HOW DID THE CATHOLIC CHARISMATIC RENEWAL ORIGINATE

"The emergence of the Renewal following the Second Vatican Council was a particular gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. It was a sign of a desire on the part of many Catholics to live more fully their Baptismal dignity and vocation as adopted sons and daughters of the Father, to know the redeeming power of Christ our Saviour in a more intense experience of individual and group prayer, and to follow the teaching of the Scriptures by reading them in the light of the same Spirit who inspired their writing. Certainly one of the most important results of this spiritual reawakening has been that increased thirst for holiness which is seen in the lives of individuals and in the whole Church." Pope John Paul II

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal would never have happened had it not been for the Vatican II Council, which created a new spirit of openness and humility in the Catholic Church as she sought to discover afresh what the Holy Spirit was saying to her. Pope John XXIII composed a special prayer to be said daily throughout the world during the council, which asked the Holy Spirit to "renew your wonders in this, our day, as a new Pentecost?

Many internal reforms, covering every area of the Church's life and understanding of herself, resulted from the Council. The way for the acceptance of the charisms was also prepared for, by an inclusion in Lumen Gentium, which accepted that the biblical charisms were potentially always available and not confined to apostolic times.

This new spirit also led Catholics at grass roots level to meet and pray more with their Christian brothers and sisters. It was through these relationships with Pentecostals and Charismatics from other traditions, that the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was born. It began with just a few individuals in the late 60's but the event that really sparked off world-wide renewal was the now famous "Duquesne weekend", where a small group of students from Duquesne university met together on retreat in February 1967, to study the Acts of the Apostles and to consider the claims of the Pentecostals as described in two books, "The Cross and the Switchblade" and "They Speak with other Tongues". One night they had an overwhelming spiritual experience, and a group of them were baptised in the Spirit and began experiencing the working of the New Testament charisms in their lives.

Within a few short years charismatic prayer groups preparing people for this baptism in the spirit experience, and meeting to praise God, had mushroomed all over the United States, and soon spread across the world. Twenty five years later it is estimated, according to the missionologist David Barrett, that 72 million people world-wide in the Catholic Church have been touched by the Charismatic Renewal and been baptised in the Spirit.

But how did the first Pentecostals come into being? The Pentecostals would compare theft experience to Pentecost itself hence theft name. This was when the Holy Spirit fell in power on the apostles as they prayed in the Upper Room, and they were anointed and empowered with charisms for ministry, The Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Paul, all speak of a Church that moved in the power of the Holy Spirit, and where tongues, healing and prophecy, among other gifts were all a normal part of church life.

Throughout history since then, there have been various spontaneous revivals and outpouting of grace, whenever the Church seemed to be getting too institutionalised and moribund. It is also obvious from the writings of the saints and the early Church Fathers, that they too experienced many of what are today considered charismatic phenomena. For ordinary Christians, however, at the turn of the 20th century, charisms like healing and tongues were things of the distant past and not to be expected in their every day church life.

The first stirrings of what we today call the Pentecostal movement, began at Topeka, Kansas, in the USA in 1901, when a group had an evening of prayer to the Holy Spirit. One of the women, Agnes Ozman, asked to have hands laid on her as it mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. As they prayed, she broke out into the gift of tongues.

It wasn't until 1906, however, some years later, that a spontaneous revival broke out in Asuza Street, Los Angeles. News of this spread across the United States, and all over the world, including England. Although these early Pentecostals grew rapidly in number they were not accepted in the churches and gradually began to form themselves into new denominations.

As the years went on there was little contact between Pentecostals and other Christians and it wasn't until the 1950's that through individual personal contacts, the Pentecostal revival began to seep back into the mainline Protestant churches. Encouraged by Pentecostal leaders like David Du Plessis, these neo-Pentecostals or Charismatics as they became known, chose to stay within their denominations believing that the Baptism in the Spirit that they had received, with the accompanying charisms was merely the fullness of the Christian experience, and not something that contradicted their denominational beliefs.

First published in Goodnews Magazine