William Dillon wears green shorts that reveal legs swollen by diabetes. His calves, ankles and feet are wrapped in white gauze.
His blistered legs “burn like mad,” says Dillon, 67, of Rolling Meadows. Eighteen months ago, he was hospitalized for his diabetes for eight weeks.
Dillon has come here tonight to be healed.
The chairs are set nine rows deep, with a center aisle, and on each rests literature. One flier states: “Expect A Miracle! Experience the healing touch of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ, with Barbara O’Malley.”
In a folder with song lyrics, there’s also this: “Both Barbara O’Malley and MIQ (Mary Immaculate Queen) Center specifically disclaim any responsibility, promise or guarantee . . .”
In the large parking lot of Villa Olivia Country Club in Bartlett, golfers straggle in under the day’s last light. Inside, people in pain filter into the Rose Room for a touch of the divine.
Many already claim knowledge that God works through O’Malley, 56, a lifelong Roman Catholic. Others are less sure.
“I really don’t know,” says Bonnie Becker, 67, of Elgin. “I hope so.”
Bill Kiszonas, 79, of Orland Park wants his “bum knees” healed tonight but won’t be disappointed if they aren’t. He has attended many of O’Malley’s services and says they are more than just healing.
“You might say you get the word of God. That is satisfying to me,” he says.
His wife went to O’Malley for healing from skin cancer. Some five years later she died of the disease. “She never got the complete healing,” Kiszonas says without bitterness.
Healing is part of the Christian tradition, according to Rev. Ed Tomasiewicz, an assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University. “Jesus was a healer,” he says, adding that one-fifth of the Gospels consists of healing stories.
A walk through a bookstore reveals a culture that now links healing with faith, he says. Authors from physicians to physicists no longer proclaim science as master. Instead, he says, the mind and body are viewed as inseparable. One can’t be healed without healing the other.
“This world is open to things that are beyond us — transcendent values, the belief that God is active and that the Divine is present in our lives. It is not a closed system,” he says. “That is a faith statement.”
About 100 people have come to Villa Olivia, not necessarily to test their faith but to practice it. Most are over 60, but there’s a smattering of children brought by parents.
At the front, behind the lectern, is a small stage with a long table covered by white and red cloths. On the table rest a picture of Jesus, with a red heart showing through his white gown, and a statue of the Virgin Mary.
At the other end of the room are wood-framed paintings of Jesus and Mary. Yours for $20 to $35.
At 7:50 p.m., 20 minutes late, the service begins with testimony from Barbara Temborius, 40, a volunteer who oversees the Mary Immaculate Queen Healing Ministry, O’Malley’s non-profit organization.
Temborius, a resident of Lombard, says that 16 years ago, God — working through O’Malley — healed her of clinical depression.
Temborius reads three recent letters from people who say they were similarly healed: a New York woman cured of a “degenerative foot disorder”; another who, at the same New York service, was healed of carpal tunnel syndrome; and an Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, couple healed of assorted ailments.
O’Malley, also of Lombard, generally travels out of the area one weekend a month. She typically is invited by religious organizations, particularly Roman Catholic groups. She holds a faith healing service at Villa Olivia five times a year, with no fixed date.
About one-third of those attending lift a hand when Temborius asks how many are at their first O’Malley healing service.
She hands the microphone to Mike Gaskin, 37, of Chicago, who says O’Malley healed him of alcoholism two years ago.
Rose Walters, 61, of Bartlett says that in 1985 O’Malley healed a “crack in my neck.” A doctor, she says, had told her the bone would have to be fused.
Randy Lounds, 44, of Streamwood says he was healed of severe headaches he had had for a decade. “Don’t think with your head while you are here,” he tells the audience. “Think with your heart.”
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At 8:50 p.m., before O’Malley has lifted a hand in healing, wicker collection baskets are passed. She says later that donations totaled “several hundred dollars.” Contributions at healing sessions form her major source of income.
She takes the microphone from the security of the lectern and paces a 15-foot-square of parquet floor. She is small, not quite 5 feet, and trim, with dark chestnut hair. She wears a navy jacket and a skirt the color of her blue eyes.
A simple ring with a ruby heart is on her wedding-band finger. After her husband, Eamon, died in 1984, she “consecrated” her life to the Lord, she says. She vowed during a special religious ceremony never to remarry and to live celibately.
She embarks on what will be a 50-minute talk by telling the biblical story of the woman who sought healing by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment.
“We come tonight to touch the hem of the cloak,” she says. Those who are healed, she says, must tell others so God will be glorified.
God cured her of alcoholism in 1966, she says. To try to stop drinking, she took Antabuse, a drug that causes violent illness when mixed with alcohol. Still, she went to a posh party hosted by her husband’s boss and while there drank, became ill, passed out and was rushed to a hospital.
She soon entered an addiction clinic in North Dakota. The program typically was four weeks but O’Malley’s denial had kept her there for 10 when, during a lecture, she felt an “overpowering sense of joy, peace and clarity,” she says.
This time, she didn’t have to pray for sobriety. God simply gave it to her.
“God is so merciful and so loving,” she tells her audience.
Despite God’s infinite love, she says, America is sick, wounded and crippled by violence, “porno and the crap on television.”
“We are so abused and beaten up we don’t even feel the woundedness anymore,” she says. “How many people can’t even go to sleep because of the abuse they take from the media?”
