This article is a supplement to “Encounter School of Ministry comes to Louisville, teaches laity to evangelize.”
When Father Anthony Cecil Jr. first heard of the Encounter School of Ministry through a priest friend and decided to attend its annual conference in 2021, he was struggling with grief and pain, he said in a recent interview.
Just a few weeks after his ordination to the priesthood in 2019, he began his first pastoral assignment and his father died. Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and then he badly injured his foot, which caused him constant pain, he said.
“My whole life changed,” he said. “I became very, very angry with God, because I thought I could manage all this transition really well, and I wasn’t. And I thought I could manage my grief well, and I wasn’t. And so I found myself in a place where I was just very angry with God, but I wouldn’t admit it.”
‘Encounter radically changed my life and my own relationship with God and my priesthood’
— Father Tony Cecil
On the first night of the Encounter School conference, Father Cecil and his friend were sitting outside of a conference session, taking a break due to his foot pain, when a laywoman attending the conference walked over to greet him, he said.
Learning about his injury, she asked him, “Have you ever asked God to heal you?”
“I didn’t say anything in response to her other than ‘no,’ ” he said.
“But the response in my mind, that didn’t come out of my mouth, was, ‘What a stupid question. God doesn’t do that anymore — unless it’s something big — like a saint needs a miracle through their intercession to be canonized. And this is so insignificant. And if God did do this, he would never do this for me, because I’m angry with him.’ ”
She asked if he would be willing to let her and her friends pray for him, and he said yes. As she walked away, Father Cecil said he looked at his friend and said, “I wish that I was physically able to run.”
She came back with three other women, and his friend put his hand on his ankle, he said. As they prayed aloud for him, he sat, angry and in pain, wishing that the interaction would end quickly, he said.
“Then finally, it just dawned on me that I was so angry that I wasn’t open to anything,” he said.
So, he prayed a short prayer to God: “You have my full permission to do whatever you want.”
“The moment I said that, it was like I blinked my eyes and my entire leg from my hip down to the tips of my toes was like on fire,” he said.
As the prayer concluded, he was shocked to feel that the pain, which had been constant for months, had subsided.
Suddenly, he could do the things he couldn’t do before — like genuflecting and taking the stairs, he said. The pain “never came back,” he said.
But it wasn’t just physical healing that God had in mind for him, Father Cecil said. The physical healing “opened me up to just experiencing the rest of that conference, and I had a big healing of my heart,” and a release of anger, he said. “In the span of 24 hours, everything changed.”
He left the conference filled with “a great hope” that “Jesus is actually real — like he’s actually alive. And all the things that he says in Scriptures that his disciples can do, they can actually do,” he said. “They just have to know they can ask him for it.”
“That changed my ministry,” he said, revealing to him that “we’re allowed to pray with God with an expectancy that God can actually do something.”
Shortly after the conference, Father Cecil received an emergency call to the hospital for a young man who was dying.
When he arrived, the nurse told him, “You need to do what you do for someone who’s dying because there’s nothing we can do,” he said.
While offering the anointing of the sick, Father Cecil asked God to heal the patient through the sacrament, he said.
Father Cecil returned home, only to be woken a few hours later by a phone call from the nurse, he said.
“She said, ‘I just felt like I had to tell you. I don’t know what happened in that room. But a few minutes after you left, all of his vitals started turning around, and he started changing, and he is now sitting up in bed, disconnected from everything.”
