Every Easter an amazing Catholic event takes place a little seaside town in the Western part of England. The town of Ilfracombe hosts the annual get together of Catholics involved in the Charismatic movement. Now in its tenth year, the Celebrate conference attracted nearly two thousand Catholics to Celebrate Easter in the Charismatic style.
Once again this year all the tickets had been snapped up within hours of the booking office opening for business. The organizers of Celebrate take over a holiday camp. Most of the accommodation in the town and surrounding area is booked by conference participants.
The Celebrate team hire a local college and convert it into a conference center — using the rooms for workshops and seminars and transforming the gym into a large worship hall. Once the conference swings into action the hall booms with the excellent music of several praise bands. If you enter the hall you will see Catholics from all over the country get their hands up and get down to the serious business of praising the Lord.
It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Loud happy music, people clapping and cheering for Jesus is enough to make more staid Catholics run a mile. The Charismatic movement is sometimes criticised. People say it is shallow and frothy. But at Celebrate the heady charismatic worship is balanced with the daily round of the church’s liturgy and the people praying in a chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed for adoration.
Others say the charismatic movement is not Catholic, or that it lacks true Catholic teaching. Not so at Celebrate. The high spirits are also weighted with solid teaching from the Scriptures and Church teaching. Every morning there is a teaching session followed by mass. In the afternoons a wide range of expertly run workshops and seminars happen all over the site. The day ends with a time of praise, an dynamic speaker and an opportunity for people to make their confession and receive prayer and the ministry of healing.
The most encouraging aspect to Celebrate is the youth work. This year over 40% of the participants were under the age of 22. The Celebrate team work with different communities around the country. Together they put on seven different age-specific worship and training groups. The groups work through a week long program of catechesis, creativity and Christian worship. When a Baptist preacher visited last year to speak to the young adult stream he came into the room to find seventy five young men and women in their late teens and early twenties on their knees rapt in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Not being familiar with Catholic worship he asked what was going on. When it was explained he choked back the emotion and said, ‘Those kids really love Jesus. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ The Baptist then put his theological qualms to one side and dropped to his knees and joined them.
In England the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is still unknown in many circles. But among the new movements in the church, the Charismatic Renewal is one of the oldest. The charismatic movement is a grass roots movement, so it is difficult to pin down just where it started. Church historians trace the beginnings to American Pentecostalism at the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1950s a South African Pentecostal named David DuPlessis felt led to share what was happening with other Christians. In the 1960s the Catholic Church had caught the Spirit of the Charismatic renewal and, in the wake of Vatican II, it quickly spread to influence many in the Catholic Church.
By the early 70s, In the USA, two young Catholics realized that something exciting was happening in the Catholic Church. Life in the Spirit seminars were established and before long Catholics were experiencing a new kind of outpouring of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The movement soon jumped the Atlantic, Life in the Spirit seminars were started in England and by 1974 a Committee for Catholic Charismatic Renewal was established. For ten years an Englishman named Charles Whitehead was the international director of the Office for Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Rome and Charles now serves on an international committee that harnesses the experiences and skills of Charismatic Renewal for the work of evangelization.
At the first Pentecost the first Christians experienced astounding supernatural gifts. These same gifts have accompanied the Charismatic Renewal Movement. At charismatic meetings people speak in tongues, they often ‘rest in the Spirit’ or seem to pass out and need to lie down on the floor as if overcome with the Spirit. Miraculous healings and exorcisms are reported, and dramatic conversions take place.
They should remember why the gifts were given in the first place. They were not given simply to impress non-believers with the power of the risen Lord. They were also given to empower the church for the vital work of evangelization. David Payne, who is the director of the Catholic Evangelization Services, has pioneered the CaFE course. CaFE stands for Catholic Faith Exploration. Now used in over 500 parishes in England, the video-based course seeks to enliven the Catholic Church with the good news in a fresh way. Payne and his team have all been heavily influenced by the Charismatic Renewal, but he admits that it is right for the more dramatic and controversial aspects of Charismatic Renewal to be played down. While not denying the more dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit, CaFE emphasizes how the power of the Holy Spirit is present through the more ordinary channels of Church and sacraments.
Other groups influenced by the Charismatic Renewal are also at the forefront of the New Evangelization. Various small communities have grown from the Renewal Movement. The Emmaus Family of Prayer promotes a teaching ministry with tapes, retreats and missions. House of the Open Door Community organizes a home for alcoholics, runs youth retreats and training sessions, while The Catholic Bible School and Bible Alive Publishing promote Bible study and Biblical devotion amongst Catholics. The Sion Community and The Pilgrims Community are key players in organizing and supporting Evangelization in England today.
In his 1990 encyclical Redemptio Missio Pope John Paul II was already recognizing the rapid growth of the new movements in the church. Charismatic Renewal was one of them. At that point he said then, ‘they represent a true gift of God both for new evangelization and for missionary activity… I recommend that they be spread and that they be used to give fresh energy, especially among young people to the Christian life and to evangelization.’
To recognize and encourage their growth, the Pope summoned members of the new movements to Rome for Pentecost Day 1998. On that day St Peter’s Square was thronged with over 350,000 representatives of the new movements. The Pope called to them clearly and said, ‘Open yourselves docilely to the gifts of the Spirit! Accept gratefully and obediently the charisms which the Spirit never ceases to bestow upon us.’
Many thousands of Catholics the world over have responded to his call. When faced with falling vocations and a drop in mass numbers we sometimes wonder what the church of the future will look like. If you want to see the church of the future today, then part if the future is revealed by the Charismatic movement. What is going on there will be a vibrant and powerful part of the Catholic Church of the twenty first century. As their leader Charles Whitehead said to me recently, ‘The Charismatic renewal used to be broad and shallow. Now in the church it is running fast and deep.’
Dwight Longenecker is a Catholic freelance writer published regularly in the Catholic Press in England. He has also been featured in Our Sunday Visitor, and National Catholic Register and is the author of eight books on conversion, apologetics and Benedictine spirituality.
Dwight's first book, a collection of English conversion stories, is available from Coming Home Network. His latest book is Adventures in Orthodoxy.
(This article was first published in The Universe and is used by permission of the author.)
