Later, at the church I learned about the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Again I requested and received a list of scriptures on this teaching. I plunged into another session of study in the basement to learn what God's word taught.

Seven priests showed up at the home to bluff, stare at and threaten me. I cried all day long after they left until my face was swollen and eyes bloodshot. I was learning how strong and tenacious the old soul ties to a demonic religious system could be. Keep in mind that I was caught in this religious snare from birth and was soaked through and through with the power which energizes the wicked system.

I almost did not attend church that night, but went anyway. The sermon topic was the crucifixion of Christ and this repulsed me. I wanted to wait outside in the car, but the lady with whom I stayed urged me to come inside. To me, the cross was what I had learned to dread and hate.

Horrifying memories of the ghastly tortures, torment, abuse and suffering were associated with that rough, blood-soaked cross in convent torture chambers. How many times had I cringed and groaned after flagellation with whips as Mother Superior forced the cruel metal crown of thorns on my scarred, bald head. Then loaded with a rough-hewn, heavy, eight foot cross dropped on my frail, lacerated back, I had to drag it, staggering across the room, until I collapsed. I was so weak I could never get very far.

There was another horror chamber two stories underground in the convent where several times I was forced to lie on the dirt floor in the form of a cross, without moving, for three days and three nights without food or water. During this time all the priests and nuns were there with Mother Superior and they repeatedly walked back and forth across my body. This painful and humiliating trial was supposed to teach me humility and submission and crush out pride. No wonder I shuddered and recoiled from hearing about the cross.

However, as I listened to the Biblical message on the meaning of the cross, it took on a whole new aspect. I was caught up in the awe as scriptures regarding it were expounded. By the time we got to the part where the Roman soldier pierced His side, I wept with real understanding of the bloody sacrifice Jesus had made for me. During the invitation I fell to my knees and asked for the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Although I had always been very conscious about my haggard looks and lack of hair, this night at the church I did not care about my hair, dress or anything else. I ended up stretched out on that dirty floor weeping for over an hour. Many, many ungodly things came out of me during that time of heart searching. God dealt deeply with me as I laid my entire family on the altar, my brother, the ordained priest; my parents, sisters and other brothers. I asked the Lord to save them at any cost.

Once again, upon arrival at home, I went down in the basement to spend the time alone with the Lord. There I danced all night before the Lord. The next morning when the lady of the house came down to check on me she asked if I was hungry but I had lost my natural appetite. Each time I tried to answer her I spoke in tongues and could not speak English. For two days and nights this continued and I promised Jesus I would go anywhere He would send me to testify of His glory.

Three days before the revival meeting closed I was handed a telegram stating my father had died and gave the time of his funeral. My father disinherited me when I refused to go home with him and the two priests. I was afraid to go to the funeral and it was nearly seven hundred miles away, however I did send some flowers.

My mother had her personal banker set aside $12,000 of her own money for me when she learned that my father had cut me out of his will. I didn't even know she had any money and when her attorney contacted me about it I wept happily. With these funds I was able to buy a used car and a new cloth coat and I banked the rest.

Before she left town, Sister Nilah, the young Pentecostal evangelist, invited me to come to see her if I was ever in Chicago. I told Sister Nilah I planned to run an ad to sell my furniture and everything else in the apartment. The first morning two priest came, not to buy, but to harass. I had to threaten to call the police to get them to leave. The next morning another priest showed up, heckling and trying to frighten this ex-nun who had publicly gone to a Pentecostal altar.

I hired a woman to stay in my apartment until all was sold. I packed up and moved to a large hotel nearby. Here I knew the owner personally and gave orders to let no one come to my room. I could come to the lobby to see any visitors.

One morning the phone ran and I was told that three people had come to see me. When I came down, there stood my brother, the priest, dressed in his holy habit, with two of my sisters. The women turned their backs to me but he strode across the lobby towards me.

My mother had died from a stroke two weeks before. Furiously he spat at me, "I guess you know what you did." He proceeded to belittle me and told me I was damned forever (because I had run to the feet of Jesus) and I would certainly burn in hell forever for this.

He further stated that I had sent my mother to an early grave. Imagine, my mother who had been a complete invalid for seven long years while I was imprisoned in a foreign convent! He raved on and made many nasty, hurtful statements and wild charges. After he had vented his spleen on me, he turned to walk away.

I caught him by the arm and said, "Now wait just a minute, Chet. How many women have you destroyed in the confessional box? I know about the priests who go to homes when the husbands are away." He flushed angrily and glared at me with hatred in his eyes. I continued, "Chet, have you ever been in a convent? Did you ever rob a little sister of her virtue?"

He hissed curses under his breath, lunged for me and struck me viciously with his fist. He was over six feet tall, a big man, so I got a black eye and a huge knot on my head when he knocked me down. The man behind the desk witnessed the attack and leaped to my defence. He said terrible things to my brother and ordered him to get out of the hotel and never return.

