A Mighty Current of Grace: The Story of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal by Alan Schreck

Author:Alan Schreck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Word Among Us Press
Published: 2017-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Catholic Hierarchy and the Renewal

Every movement or group in the Catholic Church is subject to the authority and guidance of the Church’s pastors, especially the pope and the bishops, who make up the Church’s primary hierarchy or leadership structure. In regard to these movements, the heirarchy’s role is to “test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) or to “test the spirits to see whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1), as well as to provide pastoral guidance and support for individual Catholics involved in these movements or groups.

So what has the Catholic hierarchy had to say about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal? We have already seen that the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) taught about the importance and the role of charisms in the Church. Vatican II’s Presbyterorum Ordinis [Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests] speaks directly about how ordained ministers should pastor the charisms and the lay members of the Church who possess them: “While trying the spirits to see if they be of God, they must discover with faith, recognize with joy, and foster with diligence the many and varied charismatic gifts of the laity, whether these be of a humble or more exalted kind” (9).

This document, promulgated on December 7, 1965, shows how God was preparing the hierarchy of the Church to discern and support the Renewal that emerged a little over a year later.

A New Pentecost

Pope St. John XXIII was the prophetic pope who called the Second Vatican Council, and on December 25, 1961, exhorted the whole Church to pray for the upcoming council with a prayer that began, “Renew Your wonders in our time, as though for a new Pentecost.” Shortly before his death, he predicted that after the council “will dawn that new Pentecost which is the object of our yearning.”1

Blessed Pope Paul VI brought the council to a conclusion after Pope St. John XXIII’s death in 1963 and presided over the Catholic Church during the emergence of the Renewal until his death in 1978. Paul VI aligned himself with Pope St. John XXIII in his hope for a new Pentecost. Toward the end of his pontificate, in 1975, he wrote,

One must…recognize a prophetic intuition on the part of our predecessor, John XXIII, who envisioned a kind of new Pentecost as a fruit of the Council. We too have wished to place ourself in the same perspective and in the same attitude of expectation. Not that Pentecost has ever ceased to be an actuality throughout the entire history of the Church, but so great are the needs and perils of the present age, so vast the horizons of mankind drawn towards world coexistence and powerless to achieve it, that there is no salvation for it except in a new outpouring of the gift of God. Let Him then come, the Creating Spirit, to renew the face of the earth!2

Even before the Renewal emerged, Pope Paul VI had a pastoral concern to increase Catholics’ awareness of the person of the Holy Spirit. In 1964,

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