Farias, Ruben, Jr. (1954-)

Ruben Farias, Jr., is possibly the most famous of the contemporary Brazilian Spiritualist healers. He was born on February 14, 1954 in San Paulo, Brazil. As a young man he trained as an engineer and graduated in 1980 as a telecommunications engineer from IME (Military Institute of Engineering). Then in the 1990s, he emerged as the most recent person in whom the spirit entity Dr. Adolpho Fritz has manifested. Dr. Fritz first appeared in the middle of the twentieth century as the spirit guide of José Pedro de Fritas, who became known as José Arigó, the Brazilian psychic surgeon. Arigó apparently performed operations with an unsterilized pocket knife, though it was understood that Fritz was doing the real work on the patient's astral body. Following Arigó's untimely death in an automobile accident in 1971, Dr. Fritz began to manifest through several other healers, the most famous being Edson Queiroz who worked in Recife, in northern Brazil. Like Arigó, he met an untimely death in 1991.

Fritz reportedly began to possess Farias as early as 1986, but became most active after Queiroz's death. Since that time, Farias has seen a reported 500,000 patients and been the subject of a book and a television documentary. He has also accumulated a number of testimonies of healing from patients who reside outside of Brazil. He goes into trance to begin his healing work and Dr. Fritz takes over as a secondary personality. Like Arigó, he will actually open the body of patients with a knife, and they apparently feel no pain. Also, like Arigó, he has faced charges by the authorities that he is practicing medicine without a license, but has withstood efforts to close his work to date.

Farias made his first visit to the United States in 2000. This visit followed his acquittal in a 1999 court case in which he was charged with practicing witchcraft and being a charlatan.

Sources:

Dr. Fritz. http://alternative-health-4u.com/drfritz/. June 11, 2000.

Maki, Masao. In Search of Brazil's Quantum Surgeon: The Dr. Fritz Phenomenon. Redwood, N.Y.: Cadence Books, 1998.