Threatened with prosecution

We continued to encounter challenges during those years of research, especially those busy years between 1953 and 1963.

One day the district attorney called me to come to his office. As soon as I arrived, his secretary ushered me into his office, where he greeted me very politely and invited me to sit down. We had known each other since childhood and greeted each other by first names.

"Jose," he said, "there is a complaint against you. There is a doctor complaining that you healed one of his patients. he says you are practicing medicine without a license. Just what are you people doing?"

I then explained to the district attorney the way we operated, and that it was more like praying for the patient the\an anything else.

The district attorney then went on to tell me that the doctor did not have a case against me. If the patient had complained, he said, then they would have a case against me.

But the patient was not complaining. The patient was grateful for being healed.

As it turned out, we were not even aware of the healing until the district attorney summoned me to his office. Here is how it happened:

The doctor had prescribed a series of injections, two per week for several weeks, to correct a condition in the patient. During this time, the patient had decided to come to the Friday meetings we held.

Simply by participating in the mental exercises we conducted at the start of each meeting (the Silva Centering Exercise), the patient's health problem cleared up. We never even knew about it.

The patient stopped going to the doctor. But one day the patient saw the doctor in town and the doctor asked the patient, "Why did you not continue to come for your injections?" The patient answered, "Because they healed me over there," meaning our place.

That was why the doctor complained to the district attorney.

The district attorney's relatives were attending our Friday night meetings as regulars, so he ended our little meeting by warning us, and then giving us advice on how to proceed without getting into trouble.

We had thought it would be wise to have relatives of some of city and county officials as members of our movement. We were glad we did, as this idea paid off very nicely.

The doctors were not the only ones giving us a hard time. So were many of the local church officials.

Many of the people I had helped did not want to believe what was being done until they saw it first hand. This was true of the priest I had healed some years before.

One day this priest called me. His knees were still fine, he told me, but he had a friend, another priest, who had cancer in the digestive system and had already had three major operations. The priest continued to have constant fever and diarrhea, and had already been excused of his obligation to serve and retired to something similar to a rest-home type of situation.

My friend wanted me to help this priest.

This was in the days when priests in Laredo were saying in their sermons that people should not come to our meetings because they thought we were working for the devil.

I told my priest friend, "You mean that the priest there will allow me to come into the building to see the sick priest?"

He answered, "I will arrange it so that nobody there will bother you."

Then I told him about an incident that had just taken place.

The building where the sick priest was living was sometimes used as a meeting place for the Knights of Columbus. A friend of mine who was the

Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus came to my office one day and placed on my desk an application to become a member of the organization.

"I am the Grand Knight and I have a say in this," my friend told me. I filled out the application and signed it.

It was three months before I saw my friend again. That was a chance meeting in the post office.

"Mr. Grand Knight," I said, "what happened with my application?"

He answered, "You were right, they turned you down."

After relating that story to my priest friend, I asked him, "Knowing that this happened to me recently, do you still say that if I come to that place to see the sick priest, they will not run me out of the building"

The priest assured me, "I will come with you to see that nobody will get in your way."

As soon as I entered the sick priest's room, all the other priests who were there left the room and left me alone with the sick priest.

I used the same method as I used with the others. got the feel of the priest's hand, got a good impression of his face and voice, and recommended that he drink half a glass of water at night and the other half in the morning.

Then I told him I would return in three days to check on his progress.

Then at home that night, I finished the programming of the project at a distance.

Three days later I went to check on the priest's progress and the priest indicated an improvement.

His fever had dropped and his diarrhea had stopped. He was now having normal bowel movements.

I saw the sick priest change his attitude completely from negative to very positive.

The other priests changed, too. The next time I came, they welcomed me very nicely and escorted me to the sick priest's room.

It took three applications to complete the project very successfully.

One month later the priest went on a one month vacation to Spain, his native land, and when he came back he was reassigned to take charge of a church.

He is still alive today.

Next: More resistance to our work