This month's website
A HOME FOR THE SEEKING SPIRIT
Come, Holy Spirit, and make ever more fruitful the charisms you have bestowed on us.
CATHOLIC CHARISMATIC RENEWAL
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Pope John Paul II on the Charismatic Movement From the very beginning of my ministry as the Successor of Peter, I have considered the movement as a great spiritual resource for the church…Within the Charismatic Renewal, the Catholic Fraternity has a specific mission, recognized by the Holy See. One of the objectives stated in your statutes is to safeguard the Catholic identity of the charismatic communities and to encourage them always to maintain a close link with the Bishops and the Roman Pontiff. To help people to have a strong sense of their membership in the Church is especially important in times such as ours, when confusion and relativism abound. You belong to an ecclesial movement. The word "ecclesial" here is more than merely decorative. It implies a precise task of Christian formation, and involves a deep convergence of faith and life. The enthusiastic faith, which enlivens your communities, is a great enrichment, but it is not enough. It must be accompanied by a Christian formation, which is solid, comprehensive and faithful to the Church’s Magisterium: a formation based upon a life of prayer, upon listening to the Word of God, and upon worthy reception of the sacraments, especially Reconciliation and the Eucharist. To mature in faith, we have to grow in knowledge of its truths. If this does not happen, there is a danger of superficiality, extreme subjectivism and illusion. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church should become for every Christian - and therefore for every community of the Renewal a constant reference-point. Again and again, you must also assess yourselves in the light of the "criteria of ecclesial character" which I set out in the Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles laici (n. 30). As an ecclesial movement, one of your distinguishing marks should be to sentire cum Ecclesia—to live in filial obedience to the Church’s Magisterium, to the Pastors, and to the Successor of Peter, and with them to build the communion of the whole body. The motto of the Eighth International Meeting of the Catholic Fraternity looks to the words of Christ: "I have come to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Lk 12:49). In the context of the Great Jubilee of Jesus Christ the Savior of the world, these words resound with all their force. The Son of God made man has brought to us the fire of love and the truth that saves. At the approach of the new millennium, the Church hears the call, the urgent summons of the Master to an ever greater commitment to mission: "the grain is ripe, the harvest has come" (Mk 4:29). You will doubtless discuss this during your meeting. Allow yourselves therefore to be awarded by the Holy Spirit, who is always the prime agent of evangelization and of mission. I accompany your undertakings with my prayers, and I sincerely hope that this meeting, being held in circumstances so charged with meaning, will bear abundant spiritual fruit for the entire Catholic Charismatic Renewal. May it be a milestone on the journey of your spiritual preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. To all of you, to your communities and to your loved ones, I cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing. (Pope John Paul II’s message condensed from his June 1, 1998 meeting with the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships at the Vatican as reported in L‘Osservatore Romano, English Edition.) Sharing all the Charisms of the Spirit by Reverend Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. In today’s Church, I believe that all Christians would agree that God calls us ultimately to resurrection with Christ; but we do not agree so easily about the proximate future to which God is calling us. We do not agree about the concrete shape which the kingdom of God must take here and now because we disagree, sometimes bitterly, about what it means for us to be a Church. Authoritarian, right-wing Christians want to pattern the Church on the Roman Empire. They want an authoritarian Church in which all movement descends from those in authority to those they command. Left-wing Christians want to democratize the Church and to pattern it on the democratic governments, which emerged politically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the polarized Church in which we live, the Charismatic Renewal has, I believe, the divine call and responsibility to insist that no political model of the Church can grasp or articulate the social reality which the Christian community ought to embody. The Church derives neither from the Roman Empire nor from democracies of the Enlightenment—but from Pentecost. On Pentecost, the risen Christ sent the Spirit into the Church in order to create it as a community of shared faith. The Spirit accomplished that task on Pentecost by an outpouring of all the charisms. Moreover, only by sharing all the charisms of the Spirit can the Church experience shared faith consciousness. The Church needs prophets and teachers to remind it constantly of the events which give rise to it: the incarnation of the Son of God, His ministry, death, resurrection, and mission of the Pentecostal Spirit. The Church needs teachers to remind it in season and out of the history of sin and of grace which links it to the paschal mystery. Without the charismatic activity of those teachers the Church will have no present sense of identity. In other words, without the kind of historical consciousness which teaching and prophecy inspire, the Church will not know collectively who it is and cannot therefore reach clarity concerning what God has called it to become. In addition, the Church needs charisms of prayer, like tongues and the other prayer gifts, as well as gifts of healing if it expects to experience in a vivid way the saving presence of God in its midst. Without a vivid sense of God’s saving presence, the Church will forget that only the saving grace of God creates and sustains it as a community; and that kind of tragic forgetting will make the Christian