, and the right time comes well before the final hours (CCC 1514). It is fitting before a serious operation, for the elderly as frailty grows, and it can be repeated if the illness worsens or a new serious illness comes (CCC 1515). Only priests and bishops can give it (CCC 1516). Too many families wait until a loved one is unconscious. Call the parish this week.

What happens

The priest lays his hands on the sick person in silence, prays, and anoints the forehead and hands with blessed oil, saying: "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up" (CCC 1513). Where possible it is joined with confession and Holy Communion. For the dying, Communion received as Viaticum is food for the final journey (CCC 1524).

What it does

The Catechism names its effects. Its first grace is strengthening, peace and courage to face serious illness or the frailty of age, and it is meant to lead the sick person to healing of the soul, and of the body too if that is God's will (CCC 1520). It forgives sins if the person could not make a confession (James 5:15; CCC 1520). It unites the sick person to the Passion of Christ (CCC 1521), it is a gift to the whole Church (CCC 1522), and it prepares the soul for its passage to eternal life (CCC 1523). People have recovered after this sacrament. People have also received it and died in great peace. Both are answered prayers. Ask for it.

5. What Is the Charism of Healing?

The charism of healing is a gift of the Holy Spirit, given to some believers for the good of others, through which God heals people in answer to their prayer. Paul lists "gifts of healing" among the manifestations of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:9), and the plural suggests many kinds of healing given in many ways. He also asks, "Do all possess gifts of healing?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), and the expected answer is no. The Spirit gives as he wills (1 Corinthians 12:11).

The Catechism affirms the gift and immediately adds its limit: "The Holy Spirit gives to some a special charism of healing so as to make manifest the power of the grace of the risen Lord. But even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses" (CCC 1508). It then points to Paul's thorn. Hold both halves of that paragraph and you will avoid the two great errors: never asking, and promising what God has not promised.

The charism is alive in the Church today, especially through the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and its prayer groups, where teams pray over the sick with the laying on of hands. In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an Instruction on Prayers for Healing. It welcomes prayer for healing, distinguishes liturgical healing services (which follow the liturgical books and the bishop's direction) from non-liturgical prayer meetings, and warns against hysteria, artificiality, theatricality and sensationalism. That is wise counsel for any group. For an overview of every gift Paul lists, see our hub on the spiritual gifts and how to discern yours.

6. Is Healing in the Atonement?

"Healing in the atonement" is the teaching, held by many Pentecostal and Holiness Christians, that Christ's death on the cross provides for bodily healing as well as forgiveness of sins, so that healing is available to every believer now. Catholics agree that every healing flows from the cross, and they teach that complete bodily healing arrives at the resurrection of the body.

The Pentecostal position, stated fairly

The Assemblies of God, one of the largest Pentecostal fellowships, puts it in its Statement of Fundamental Truths: "Deliverance from sickness is provided for in the atonement, and is the privilege of all believers," citing Isaiah 53:4-5, Matthew 8:16-17 and James 5:14-16. The idea runs back through the nineteenth-century Holiness movement. A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, preached a "fourfold gospel" of Christ as Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King, and Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Church preaches Jesus as Saviour, Baptiser, Healer and Coming King. Our guide to Pentecostal beliefs and churches covers the wider tradition.

A later strand, the Word of Faith movement, pushed the idea further: if healing is already purchased, then a believer who confesses it with enough faith must receive it, and continuing symptoms are to be denied. Many Pentecostal scholars and pastors reject that conclusion, and so does the Catholic Church. Its link with promised wealth is covered in our critique of the prosperity gospel.

The Catholic answer

The cross won everything: forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit, and the resurrection of the body. Christ's healings in the Gospels are signs of that victory breaking into the present, and the Church prays for them confidently. The full harvest comes later. Paul says the body "is sown in weakness; it is raised in power" (1 Corinthians 15:43), and the day is coming when God "will wipe away every tear," and "death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain" (Revelation 21:4). Until then, Christians pray for healing with faith, receive it with thanksgiving when it comes, and carry their crosses with Christ when it does not. That is the full gospel, and it never puts the blame on the sick.

7. Medicine Is God's Gift: Keep Seeing Your Doctor

Medicine is one of the ways God heals, so keep seeing your doctor and keep taking your medicine while you pray. Scripture says this outright. The Book of Sirach, part of the Catholic Old Testament, gives a whole passage to it:

Sirach 38:1-15 then says that physicians too pray to the Lord for success in diagnosis and healing. Prayer and medicine stand side by side in that chapter, and they belong side by side in your life. When King Hezekiah was dying, God promised him fifteen more years through Isaiah, and Isaiah then told them to apply a cake of figs to his boil (2 Kings 20:1-7). The Good Samaritan poured oil and wine on the wounded man's injuries (Luke 10:34). Luke, who wrote a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, was "the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14).