I put my car and coat in a storage and caught a train to Chicago. There I found a hotel room near the meeting where Sister Nilah was working. I went every night and then, at her invitation, went with her to visit her family. From there we went to a meeting in Wisconsin.

Several days later, an attorney called telling me that a member of my family was suing me for all the money my mother had left to me. After a wrangle with lawyers and courts, they took all the money and my car and coat. I wept at the greediness and unfairness of it all, but it actually drew me closer to the Lord. I accepted Sister Nilah's invitation to travel with her for the next thirty months.

It was after I returned to the place where Sister Nilah was in revival I received a telegram. My youngest sister asked me to return home because my dad was asking for me. Remember, earlier, I had wired a funeral wreath for him because they notified me that he had died, so this was a shock. My family deliberately led me to believe he was already dead. When I arrived, my sister told me that my dad was still alive, in his eighties, very independent and well off financially.

I was apprehensive about how he would react to me. However, when I saw him he grabbed and hugged me, saying, "Hookie, you look wonderful." He was leaving on a trip to see his other children, but I was very happy for our reunion.

After he returned two months later, he wired me to come back to see him. When Sister Nilah and I visited him, he asked my forgiveness for all the family had done to me. His heart was definitely softening toward me, but he still did not want my God.

Later, when we arrived on the West coast, I prayed until God gave me grace to call my brother, the Catholic priest. He then asked that I forgive him for striking me at the hotel. Late that night we drove twelve miles to his home, where he was waiting on the front steps. Dashing to the car, he grabbed and held me, asking anxiously, "Oh, Charlotte, have you forgiven me?" I assured him that I had.

I learned that for seven years he had lived in adultery with his housekeeper. As he heard confessions from his parishioners, he felt increasingly guilty and hypocritical. At last, he notified the pope that he was leaving the Roman Catholic church and the priesthood. A bishop came to urge him to retire to a South American monastery to reflect on and reconsider his decision, but he refused.

Six months after his excommunication he married his mistress. One day while browsing in a second hand bookstore he purchased a King James Bible. Through reading it, both he and his wife were brought to salvation by faith in Jesus Christ.

He took me to see my sister Connie, who immediately said, "I don't want anything you have. I'm a Roman Catholic, and I'll die a Roman Catholic." She pushed me away. Eighteen months later she was taken to the hospital for a double goiter operation. Her vocal chords were severed, destroying her voice box and she went blind in both eyes. Six weeks later arthritis struck, twisting both her hands and feet. Medical doctors helped to straighten her feet but she still could not walk or talk. A therapist worked with her a year to teach her how to speak again. I gave a Bible which she quickly destroyed.

She heard of an eye doctor in Mexico and went to him. A series of operations restored her sight but she still refused to repent and seek the Lord. In 1964, she awoke with terrible pains and they removed a sizable growth from the large intestine. Within ten days she was back home, but would not turn to God. Two years went by and she was again seized with awful pains. This time tests revealed cancer scattered throughout her entire body.

In desperation and fear she called me to come and pray for her healing. I went to her and advised her to ask God for forgiveness and prepare to meet Him, for she was surely going to die. Her weeping family was gathered around her and she cries out in terror, "Oh no! I'm so afraid, I'm afraid, won't someone please help me, I'm so afraid!" She knew she was dying and dropped into eternity crying out in despair and fear. How tragic to have refused the Lord's mercy so many times. Six weeks after the funeral, her husband went to a small church and cried out to the Lord, was saved and filled with the Holy Spirit also.

Over the years I had received many hate letters from my family and each time I received another one and read it I would become terribly upset. Finally I stopped opening them and stored them in a box located in a safe. Four years passed and I received another letter from my youngest sister. This one I felt I should open and read. She was critically ill and said that she believed if I would come home she would get well. She asked my forgiveness for all the harsh and derogatory letters she had previously written to me.

At their house my brother-in-law and niece came out to meet me and it was obvious that he was broken and his heart was tender. He swept me into a close embrace, lifting me from the ground as we both wept for joy. He had diagnosed her trouble as inoperable stomach cancer and there was no hope.

My sister, a petite, five-foot woman, could keep nothing on her stomach and looked very gaunt and wasted. I assured her that God wanted to save and heal her and she need not die. We took her to Brother William Branham's meetings in Vanadalia.

I was up all night with my poor suffering sister. Finally we got her into the prayer line where many miracles of healing were being performed in the name of the Lord Jesus. When she received prayer, she dropped to the ground, weeping loudly. Anxiously I asked what was wrong and she sobbed, "Oh, Charlotte, God has healed me, God has healed me!"