community indistinguishable from any other natural or sinful human community. A Church that looks like any other natural or sinful human community cannot, however, mediate Christ and His Spirit effectively to a sinful world. If charisms like prophecy, teaching, prayer, and healing create the Church’s awareness of its authentic religious identity, the charisms of the Spirit also endow the Church with an awareness of the common future to which God calls it. Prophets and evangelists must call the community to the kind of repentance and conversion that alone can open it to God’s future. Teachers need to remind the community of its past mistakes so that it will not continue to make them and so to divide the Church into sinful factions. Discerners need to help the community distinguish between true and false teaching, between sound and unsound community discipline, between authentic and inauthentic hopes if shared consensus about the future to which God calls us will ever emerge in a clear and focused manner. The Church, however, needs more than a shared sense of history and a shared consensus about the future in order to reach full consciousness as a Christian community. In addition, all the members of the Church need to collaborate in making that shared future a reality. Mobilizing the Christian community in order to realize the vision of the kingdom to which Jesus called us engages all the action gifts, which facilitate corporate action on the part of the Christian community. By the action gifts, I mean gifts of administration, of pastoral leadership, of community organizing, of practical concern for the poor, for the marginal, and for their needs. Such gifts make possible our practical corporate witness to the gospel. I am suggesting to you that without practical, living faith in all the charisms of the Holy Spirit, the Church will never reach full, shared consciousness as a community of faith. I am also suggesting that only by reaching full, shared, faith consciousness can the Christian community exist as a Church. I say that the Church must re-appropriate all the charisms of the Holy Spirit. It may well be true that God called the Charismatic Renewal into existence as His chosen instrument for bringing the rest of the Church to renewed faith in the gift-giving Pentecostal Spirit. If so, then we in the Charismatic Renewal must acknowledge not only our failure to date to respond adequately to that call; but we must also acknowledge our part in that failure. In my judgment, the Charismatic Renewal has become to a great extent the victim of the chief institution, which it created--namely the prayer meeting. Within the context of shared prayer only, we can only share a limited number of charisms: tongues, prophecy, word gifts, and teaching. Many of the charisms, however, require another context for their exercise. I refer to gifts like administration, pastoral leadership, and practical care for the poor, and a prophecy, which confronts social injustice and oppression instead of just talking piously in King James English. Narrow focus on prayer gifts has, in my judgment, caused the Charismatic Renewal to inculcate an inadequate and skewed charismatic piety by focusing too narrowly on gifts like tongues, healing, and ecstatic prophecy and by failing to cultivate the full spectrum of the gifts. In other words, the Charismatic Renewal itself has failed to grasp fully what Paul the apostle meant when he said (that Jesus), "the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit." Only openness to all the charisms of the Spirit can create the kind of balanced charismatic consciousness that creates the Church as a Church. At the Denver Symposium on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Renewal, which assessed the progress of the Charismatic renewal, I sensed an incipient consensus developing among the leaders of the movement that the name which the bishops gave this movement—"The Charismatic Renewal of the Church"—can have misleading connotations. The total charismatic renewal of the Church involves much more than what goes on in the movement which calls itself in obedience to the bishops, "The Charismatic Renewal." The total charismatic renewal of the Church involves all the renewal movements which contribute to the Church’s shared faith consciousness: movements like the RCIA, the Cursillo, marriage encounter, Christian Life Communities, the Jesuit Volunteers and other volunteer groups in the Church which work for a justice inspired by faith. If the Charismatic Renewal hopes to respond effectively to the call of God to bring living faith in all the charisms to the heart of Catholic piety, then, in my judgment, the Renewal needs a spirit of repentance and of humility. We need to enter into effective dialogue with all the other renewal movements that contribute to the Church’s total charismatic renewal. We need to enter into that dialogue with an expectation that those movements have something important to teach the Charismatic Renewal about the full spectrum of the Spirit’s charismatic inspirations. At the same time, we should enter into dialogue with these other renewal movements with a consciousness of all the important things which the Holy Spirit has taught this movement about the exercise of the gifts and which other renewal movements need to learn. The Spirit must, of course, guide such dialogue; and with the guidance of the Spirit that dialogue will, God willing, advance the day when the entire Church can confess that "the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit" and actually experience the reality of what it confesses. Fr. Gelpi is a professor at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. This article was condensed from his presentation at the Liaison Theological Symposium, The Last Adam Became A Life-Giving Spirit: An Important Key to Spirit Christology, pp. 21-25.
".. I
would rather that you had the gift of proclaiming God's message. Like St.Paul, we are blessed as the
Lord speaks directly to us through our prophesies during our praise and worship session.
The Lord knows our most eager yearnings, our deepest pains and our loftiest aspirations,
and He always has a word of hope, encouragement or even rebuke for us.
