“God, Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the
things I can,
and the wisdom to know the
difference.”
- Serenity
Prayer
Fr. Joe praying over Bill Wilson’s
grave, co-founder of
AA, (Alcoholics Anonymous) in Dorset, VT
Rev. Joseph F. Whalen, M.S.
Fr. Joseph Whalen, M.S. was born in Quincy,
Massachusetts and received his call to the priesthood late in life. He entered
Pope John XXlll Seminary, a seminary for delayed vocations, and completed four
years of advanced graduate studies. On September 9, 1989, at the age of 66, he
was ordained a Roman Catholic priest by Bishop Alfred Hughes and became a
La Salette Missionary. His dramatic life
story is a story of “how God writes straight with crooked
lines!” With the
charism of healing,his ministries are many and he is a champion of the sick, the
elderly, drug addicts, alcoholics, families, and those in need. The charism of
the La Salette’s is Reconciliation … of compassion and mercy to the repentant;he
is noted for his ability to hear confessions hour upon hour. He gives us a
tremendous story of Almighty God’s love, grace and mercy in the circumstances of
his own life; he is also the founder of the renowned Archangel St. Raphael Holy
Healing Ministry. Hundreds of spiritual conversions and physical healings have
been the fruits of this powerful ministry. Fr. Whalen takes no credit, and
always stresses he is only a humble instrument of God, only Jesus Christ is the
Divine Physician and Healer. Father’s message is to realize that It’s Never Too Late to
Live. He was the oldest of seven boys. All predeceased him by the
age of 70. He presided over all their funerals. Fr. Whalen conducts many healing
services every year and his St. Raphael Healing Ministry is international. He is
so grateful to Almighty God for transforming his life into His humble servant.
He says, “there are not enough words in any language to praise and thank Him for
the many gifts He has bestowed upon me. He lifted me out of the darkness and
brought me into His light, where I now have the privilege of serving Him as one
of His Roman Catholic priests.” Fr. Whalen has spent his entire priesthood witnessing
Christ’s healing presence and helping countless people to find hope in the midst
of life’s many challenges.
Once An Alcoholic, Now A Late
Vocation, Priest Sees Miracles With Archangel
by Michael H.
Brown
Ten years ago my wife and I were in Medjugorje and heard an
extraordinary sermon by a luminous, white-bearded, almost St. Nicholas-like
priest who was with a group from Chicago and was up there in
the pulpit telling a riveting story. It was about a man who had risen from the
despair of alcoholism to become a priest — at the age of 66! It was a story
about a fantastically successful late vocation.
At the end of the sermon,
this priest, this homilist, shocked everyone by explaining that he was
the man he was talking about, the alcoholic. He was the one who had risen from
the pits. He was the late vocation. We didn’t get his name at the time — weren’t
even sure exactly what city he was from — but the homily was
unforgettable.
Months later, back in New York
State, we were trying to find a priest to bless the apartment in which we were
living when we first married. It was awkward. It was a new city, and we didn’t know any priests to
approach. These days, it is an odd request. Some priests have not even been
trained to do so. And we really wanted that. We had even asked folks to help us
find the right priest but still had no luck when the phone rang one day, the
feast of Corpus
Christi. It was a
priest from Connecticut
who identified himself as Father Joseph Whalen. I had never heard of him before.
He said that someone at my publisher’s told him to call. They knew I was doing
research on angels and he was sort of an expert on the Archangel
Raphael.
That was his ministry, he
told me; he distributed specially anointed healing oil and St. Raphael cards
that many claimed caused miraculous effects.
He was going to be in the
area that day, he told me. Would I mind if he stopped in?
By all means, I said. But first I
had to go to Mass. It was a feast
day.
Don’t bother, he told me; he
would say Mass in our apartment. He would bless it. Finally we had a priest to
anoint our apartment!
Later that day, when Father
Whalen and two companions arrived, I opened the door only to find that he
was the same priest we had seen at Medjugorje —
the one who had been with the pilgrim group and had given that tremendous
homily!
Out of the 27,000 active
parish priests in the United States, and more than 160 in our own little
diocese, here he was at our door.
As I was soon to learn, it
was only the beginning of extraordinary events that regularly occur around him.
His story? Father Whalen was born July 14, 1923, in Quincy, Massachusetts, the
oldest of seven boys. His uncle was a bishop who wanted him to be a priest. He
wanted nothing to do with it. As a teenager he worked as a clam-digger — and
started drinking whiskey with the men. After graduating from high school, he
served in the Navy on a submarine chaser, hunting German subs. And drinking
more. By this time he was developing shakes and even blackouts. “Many nights I
staggered back on board the ship with my clothes ripped or a shoe missing,” he
recounts. “Countless nights in nameless ports around the world, I woke up in
filthy, alcohol-stained clothes — too drunk to care where or how I slept.”
You get the point.
He had turned into an
alcoholic at a young age and it grew. After a year in the maritime service,
Whalen was hired by the New England Telephone Company as a office equipment
installer. By this time he was also married to a woman named Frances and they
had children. Over the next 32 years he worked his way up to second-level
management.
