SID: So, a woman comes to you. She’s born blind. She has a seeing-eye dog, what happened?

FRANCIS: As she made her way up, nobody called her up. I was still in the middle of preaching at the time. But she came up with this German shepherd seeing-eye dog, and the dog had a harness on, and she was kind of holding onto the harness. And I got a little bit frightened when I saw the size of that dog.

As she got about 15 or 20 feet away from me, the dog fell out under the power of God. God showed me something interesting theologically that this lady used the dog as her eyesight, for her eyesight, that she had to let go of the dog before she could come to Him empty handed. We must come to the Lord empty handed, without any crutches, without any kind of aids.

SID: Now you can understand why his meetings were really big. These meetings, these healing meetings you had, how many people would come to them?

FRANCIS: We had, during the nine years that I was doing them, 2,500 people each meeting, and buses would come in. People would wait two hours ahead of time just to get seats because they wanted to see what God was about to do.

SID: And then minding his own business, he’s at a meeting, and someone walks up to him that he is convinced is an angel, and says a very strange thing to him. What?

FRANCIS: I was having lunch with the head of the Full Gospel Businessmen International in Washington DC. The men were trying to ask me, “Why are you a priest?” Or, “What is a priest?” They were all Protestant backgrounds, and it was unusual to have a saved Catholic priest with the gift of healing and the power of God in him.

So I was doing a bad job explaining myself about priesthood. A lady came along, and tapped me on the shoulder, and whispered in my ear, “The answer is in the curtain.” Well, with that she was gone. Never saw her again. Couldn’t find her. Looked for her everywhere. She disappeared. It was an angel. Demos Shakarian, who was sitting beside me, said, “Oh, you need to go read about the curtain, Hebrews 10:19.”

And it says there: Therefore, brothers and sisters, since you have confidence to enter the holy of holies through the veil, which is his body, and through the blood, come forth into my chamber, it says, with confidence because I am your God.

Now I knew when I read that, that my priesthood days were over because Jesus once for all offered himself for us. There was no need for me to say Mass anymore. There was no reason for me to be an intermediary in a sacramental system because people now, as they receive Christ, all become a priesthood of believers. And they all have access to God. We’re all priests.

SID: Now, the criticism from religious people got more than he could tolerate. He saw this, he did, people didn’t have to go to him to get to God. Well, we already have the priest, his name is Jesus.

FRANCIS: Amen.

SID: Much better than human. And he saw these differences, and he left the church. He really stopped going even to church. He was burned out. He went back to college. He got his doctorate in psychology, and he opened up his own little shop. He got married to a woman, this is a story in itself, she was a marvelous ballet dancer, and she went to Turkey with her troop, and she was captured and put into what’s known as, I guess called white slavery.

FRANCIS: White slavery.

SID: She had how many tumors in her?

FRANCIS: She came back from Turkey, and her stomach was just ripped apart from dysentery and starvation. She doctored with the American doctors for about eight months, nine months. Then she heard about a priest who had the gift of healing. That was me. That’s how we met. She had 11 bleeding ulcers. The doctors were ready to take 75% of her stomach out, and cut it out because of all these ulcers.

But we know a better way through Jesus. I prayed with her, and she was pretty much on her death bed. The power of God went into her stomach, and both of us knew she was healed. She made the doctor sign an agreement that he would not go ahead with the operation until he did another endoscopic exam, and looked down her stomach, and he did. He saw her stomach looked like a newborn baby’s pink stomach.

He came out of the operating room, and he shook my hand, and he said, “Father, what is your technique? What is your technique? Congratulations.”

SID: I’ll tell you what, I’m going to have him pray for the fire to come on when we come back. Interested?