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UNOFFICIAL CATHOLIC CHARISMATIC RENEWAL WEBSITE
| Pentecostal Catholics--The
Catholic Charismatic Renewal by The Most Reverend William J. Levada, Archbishop of San Francisco
The first group of Pentecostal Catholics experienced the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the manner unique to Pentecostalism at Duquesne in Pittsburgh in 1967 and at Notre Dame in 1968. By 1972 Cardinal Suenens personally encountered the charismatic renewal, the preferred terminology for Catholics and mainline Protestants, for the first time during a visit to the United States. He was immediately taken by this encounter, appealing as it did to his keen desire to see the church flourish as in a new Pentecost through the work of the Holy Spirit. For him this amounted to a life-long goal. In many ways Suenens was an unlikely person to carry the banner for the Catholic charismatic renewal. Personally reserved, even shy, at times almost overly intellectual, he was profoundly touched in his own personal experience and in assessing the fruits of the Holy Spirit in so many Catholics (and Protestants, too, I should add) whose spiritual journey had been deepened and advanced through the renewal. Cardinal Danneels captures it perfectly in his funeral homily: "How could a cardinal with a face that did not show many emotions, with a straight and immobile stature, with a grave and steady voice, find himself at ease in the midst of a crowd that sang, danced, clapped hands and spoke in tongues? Was it a late life conversion to fantasy and imagination in a man who had been until then too rational and responsible? No. Rather, he perceived in this revival a return to the church of the Acts of the Apostles about which he had always dreamed -- with a taste for the Scriptures, spontaneous prayer, joy, a sense of community, the stirrings of the Spirit, the proliferation of charisms. The Archbishop Levada (Continued from Page 1.) renewal gave the legitimate role of the heart and the body back to the spiritual life of Christians." Suenens dialogued with the Catholic leadership of the new movement -- Ralph Martin, Steve Clark, Kevin Ranaghan, Father Jim Ferry in the United States, and in Europe as well. He made a singular contribution by explaining the renewal to the pope and the Curia, and by alerting its leadership to what I would call their "amnesia" about the gifts of the Holy Spirit to the church: the Eucharist, The Blessed Virgin Mary, the pope as visible center of unity, the scope of Catholic teaching and practice. From 1974 to 1986 Suenens composed a series of six "Malines Documents," which still serve as a guide to the renewal, with precious insight into its possibilities and its needs. Charismatic Renewal, with Kilian McDonnell as lead consultant, was followed by Ecumenism and Charismatic Renewal (1978). In 1979 Charismatic Renewal and Social Action was written in collaboration with his longtime friend, Dom Helder Camara of Brazil. In 1982 he wrote Renewal and the Powers of Darkness, with a Foreword by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The final two "Malines Documents" treat two specific issues the renewal had to deal with: an over-reliance on introspection, in Le Culte du Moi et Foi Chretienne (1985); and the controversial phenomenon Resting in the Spirit (1986), sometimes also referred to as "slaying in the Spirit." 1975 marks the year of the renewal’s "coming of age" in the Catholic Church. Thanks to Veronica O’Brien’s urging of the cardinal and the cardinal’s convincing recommendation to Pope Paul, the renewal was invited to have its world congress at Rome on Pentecost during the Holy Year. As Father Walter Abbott notes, during the 1975 Holy Year "the charismatic renewal was decisively accepted into the Catholic Church when Pope Paul endorsed it in St. Peter’s Basilica on Pentecost Sunday." Peter Hebblethwaite, in his book, Paul VI--The First Modern Pope, concludes, "Suenens won another battle." It is also fair to say that Suenens was the man of the hour for the renewal. His patient, intelligent, ongoing dialogue showed many in the charismatic renewal how to integrate their new enthusiasm for religious experience blessed by the gifts of the Spirit into the faith and practice of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Charisms for the Third Millennium On July 14, 1979, less than a year into the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, Suenens submitted his resignation as archbishop of Malines-Brussels. It was a duty which he, above all, would not neglect or refuse, since he had been the first to publicly call for the retirement of bishops. While the council heard his plea without enthusiasm, Pope Paul VI introduced the rule, motu proprio. On Jan. 4, 1980, he was succeeded as archbishop by Godfried Danneels, then bishop of Antwerp. His has been an active retirement, as his many books and lectures throughout this period will attest. His successor has publicly stated what Pope John Paul II said to him as he began his ministry, "Cardinal Suenens played a crucial role during Vatican II, and the universal church owes much to him." At this symposium we look to the 21st century and the third millennium of Christianity. I was asked to speak to you about the charism of Cardinal Suenens. I have tried to be reasonably thorough, and I hope reasonably objective, in the time given to me. I know that he was genuinely looking forward to this very symposium on retrieving charisms for the 21st century to find the new insights and new directions of the Spirit, who blows where he wills. By way of conclusion, I would recall again Suenens’ singular achievement in providing direction for the council in its earliest days, when he outlined a simple framework for its deliberation and the council decided to concentrate its work around the central theme of the church as such -- ad intra and ad extra. It seems to me that he models a very significant charism to be retrieved for the new millennium: an ability to frame the question