Healing Facilitators

In late March, Brazilian media reported that Joao—who for many decades served as a spiritual healer and has devoted himself to educating people about this aspect of life—was sent home from prison to serve his sentence under house arrest with stipulations that included him wearing an anklet and being prohibited from visiting his hospital. The judge authorized this in order for him to avoid coronavirus contagion. During the period when he was incarcerated and I searched news reports for his response to the accusations brought against him, some articles reported that a court secrecy order was involved. All that I've ever seen reported about Joao's response to the accusations is that he has steadfastly denied all of the complaints — something easily understood by close constituents, as exemplified with a video made by one of his biographers. There has always been readily available in books and video footage ample evidence of Joao's authentic facilitation of spiritual healing through 'channeling.'

Many Facebook supporters happily greeted the news of his release with one of them expressing that he had been "wrongly imprisoned because of the satanic mainstream media." Media outlets who exploited all the sensational and nonsensical claims made about Joao obviously knew little about the subject of their reports. The first English language biography about John of God presented the facts of past court proceedings against him that evidently were motivated by selfish and spiritually ignorant assumed imperatives. Robert Pellegrino-Estrich wrote in The Miracle Man: The Life Story of Joao de Deus (2001):

Despite his amazing contribution to mankind in the alleviation of suffering, he is still pursued by the authorities, spurred along by disgruntled factions; those medical doctors who fail to understand the source of his healing and surgical ability calling on support of their medical associations to take action, and the church whose clergy fear a weakening of their position within the community and fail to recognize the same spiritual source that is the very core of their doctrines.

In his book The Phenomenon of Abadiania, Supreme Court Judge Jose Liberato Costa Povoa argues strongly for the law to be intelligent about its interpretation, pointing out that several court cases had set a precedence which should be considered, particularly in their recognition that acts performed by incorporated entities [while the medium healer is in a trance] were not crimes. He quotes from the case Tribunal de Alcada Criminal de Sao Paulo in which the eminent Judge Azevedo Junior states "In the exercise of quackery the presence of fraud is presupposed, which cannot happen to the mediumized individual. This last, in a state of trance, finds himself unconscious and therefore may not be held responsible for actions undertaken in his absence by the spirits incorporated in him."