Ruan Harding in 1964 in Winnipeg, Canada. He began school at four in Montessori and went on to St. John’s Ravenscourt.
However, most of his childhood years were spent in and out of hospitals as he had a rare illness which frequently required
him to have oxygen and special treatments in clinics. Doctors originally believed the illness to be Cystic Fibrosis but later
ruled this out and assumed viral allergies were the cause. During this time he saw many of his young friends pass on and he
began to think about what life and death actually meant.
His mother, the artist Marion Harding, had been a nurse who moved to London, England where she worked for
a famous German, Jewish surgeon (Ernst Blumberg). Ernst was himself the son of a famous medical family, his father Jacob Moritz Blumberg
having invented the Blumberg Sign. She was also an artist’s model on the vibrant Chelsea scene of the late
1950’s and early 1960’s. She later married Ernst and began to study and to paint, meeting Picasso and having her
portrait done by Arthur Pan, painter of the Churchill portrait in the National Trust.
In 1975 Ruan's family moved to the south coast of England. In 1982 Ruan went to Sussex University and studied
Biology with John Maynard-Smith, a world respected figure in Evolutionary Biology while his mother and father (A. J. Harding) continued to work hard at their business Molimerx - a pioneering software company. He then moved to London in 1987 where
he won an award to complete two years of post-graduate research at the Guildhall. He later went on to complete further post-graduate
studies in the Faculty of Spirituality at the Pontificial University 'Angelicum' in Rome where Pope Saint John Paul II had
received his doctorate.
Following several years of teaching in London, where he won a Government Inspector’s Award from OFSTED,
Joshua moved to Rome, Italy in 1997 where he worked for the Gonzaga Family, an Italian aristocratic family. The Gonzaga family
had originally helped to build the Vatican Library hundreds of years previously and have always maintained a relationship
with the Vatican. The Patron Saint of the family was the young Jesuit Luigi Gonzaga who had died very young helping plague
victims in Rome.
It was Princess Gonzaga (Adriana Buitoni) who personally introduced him to His Eminence the Archbishop Antonio
Pietroborgo who is a renowned healer in Italy and is known as Padre Nino. After working with Nino for some time Ruan made
the decision to embrace Roman Catholicism as his faith and was guided in his conversion by Padre Stefano Canuto, a friend
of Nino working in the Vatican. After completing studies with Stefano, Nino and Professor Giardini at the Angelicum (specializing
in the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross ‘Fear of Death and Dying’) Ruan had the rare experience to be baptized, anointed
(Confirmed) and First Communion in a triple ceremony on the night of the Easter Vigil, April 11th 1998 with Pope
Saint John Paul II in St. Peter’s Basillica, Vatican City. The ceremonial Mass lasted three hours and was televised
globally through Centro Televisivo Vaticano broadcasting.
Ruan began working in the Vatican as a Catechist and also worked on many medical and bio-ethical articles
for a new Vatican encyclopedia ‘Interdisciplinary Dictionary of Science and Faith’. He continued to work with
both Padre Stefano and Nino and later on for the Italian Senate in the office of President Marini, the current Italian President
of the Senate. Ruan has also worked as a professional intuitive, written, translated, taught and lectured throughout Europe
and North America including such venues as Queens University, New York and within the Vatican itself.
Ruan married his wife Simona Lotito in the Vatican on September 29th, 1999 in the Parish
of St. Anne’s with Padre Stefano as the celebrant. Their wedding was blessed by Pope Saint John Paul II in a Public
Audience in St. Peter’s Square two weeks later on their return from their Honeymoon. They have a beautiful daughter
who lives with her mother in Rome.
Ruan's experiences with illness, his studies and research lead him to what he does today which is healing
in its purest form. Over a period of time the vocation to heal epitomized for Ruan the highest form of human creativity. Studying,
writing and teaching brought him into cancer wards and other institutions. It was within these situations coupled with his
own lifetime experiences of illness that forged his gift for healing. This healing gift has lead him to work and meet with
many extraordinary and wonderful people, both simple and exalted. He explained in a recent newspaper interview that:
"Really all I do is connect with a person’s energy field, find out what is going on intuitively and
then connect with what I see as a Divine element and ask for guidance. I think that realizing the connection between energy
and matter is fundamental to healing and hope that in the future modern medicine will take on more of a holistic and integrative
approach incorporating spiritual, emotional and psychological factors together with the physical".