Miracle Woman

"There never was a more ordinary woman than the one standing before you," she tells her audiences in a quiet, dramatic voice. "I have nothing, nothing to do with these healings. I have only yielded my life to Him. Do not try to reach out and touch Kathryn Kuhlman. Reach up and touch Him."

The words are earnest and appropriate enough for the diminutive figure in the white dress on the stage of Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. Joyfully middleclass, fiftyish, a lady who likes fine clothes, Kathryn Kuhlman looks for all the world like dozens of the women in her audience. But hidden underneath the 1945 Shirley Temple hairdo is one of the most remarkable Christian charismatics in the U.S. She is, in fact, a veritable one-woman shrine of Lourdes. In each of her recent services--in Los Angeles, Toronto and her home base of Pittsburgh--miraculous cures seem to occur.

The Los Angeles service was typical. "The power of God is going through a sugar diabetic," she cried suddenly, pointing out into the audience. "There is a cancer, and every bit of pain has left that body. Somebody with a hearing aid on, take it off. You can hear. Someone with a heart condition is being healed. There is bursitis in an arm in the balcony. The arm is completely loosened."

Now the ushers began to urge the cured into the aisles, up to the stage. The woman in white encourages them to try their new-found health: an old man in shirtsleeves, claiming to be cured of a spinal injury, tosses his cane away and runs across the stage. A seven-year-old boy, with his mother, says that he can hear in a seemingly deaf ear for the first time since he was three. "Did you know Jesus was going to open your ear?" asks Kathryn. "Yes," answers the boy, "because He loves me." Kathryn folds him in her arms. "When you grow up to be a big man, you must remember that Jesus loves you."

Jesus. God. The "H-o-o-o-ly Spirit." Kathryn Kuhlman carefully assigns credit for the remarkable phenomena that take place in her presence. But whatever the cause of the healing, the cases are often remarkable. Some examples:

> In July, twelve-year-old Venus Yates lay in Los Angeles County General Hospital under intensive care for rheumatoid arthritis, rheumatic fever and a tumor on her spine. Against the hospital's wishes, Venus' parents took her on a stretcher to one of Kuhlman's monthly services in the Shrine Auditorium. As the service neared its end, Venus' mother suddenly said, "You're cured!" Medical tests for the ailments now prove entirely negative.

> Paul Garnreiter, the seven-year-old boy who regained his hearing at the August service in Los Angeles, had suffered a proteus infection in his left ear for four years. A mastoidectomy two years ago showed a severely deteriorated eardrum. Last week Paul's physician could find no evidence of damage.

> Judith Schipper, 29, had a calcified tendon in her left elbow when she went to a Kuhlman service in Los Angeles. Her illness had been diagnosed by X ray last summer after she had complained of pain. X rays taken last week showed that the calcification no longer existed. Her doctor admitted that it could have cleared up by itself, but Mrs. Schipper contends that it pained her only days before the service.

> In 1959, 69-year-old Mrs. Myrtle Joseph of Youngstown, Ohio, was examined by Dr. O. Whitmore Burtner, now of Miami. A bone-marrow test indicated that she suffered from chronic lymphatic leukemia, which was spreading slowly. By 1964, Mrs. Joseph needed regular blood transfusions. Her liver, spleen and lymph nodes became swollen. Then, in May 1967, she wrote a letter to Kathryn Kuhlman asking for her prayers. Within a few days she felt so well that she stopped seeing Dr. Burtner. Alarmed, he asked her to come in for tests. Her marrow, liver, spleen, lymph nodes and white blood cells were normal. She is now a sprightly 80.

Among the Farmers. Kathryn Kuhlman herself has no elaborate theories about the origin of her apparent gift. The daughter of mixed-creed Protestants (she now belongs to the American Baptist Convention but her services are pointedly nondenominational), Kathryn dropped out of high school after her sophomore year because she "felt a definite call to the ministry." She took to itinerant preaching in Idaho, and for almost two decades "worked in the small places, among the farmers." She hated traditional tent healing services: "the long healing lines, filling out those cards. It was an insult to your intelligence." After visiting such a service once, she cried all night.

An intensely personal religious experience in 1946--which she speaks of only as her "baptism of the Holy Spirit"--inspired Kathryn to begin preaching regularly about the Holy Spirit. Healing came by accident, when a woman announced one night that she had been cured of a tumor during a previous Kuhlman sermon.

Today Kathryn runs her Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation from a hotel suite in Pittsburgh, where she prepares radio and TV shows and a busy staff keeps track of finances.* She draws a straight $25,000-a-year salary from the money collected at services. (She sometimes forgets to take up a collection.) Most of the rest--after operating expenses--goes to a variety of charities, especially a number of mission churches of different denominations.

Sovereign Act. Beyond her repeated assertion that it all is the work of the Holy Spirit operating through Jesus Christ, Kathryn preaches no theology of healing. She no longer believes that faith necessarily earns healing, or that lack of faith necessarily forbids it. She has seen too many nonbelievers cured, too many believers go away still lame or sick. She refuses to promise individual healings: "I can't," she explains. "That's the sovereign act of God."

She does see her ministry as a return to the supernatural element in the ancient church. "Everything that happened in the early church," she insists, "we have a right to expect today. This is exactly what we're going to get back to again." As for her own part in this return to the supernatural, Kathryn Kuhlman hesitates to look very far ahead. She is so convinced that her role is only that of an intermediary that she has a recurring nightmare about coming out on stage some day and finding the chairs empty, her gift gone. Her admirers believe that it may well be that very recognition--and her continued modesty--that have preserved the gift for so long.

* The staff spends little time verifying healings, because Kathryn has no doubt that they are accomplished. But in some remarkable cases, such as that of Venus Yates, they attempt to document the cure fully.

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