Her rhetorical questions receive no response. In fact, those in the audience, some with nearby crutches, make little eye contact. They are like sick people in the doctor’s waiting room.
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What we seek and what we need is God, O’Malley says. At the Last Supper, she says, Jesus told the disciples, “I will be with you always. I won’t leave you orphaned.”
O’Malley, abandoned by her parents, has long found comfort in God. At age 8, her folks placed her and two siblings in Maryville Academy, a Des Plaines home for children. Her family had dissolved after the death of a younger sister. The girl was severely burned and for a year received painful skin grafts before dying at age 4. Her parents never recovered.
As a girl, O’Malley says, she wept when they failed to visit her at Maryville.
“I found God in my loneliness there,” she says.
This night, she trumpets God’s promise: “I will be there. You will never, never, never be alone.”
O’Malley does a jig and shouts, “Praise God for the fanatics!”
Her audience comes alive.
– – –
God is healing people, O’Malley declares to the assembled. Specifically: “The Lord is healing all the people with bone problems . . . back problems, disks, joints. If you sense a warmth, a heat, a tingling sensation. The Lord is healing very painful situations of the back — scoliosis.”
She entreats those who feel the warmth and tingling to step forward. An assistant rolls back the lectern.
“C’mon, the Lord is healing people!” she says.
She motions for someone — anyone — to come to her. “Don’t be afraid,” she says.
Billie Metz, 42, of Hanover Park rises from her front-row seat.
Within seconds, another woman steps to the front. Volunteer “catch aides” — their term — glide behind them.
“The Lord’s power is infinite,” O’Malley says. “Please come forward if you sense his touch within you.”
The third arrival has “neck problems.” O’Malley places her right hand on the woman’s forehead.
“Heal! Be free! Praise to Jesus!” The woman falls into the arms of a volunteer.
“Receive the holy spirit and be free from back pain!” Another woman drops. Eventually, all three lie peacefully on the floor.
Next: God is healing “people with liver problems, with lung problems, breathing problems, allergies, asthma.”
A woman has a “lung problem.” A man stands “in proxy” for the healing of a friend with cystic fibrosis.
O’Malley touches them and their knees buckle. They lie in repose for varying durations before returning to their seats.
Next: “The Lord is healing people of discouragement, despair, depression. The Lord is freeing people of guilt, feelings of remorse.”
As O’Malley moves from person to person, the room has a constant background buzz, a looping mantra. She and others recite: “We praise you Jesus! We thank you Jesus! We worship you Jesus! We love you Jesus!”
O’Malley then announces she will heal row by row.
They come to her. She comforts them, prays for them. Whispers are exchanged. She touches their foreheads. They fall like leaves to the ground.
– – –
By 11 p.m. it’s like a battlefield. Twelve people lie on the floor. Volunteers tread carefully. O’Malley sits in the front row.
O’Malley was given the gift in 1981, she says. She was at a novena — nine days of prayer — at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Lombard when a nun prayed for her and said: “I have a new mission for you now with your gift of healing.” O’Malley believes the nun was the messenger of the Virgin Mary.
At the moment of physical contact, she says, “I feel the love of God for them, in them, and his desire to help them, free them and bless them.”
Sometimes God chooses not to heal, she says. “While God does heal cancer and terminal illness, he can also heal (by preparing) them for the transition into everlasting life,” she says.
And why would God pick Barbara O’Malley for this gift?
“How would I know?” she says matter of factly.
– – –
Back in her seat, Billie Metz, the first person to step forward, says the pain between her shoulder blades, which she has had for years, has vanished.
When O’Malley touched her, “I felt very lightweight,” she says. “I felt like I was a feather and I could float back. You just feel very relaxed and trusting.”
But her lower back pain, caused by a degenerated disk, remains. “I was thinking of going back up,” she confides. “But I don’t want to press my luck.”
Julie Monterrubio, in her 50s, of St. Charles says electromagnetic forces were at work tonight as she was healed of scoliosis, curvature of the spine.
“I believe in metaphysical healing because I believe really strongly that we live in an electromagnetic universe,” she says. “There is a universal force that we call God, Christ, whatever you want to call it. I know if I open myself up I will be healed.”
Joyce Smith, 36, of Elmhurst says she was healed tonight of upper-back pain. But what was truly miraculous, she says, was her healing by O’Malley earlier this year. A fractured, arthritic vertebra in her lower back had made life agonizing, she says. “I could not lie in bed without being in pain,” she says.
She went to O’Malley for the first time in April, she says, and was healed. She remains pain-free without medication.
“I don’t know if there are any miracles,” says Becker, who did not seek one tonight. “But she is doing good, and that is worth a lot in this world.”
Choked with emotion, Dillon says something powerful happened to him.
“All my life, I have been taught that all the angels were in heaven,” he says. “But there’s one right there. That’s my opinion. I have never had anybody put their hand on my forehead and felt it right to my toes. It was like a current going through me.”
He now knows he will be healed of his diabetes, he says. “It’s not going to go away overnight, but it is going to go away. I know it will.”
At 11:20 p.m., about half the audience remains. They gather around O’Malley, who makes a final request: “How about a big hand for the Lord and a big hand for his mother?”
Mother and son are applauded, and the people gradually filter out into a parking lot that, for most, doesn’t seem quite as big as it did four hours ago.
