ABSTRACT
Catholic Charismatics participate in the late-twentieth-century shift among Christians from emphasis on suffering and self-mortification as an imitation of Christ to emphasis on the possibility and benefit of divine healing as practiced by Jesus in the gospels. The processes of healing and spiritual growth are linked, because illness is typically regarded as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Prior to the tasks of empowerment and transformation, there is a level of persuasiveness embedded in the social setting of Charismatic healing that predisposes potential supplicants to the kind of experience that healing makes available. The rhetorical impact of the power motive is a function of the way it is grounded in concrete experience. For ritual healing, two principal aspects of empowerment are considered: the role of somatic symbols and physiological process and the interpretation of spontaneous expression of endogenous processes. The rhetorical movement of transformation is complete when the supplicant is persuaded to change basic cognitive, affective, and behavioral patterns.