properly. Of course our society and its media already have a political framework for characterizing religious statements: They are usually cast on the grid from liberal to conservative. The frame of reference is most often the current political campaign, with comments as thoughtful as a sound byte. The Gospel message handed on in the living tradition of the church is either unknown or so far in the background that it is unrecognizable as a frame of reference. In my view, even the church people tend to mimic the secular frame of reference, with its penchant for labels. I suggest a moratorium on labels in the church and a retrieval of the unified vision of the council, which did not issue a "conservative" Lumen Gentium and a "liberal" Gaudium et Spes. To frame the question properly for these last days of our advent before the Jubilee of the Year 2000 and for the third millennium, we would be well served to focus more clearly, and with greater unity as Catholic Americans, about our task as sacramentum mundi -- the sacrament of Christ in the world. In his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, on preparation for the Jubilee of the Year 2000, Pope John Paul calls the Second Vatican Council, in which he participated as auxiliary bishop of Krakow, "a providential event, whereby the church began (to prepare) for the jubilee of the second millennium." In commenting on the series of Synods of Bishops begun after the council, he says: "The theme underlying them all is evangelization, or rather the new evangelization, the foundations of which were laid down in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi of Pope Paul VI, issued in 1975 following the third general assembly of the Synod of Bishops. These synods themselves are part of the new evangelization: They were born of the Second Vatican Council’s vision of Archbishop Levada (Continued from Page 6.) the church. They open up broad areas for the participation of the laity, whose specific responsibilities in the church they define. They are an expression of the strength which Christ has given to the entire people of God, making it a sharer in his own messianic mission as prophet, priest and king." John Paul relates the themes of Catholic social doctrine to the new evangelization, continuing the vision of Evangelii Nuntiandi, which proposed "evangelization" precisely as a Gospel vision which embraces the church ad intra and ad extra. It thus transcends the categories of dialectical perspective of action and reaction which characterize so much of modern political thought and strategy, of liberal vs. conservative as a dominant framework. To enable and to serve this new evangelization, the Second Vatican Council provided its providential clarification of the true nature of the church, so that knowing who she is, the church might be better able to be the sacramentum mundi. The pluralism of contemporary society challenges us more than ever today to know and say why we believe in Christ and who we are as church. For this reason the question of Catholic identity is necessary and central both for the church as a whole and for each individual disciple within the community. In the face of the well-documented religious ignorance among Catholics in America, I think we must look more urgently at the task of how well we form ourselves as church for our mission in and to the world. What Cardinal Newman called for more than a century ago in England -- a well-formed, well-educated and convinced Catholic laity -- will be more than ever a necessity in an increasingly democratic and pluralistic world of the third millennium. Father Benedict Ashley has suggested that we pay more attention to the "documents" of this Catholic identity: the teachings of the Second Vatican Council as developed through the Synods of Bishops and their resulting apostolic exhortations, and particularly as presented in an integrated manner, updated with the teachings of Vatican II, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In his 1994 McGinley lecture at Fordham, Father Avery Dulles, a symposium speaker, called the catechism "the boldest challenge yet offered to the cultural relativism that currently threatens to erode the contents of the Catholic faith." Put another way, the broad task of the new evangelization, the church’s mission, requires the concomitant task of ongoing catechesis, I might even say a "new" catechesis, to provide the indispensable foundation for effective engagement in the church’s mission in the world, which is the baptismal vocation of the laity. Framing the question for the next century and the new millennium in this way, as our readiness for the challenge of the new evangelization, will ideally bring us to an ongoing participation in the new Pentecost envisioned by Pope John XXIII and Cardinal Suenens for the Second Vatican Council. In his final chapter of the Hidden Hand of God, Suenens gives us quite consciously his last testament: "As I look to the future, I cannot avoid stressing the role of the Holy Spirit in the church of tomorrow. He is always ‘the life-giving Spirit,’ in the fullest meaning of the words. This is the idea I would like to emphasize by way of farewell." Cardinal Suenens, we thank you for the charism -- the gift -- your life has been for us as church. In our farewell to you, may we pay to you the tribute you so kindly gave to your friend John XXIII in your homily at Vatican II: "At his departure, he left us closer to God and the world a better place for us to live." Requiescat in Spiritu Sancto.
For the full text of Archbishop Levada’s keynote address of May 31, 1996, delivered at the Cleveland symposium from which the foregoing was condensed, see Origins, CNS Documentary Service, June 20, 1996, Vol.26:No.5, The Charism of Cardinal Suenens. This article appeared in the February 1998 Edition of the San Francisco Charismatics (ISSN 1098-4056), the monthly newsletter of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Office of the Charismatic Renewal. |
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