But there was constantly
the alcohol, and it
would end his marriage. “Frances was always running interference and apologizing
for my stinking behavior,” he now recalls of his former wife, who died a while
back. “I would slur my words and stagger around yelling at everyone who crossed
my path. My obnoxious behavior sent everyone into hiding.”
Finally Frances dragged
Whalen into court, where their marriage ended in a bitter
divorce.
“I was loaded with guilt and
remorse for my lifestyle and for my terrible behavior toward my wife and
children. My soul was so stained, my actions so obnoxious, that I prayed to get
cancer and die.”
Desperate for help, Whalen
went to a Franciscan shrine to see a priest named Father Henry Lawler, who took
him to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The day he met Father Lawler was
the last day that Joe Whalen had a drink.
The priest also heard the
future priest’s Confession (his first in 15 years) and told him to go to church
and speak to Jesus.
“I did,” remembers Father
Whalen. “I fell on my knees and surrendered to Him, as
best I could. That’s when I started to go back to
church.”
And that’s when things began
to happen. Whalen, not yet a priest, became fascinated by angels, developing a
special devotion to Raphael and the Book of Tobit. He read the Bible cover to
cover. He read Thomas Aquinas. Along the way, he met a mystical, cloistered nun
named Sister Mary Michael of the Precious Blood Monastery in Manchester, New
Hampshire.
“At our first meeting,
sister looked deeply into my glazed, alcoholic eyes and said softly, ‘Joseph,
I
see you as a priest.’
see you as a priest.’
Tears began to stream down my face.
‘What do you mean? You must be kidding!’ I was bawling my eyes out as I
remembered the uncle who once spoke to me about becoming a priest.” Sister Mary
Michael said she could see Jesus pardoning Whalen’s sins and opening the skies
to let his mother, who always wanted one of her sons to be a priest, peeking
down at his ordination. He knew then that he had a calling.
All he could think of was how
unworthy he was. But she kept saying, “Don’t talk like that,” and shortly after,
in 1983, Whalen began receiving visions. “After prayers, with my eyes closed but
before going to sleep, I would first see pinpoints of light, then whole fields
of brilliant bluish light, pulsating like a kaleidoscope. Then the visions would
disappear. The visions continued every night for seven months. Sometimes I would
see Jesus suspended from the Cross, one heart with two circlets of thorns around
it, or two hearts with thorns around them. Many times I
would see a big white dove heading toward me as the field of vision
became an intense blue-white. In the last vision I saw two angels suspended with
their wings fluttering and a dove gliding toward them.”
To make a long story
short: Joe Whalen
entered a seminary and became a priest. His marriage was officially annulled
because of the alcoholism that had predated it and he spent four years in
graduate studies at Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts —
where he was the only one in a class of 19 who was a divorced alcoholic with
only a high school education! He was ordained on September 9, 1989, and at the
age of 80 is a very active priest — even traveling nationally. A more uplifting,
devout priest you will not find. He is a ringing
testimony to the value of late vocations, a clarion call for the Church
to pay close attention to those who may heed a call late in life at this time
when priests are in such short supply.
The prayer cards? They show
Raphael (below) appearing to Tobias requesting the great angel’s intercession.
Archangel St. Raphael Holy Healing Ministry: St.
RaphaelNearly ten years ago Father Whalen already had gathered
the written testimonies of eighty people who claimed relief or outright healing
from seizures, leukemia, heart problems, and cancerous tumors. No one knows what
the count is now. “I just can’t tell you how wonderful it is to experience the
prayer power and miraculous workings of the St. Raphael prayer card,” wrote a
woman named Ginny. “And day by day I have felt the lump disappearing. My doctor
tells me I am one of those people who they cannot explain but I am very much
aware of what has happened through faith in St. Raphael.”
“I was diagnosed with
leukemia found in my
blood tests,” wrote another. “I had been sick for some time until my wife
obtained a St. Raphael card from a friend who told us to pray for healing. My
family began to pray, and when I went back for more blood tests, the leukemia
was gone!” Claimed a woman identified only as Mildred: “My 15-year-old
grand-daughter, Laurie, had cancerous lumps all over her body. They all
disappeared. Now she has only scars. Her cancer is in
remission.”
Naturally, we can’t verify
all these claims. There are more. There are accounts of healing for lesser
problems also. There are calcium deposits that have gone, there are habits that
have been kicked, there are emotions — like Father Whalen’s own — that have been
repaired. This is a man of faith, a man who prays for 12 hours over vats of holy
oil, a man who was praying on a stormy day at a St. Pio shrine in Barto,
Pennsylvania, recently when, according to one witness, the clouds suddenly
parted (see below) and a ray of sun illuminated the luminous priest!
They swear the clouds formed
an image of Padre Pio.
Ah, yes, Father Joe
Whalen – a Missionary of LaSalette, which is
celebrated September 19.