8. Lourdes and How the Church Verifies a Healing

The Catholic Church verifies reported healings with real medical rigour, and Lourdes is the clearest example. After Our Lady appeared to St Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, pilgrims began reporting cures at the grotto. A medical bureau was set up at the shrine in the 1880s to examine them, and today an international committee of doctors reviews the strongest cases before any bishop considers declaring a miracle.

Thousands of cures have been reported at Lourdes, and the Church has recognised only around seventy as miraculous. The standards go back to criteria set out in the eighteenth century by Prospero Lambertini, who became Pope Benedict XIV: the illness must be serious and properly diagnosed, the cure must be sudden, complete and lasting, and no treatment can account for it. Doctors of any faith or none take part. That caution should strengthen your faith. When the Church says a cure is beyond medical explanation, the claim has survived hard questioning. Our guide to miracles and how the Church verifies them covers the process in detail.

Remember one more fact about Lourdes. Bernadette herself was never cured. She suffered years of illness, including tuberculosis of the bone, and died at Nevers in 1879 at the age of thirty-five. The saint through whom millions have come to pray for healing carried her own sickness to the end with great faith. St John Paul II made 11 February, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, the World Day of the Sick.

9. How to Pray for Your Own Healing, Step by Step

To pray for your own healing, combine medical care, the sacraments, honest specific prayer, the prayers of others and perseverance. Do these steps today, then keep doing them.

1. See your doctor and follow the treatment. Get a diagnosis, take your medicine, and keep your appointments. Pray for your doctors by name.
2. Go to confession. James joins healing with confession (James 5:16), and Jesus forgave the paralytic before he healed him (Mark 2:5). Unconfessed sin weighs on body and soul. Clear it. See our guide on how to go to confession.
3. Ask for the Anointing of the Sick if the illness is serious, before surgery, or as age makes you frail. Call your parish office and ask for a priest.
4. Receive the Eucharist as often as you can. Before Communion the Church prays with the centurion, "only say the word and my soul shall be healed." Mean it.
5. Ask plainly and specifically. Tell Jesus exactly what you want, as Bartimaeus did (Mark 10:51). Lay your hand where it hurts if that helps you pray.
6. Pray the Scriptures. Pray Psalm 103, Isaiah 53:4-5 and the healing stories of Mark's Gospel aloud. Put yourself in the crowd and let Jesus look at you.
7. Forgive. Bitterness poisons. Jesus ties our forgiveness to forgiving others (Matthew 6:14-15). Name the person and release them to God.
8. Ask others to pray. Tell your parish, your family, a prayer group. "Pray for one another, that you may be healed" (James 5:16).
9. Ask the saints to intercede. Begin a novena (section 10 explains how).
10. Persevere and give thanks. Jesus told the parable of the persistent widow so that we would "always pray and not lose heart" (Luke 18:1). Keep a notebook of what you asked and what changed, and thank God for every mercy, large or small.

If words fail you on the hard nights, let someone pray aloud with you. Get Pro for $49 once and play its audio-guided prayers for healing at the bedside, with lifetime access and a 30-day money-back guarantee. No subscription, no renewal, so the price never creeps up while you are ill. You can also write a personal prayer with our free prayer generator.

10. How to Pray for Someone Else's Healing

To pray for someone else's healing, ask their permission, pray simply and briefly in Jesus' name, keep any touch respectful, and leave the result to God without pressure. Here is how Catholics do it, from a hospital bedside to a charismatic prayer team.

Laying on of hands in charismatic practice

1. Ask first. "May I pray for you? May I put a hand on your shoulder?" Never touch anyone without consent.
2. Pray in twos or threes. Teams of two or more protect everyone. Where possible, women pray with women and men with men, or with others present.
3. Keep touch appropriate. A hand on the shoulder, the hand or the head is enough. Never touch private areas, and never push.
4. Ask what they want prayer for. Listen. Then pray short, clear prayers: "Lord Jesus, in your name we ask you to heal this pain. Come, Holy Spirit."
5. Check and pray again. Ask gently what they notice. Jesus prayed twice for the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-25). Then pray again if they wish.
6. Bless and release. Thank God, bless the person, and encourage them to keep praying, keep receiving the sacraments, and keep seeing their doctor.

Never announce that someone is healed, never tell them to stop medicine, and never suggest their faith was too weak. Lay people should not imitate the sacrament's anointing with oil; that belongs to the priest. Parents pray over their own children often; when praying for another family's child, a parent stays present.

