Actress Patricia Heaton Shares Spiritual Experience from Eucharist at Mass

You don’t see celebrities talk this way on Twitter very often!

Actress Patricia Heaton shared on Twitter about a spiritual experience she had with the Eucharist at Mass last Sunday. Heaton is famous for starring in Everybody Loves Raymond in the early 2000s and currently stars on ABC’s The Middle.

Here’s what she said:

Her tweet reads: “Spent Mass internally grumbling about lame sermon; received Eucharist, knelt down, burst into tears. #NoOneExpectstheHolySpirit.”

She later had a follow-up tweet:

The tweet reads: “Just read this, now feel really bad about grumbling at Mass. The miracle is that God loves me anyway.” It was in response to an article shared by Protestant pastor John Piper.

Heaton grew up in a devout Catholic home, which included going to daily Mass with her mom and watching her sister join the Dominican Sisters in Nashville. Tragically, her mother died of an aneurysm when she was 12 years old, which left Heaton struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide.

“I’d sit in my apartment on the Upper West Side,” she later explained, “and call on the saints, including Patrick and Joseph, for help, and then I’d go see my therapist.”

After she divorced and remarried, she left the Catholic Church and went through a self-subscribed “Protestant wilderness.” It was during this time, she’s later said, that she realized acting had become an idol for her, and that she needed to put Christ first.

She eventually got connected with an Opus Dei priest who guided her through the annulment process for her first marriage. Since then, she has been a practicing Catholic. “It was a great joy,” she says of her return to the Catholic Church, “…a beautiful thing.”