One heckuva a priest — the
one God sent to bless our apartment when there was no one else, the one who
presided over his former wife’s funeral, and has baptized five of his
grandchildren. The drop-down drunk who is now a hero to his
children.
And to
us.
“God does draw straight with
crooked lines, you know that,” says the priest, who stopped in on us again last
week. As for his calling: he urges the Church to promote late vocations at this
time of crisis and still thinks of that nun who has been cloistered for more
than fifty years now and with whom he remains in touch.
“When I visited Sister Mary
Michael again, she said, ‘Joseph, I am convinced that your mother got a glimpse
of your ordination,” recalls the priest. “Jesus surely parted the skies to allow
her to look down from Heaven and see the fulfillment of her
prayers.”
In 2003 Father Whalen, visited a
Padre Pio shrine in Pennsylvania. It was rainy and cloudy but just after he
prayed, the clouds parted and a companion saw a ray of light descend. She took a
photo and sees a profile of St. Pio in it.
Sun bursts
forth and blue light appears over Fr. Whalen at St. Anne Shrine in
Vermont
With the late Sister Mary Michael
of the Precious Blood Monastery in Manchester, New
Hampshire.
This editorial was written in 2003
by Michael H.
Brown
and gratefully used with his
permission
Favorite quote on Christian martyrdom:
"you cannot kill a Christian, you can only
change their
address."
 |
Fr. Joseph Whalen,
M.S.
St. Anthony’s Lenten
Retreat
No.Providence, Rhode
Island
March 11,
2006
Beginning in
the morning a beautiful dove appeared and stood guard over the front entrance of
the church. Over three hundred people went in and out of the entrance all day
and the dove never left his perch. While we were inside, the dove turned his
entire body and watched us through the window over the entrance doors of the
church and left at 5:15 pm, when we left. This picture was taken as Fr. Whalen
was about to enter the church for his healing service. The doved turned and
looked at us for the picture and resumed his former stance afterwards where he
turned around looking into the church.
|
Clarence and Emily
Whalen with their seven sons. Emily dreamed that one of her boys would follow in
the footsteps of her brother,who was a Bishop, and become a priest. It took 66
years for her prayers to be answered, when her oldest son, Joe, (back row,
second from right), became a Missionary of Our Lady of
LaSalette.
All his brothers
predeceased him by the age of 70. Fr. Joe did all their funeral
Masses.
His favorite tapestry of
Jesus, in the sacristy at
St. James in
CT.
And
when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyic, “My son, your sins are
forgiven.”
Mark
2:5
from Fr. Joe’s
corner
“In Sunday’s Gospel (Mark
2:1-12) Jesus forgives the paralytic man his sins and only then does Jesus heal
him of his paralysis. Jesus knew the paralytic needed spiritual healing before
physical healing. FORGIVENESS is necessary before
we receive God’s healing graces and for spiritual growth.
Even little
forgotten unforgivingnesses keep us bound in suffering after death.
Your forgiveness can trigger someone else’s conversion!
Your forgiveness can trigger someone else’s conversion!
Spiritual
healing precedes physical healing. God wants to heal you from the inside out.The
most powerful healing we can receive on earth is our reconciliation with God
broken through sin. There is no limit on how many times we can receive the great
Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the graces we receive are limitless!
When we are truly sorry for offending God, and breaking His Commandments, confession becomes transformation.
When we are truly sorry for offending God, and breaking His Commandments, confession becomes transformation.
The
Sacrament of Reconciliation doesn’t just empty us of the past; it also fills us
with God’s grace for the future.
In
confession, Jesus lifts the weight of our past sins from our shoulders so that
we can go out into the world free from guilt, inspired by grace to say an even
firmer no to sin than before.
Jesus has
given us the grace of confession not only to forgive us but also to strengthen
us against temptation.
Don’t miss
the opportunity to go to confession.
And when you do, know that the grace is there both to absolve and to fill you with divine grace.
A Grace that brings you closer to Jesus and strengthens you against temptation.”
And when you do, know that the grace is there both to absolve and to fill you with divine grace.
A Grace that brings you closer to Jesus and strengthens you against temptation.”
Bless me, Father,
for I have
sinned…
|
If you haven’t gone to
confession in a while, now is the perfect time to reconcile yourself with God
and the Church. Most parishes have Confessions on Saturday or you can also make
a private appointment with a priest. (a necessity for absolution of mortal
sins)
Preparation for confession should include an
examination of conscience, which means you think back on sins you have committed
since your last confession. God looks at the heart. Be truly sorry for having
offended Him.
What happens during confession depends on the
priest and the person. Most people still start with the formula: “Bless me,
Father, for I have sinned. It has been (state the number of months or years)
since my last
confession.”
If you can’t remember the words or you don’t
recall how long it’s been, don’t worry. Just tell the priest it’s been a long
time, and he will guide you through the process.
What you will experience is the healing gift of
God’s love, the chance to start over with a clean conscience, and an
overwhelming sense of gratitude.
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