The intercession of the saints

Catholics ask the saints to pray for the sick just as they ask friends to. Ask Our Lady of Lourdes, "health of the sick." Ask St Raphael the Archangel, whose name means "God heals" and who brought healing to Tobit (Tobit 12:14-15). Ask St Luke the physician, Sts Cosmas and Damian, St Peregrine, patron of cancer patients, St Padre Pio, who spent his life among the sick and founded a hospital, and St Jude for desperate cases. Our patron saint finder can help you choose.

Novenas

A novena is nine days of prayer for one intention, modelled on the apostles and Mary praying together between the Ascension and Pentecost (Acts 1:14). Pick one: the Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes runs from 2 to 10 February before her feast, but you may pray it any time. Pray the same prayer each day for nine days, add a decade of the Rosary, ask your parish to have a Mass offered for the sick person, and ask the priest to bring them Communion and the Anointing of the Sick. Many families never ask. Call today.

Pray with others who will keep praying when you are worn out. Join the Pro circle for $49 once, a community of believers who pray together, with audio-guided prayers for healing and lifetime access. Will you stick with it? It costs nothing more after day one, and the 30-day money-back guarantee covers you if it is not for you.

11. Why Am I Not Healed?

If you have prayed and you are not healed, it is not because your faith was too small, and God has not abandoned you. Let that sink in before anything else. A lack of healing does not mean a lack of faith, and anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong.

Look at the faithful who stayed sick. Paul, who raised the dead, asked three times for relief and received grace instead (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). Timothy had frequent ailments (1 Timothy 5:23). Trophimus was left behind ill (2 Timothy 4:20). Epaphroditus nearly died (Philippians 2:25-27). Bernadette of Lourdes died young of illness. The Catechism says it plainly: "even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses" (CCC 1508). When the disciples asked who had sinned so that a man was born blind, Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents" (John 9:3).

Some people point to Nazareth, where Jesus "could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them" because of their unbelief (Mark 6:5-6). Read it closely. Jesus still healed the sick who came to him there. The unbelief belonged to a town that refused to come at all. You came. You are asking. That is faith.

What God may be doing

Catholic faith offers something the faith-healing promise cannot: meaning in the suffering itself. Paul wrote, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church" (Colossians 1:24). The Catechism says that through the Anointing of the Sick, suffering "acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus" (CCC 1521). Your pain, offered to Christ, can bring grace to people you will never meet. That is redemptive suffering, and it makes a sickroom a place of real power. Our guide on suffering and the problem of pain goes deeper.

Healing also comes in more than one form. Many people receive peace, reconciliation, a healed relationship or freedom from fear long before, or instead of, a cure. And every believer who dies in Christ receives the final healing: a risen body that will never sicken again (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). So keep praying. God's silence today is never his last word.

12. Faith-Healing Abuses and How to Spot Them

Faith-healing abuses are real, and they hurt sick and desperate people. Learn the warning signs and walk away from any ministry that shows them.

• Money for healing. Jesus told the Twelve, "You received without paying; give without pay" (Matthew 10:8). Peter rebuked Simon the magician for trying to buy the Spirit's power (Acts 8:18-24). Any minister who sells blessed oil, prayer cloths or "seed offerings" as the price of a cure is trading on your pain.
• Pressure to stop treatment. Any minister who tells you to stop medicine, skip chemotherapy, or throw away an inhaler to "prove your faith" is giving advice that has cost lives. Children have died of treatable illnesses when adults refused medical care on religious grounds. Keep your treatment.
• Blaming the sick. "You lack faith," "you have hidden sin," "you are not claiming it." Christ never sent a sick person away with an accusation. Reject this teaching.
• Staged or unverified healings. Some televangelists have been caught faking "words of knowledge." The healing evangelist Peter Popoff was exposed in 1986 for receiving information about audience members through a hidden earpiece; see our profile of Peter Popoff. Ask whether claimed cures are ever medically checked.
• No accountability. Healthy Catholic healing ministry works under the bishop and inside the Church's sacramental life. Answering to no one is a red flag. Our guides on false prophets and the prosperity gospel explain the wider pattern.
• Spectacle and pressure. Crowds urged to shout, people pushed over or pulled from wheelchairs on stage, and promises of guaranteed results. The 2000 Vatican instruction on healing prayer warns against exactly this kind of theatricality and sensationalism.

Ordinary Catholic healing prayer looks different: quiet, free, sacramental, patient, joined to medical care, and kind to those who are not healed.

13. Where to Get Help Today

Get help today from three places at once: your doctor, your parish, and people who will pray with you. Do not delay any of them.

Then pray, and keep praying. The Lord who asked Bartimaeus "What do you want me to do for you?" is asking you the same question today. Answer him.