She was hungry and we went to a restaurant to eat. She ate a good big meal, had a wonderful night's sleep and awoke with no trace of her former pain or sickness.

When we arrived back home, her husband had difficulty believing that the miracle had actually been accomplished. However, when the doctor made fresh x-rays, he announced, "Your wife is well from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. A greater power than I has healed her." Weeks later my sister and her husband were saved and became workers in a local church.

I went to visit my father when he was 93 years old. He told me that if I was going to church he wanted to go with me. Three weeks earlier he had completely lost his eyesight for the second time. After we returned from the services we were sitting in the living room when he began to tremble all over. I quickly dropped to my knees beside his chair and talked with him about receiving Christ as Saviour. I read scripture showing that Jesus alone could give absolution for sin, not the priests or the catholic hierarchy. He fell to his knees and sobbed many tears as he followed me in the sinner's prayer, asking Jesus Christ to save him and forgive his sins. Then he wept for joy saying he had never felt so wonderful in all his life. I was going to baptize him in the bathtub but my two brothers walked in and stopped me.

My brother John, lying in a bed dying with leukemia, told me he was a Roman Catholic and would die a Roman Catholic. I was with him praying when he slipped out into a Christless eternity. My older brother later left the Roman Catholic church and began to attend an evangelical church and accepted Christ as Saviour. He wrote me, encouraging me to continue giving my testimony and saying he was praying for me.

My older sister lies crippled with Parkinson's disease in a Hollywood hospital and is dying with hardening of the arteries. She too is a staunch and determined Roman Catholic, totally closed to the gospel message of salvation.

While Sister Nilah and I were ministering to Roman Catholics in Quebec, my eyesight, already poor, gave way completely. I could no longer read my Bible or even my watch. As we swung back through Maine and into Boston I stopped to see an eye specialist whom my father had used to fit me with glasses years before. I told him I was losing all my vision so he ran tests and shook his head and said he could do nothing to help me. I was going blind and I so needed to read and study the Word.

We went to a meeting and had prayer for my eyes. I just knew God was working a miracle when the clock on a distant wall suddenly came into focus. Excitedly, I took a Bible and opened it, and sure enough, I read it easily. There was great rejoicing and praise to the Lord Jesus that day I can tell you!

On our return trip I once more stopped to see the eye doctor and asked him to examine me once more. Imagine his shock when I was able to easily read the fine print on the bottom of his charts instead of the large block printed letters at the top. Because of this, later he went to church and sought and received the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Since I was saved in 1946, I have daily prayed for God to move upon the Roman Catholic Bishops, the Pope, prelates, priests, nuns and people. They all desperately need the touch of the Lord in their lives and the saving blood of Jesus Christ to wash away their sins. They labor under a terrible yoke of deception, delusion, darkness and religious works, never suspecting the liberating truths we know, of life in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Today I can still burst into praise when I recall my wonderful salvation and deliverance from unbelievable demonic bondage. Thank God, there are no more Roman Catholic priests in my life; no more confessional boxes; no more worship of and prayer to the Virgin Mary and all the other "saints;" no more wafer god.

Thank God! No more purgatory (the only purgatory the Catholics face is the priest's pocket.) In the United States, November is purgatory month and during this period priests collect nearly $22,000,000.00 saying masses for the dead. Many have paid regularly for twenty or twenty-five years of masses and are told their loved ones are still not in heaven. This terrible doctrine will force the faithful to pay and pay and pay indefinitely to secure their release. It is one of the cruelest religious hoaxes ever dreamed up by the demons to be foisted off on human victims. The awful bondage and fear generated by this false teaching is incredible.

No more scapulars, thank God! Every priest, bishop, every nun in open or closed orders and all prelates of the Roman Catholic Church wear them. It is a dirty piece of brown cloth with a hole in the middle of the top. Your head goes through the hole and the scapular falls to the front and back. From the time I entered a convent I wore one constantly. Even after escaping from the overseas convent and returning to the United States I still wore the scapular.

The night I heard the gospel and ran to the feet of Jesus for salvation I was still wearing it. I raced home, undressed, ripped off the scapular and burned it. I no longer needed that relic of past bondage and darkness for I knew I now belonged to the family of God and His royal blood flowed through my veins!

No more holy water! This was supposed to keep away all evil spirits and was stored in the convents by the barrel. Following priests' visits in the buildings, Mother Superior would give six or eight nuns bottles of the holy water with orders to sprinkle it everywhere the priests had walked, just in case they had brought some evil spirits in with them.

No more prostrating and bowing to dumb idols in prayer and supplication! God only knows how many hours I spent and how many gallons of tears I wasted at the feet of idols when I walked in the heathen darkness of religion without reality. Now I bow my knees only to the lovely Son of God, my Saviour, Jesus Christ. To Him be all glory, honor and praise, now and evermore.