The Pentecostal Movement

The Pentecostal Movement

Then & Now

Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, leaders at the very beginning of CCR, gave a wonderful presentation about its history and suggested priorities for the way forward at the 40th Anniversary Celebration at the Westminster Cathedral on 5th May 2007.
Below we reprint part one of their talk.

Dorothy & Kevin A few months ago I was talking with a priest who teaches theology in the graduate school at the University of Notre Dame. This priest mentioned that, during one of his recent lectures, he quoted a section from one of Fr. Cantalamessa’s books about the charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church. One of his Catholic graduate students said: “what is charismatic renewal?” It is hard for many of us to believe that, 40 years after this great Pentecostal renewal has swept through the church, and has taken root in more than 100 countries, and has touched the lives of over one hundred twenty five million Catholics around the world, that there are still so many Catholics who have never been exposed to the renewal or to the power of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. We still have work to do!

One of the first things we will have to do is to clear up the confusion about this movement of God. Almost 40 years ago, the student newspaper announced the first charismatic renewal prayer meetings at the University of Notre Dame with headlines which read: “Spiritualists Claim Gift of Tongues at Exorcism Rites,” and, “If they touch you, you learn to speak Chinese.” These headlines were, of course confused and confusing. They were factually and theologically mistaken. Fortunately, there were other reporters, such as one from the National Catholic Reporter, who wrote more balanced, objective articles reporting what was happening in the early days of the renewal. Because of this publicity, many people flocked to the meetings at Notre Dame. The curious, the skeptical and those who were seeking more from the Lord all came together. Soon, the meetings and the movement grew in both size and favour. The Pentecostal renewal among Catholics began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1966, among Catholic faculty members and students at Duquesne University. The faculty members were actively seeking a deeper relationship with the Lord. Several of them who served as mentors for the students had, themselves, been praying that the Holy Spirit would renew in them all the graces of their baptism and confirmation. Each day they prayed for one another the “golden Sequence” for the liturgy of Pentecost Sunday, “Come Holy Spirit.”

Power from Baptism in the Holy Spirit

During this time, at a Cursillo Convention in 1966, one of these professors was introduced to The Cross and the Switchblade, the story of David Wilkerson’s powerful ministry among gang members and drug addicts in New York City. Wilkerson claimed that the power in his work came from a “baptism in the Spirit.” As the professor and his colleagues read, their eyes were opened to many biblical texts which they had known for years, but which now shouted out to them that the culmination of Jesus’ messianic career was that just as he had received the Spirit to be messiah and Lord, so the same Spirit was his great gift to his disciples. They realized anew that they needed more of the life of the Spirit to be effective disciples. So they sought out a group of mainline church people, mostly Episcopalians and Presbyterians, who claimed to have received this “Pentecostal” experience and to have been “baptized in the Holy Spirit.” Soon they themselves were prayed with and received the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

A couple of months later, a large group of their students were gathered together for a retreat. Without prompting, other than fellow student, Patti Gallagher Mansfield’s urging them to gather in the chapel at the retreat house, almost all in the group experienced powerful movements of the Holy Spirit, including charisms, once thought to have been meant only for the “early” church. Some spoke in tongues, others prophesied. Many of them fell prostrate, but all who were touched experienced a remarkable deepening of their faith. This event has come to be known as the “Duquesne weekend.”

Wrestled with theological objections

Dorothy had previously graduated from Duquesne University and we both knew all of these faculty members. So when their story first reached us at Notre Dame University in Indiana in January of 1967, we were both puzzled and intrigued. At first we struggled and fought against what they were saying. We wrestled with theological objections, the most important of which was: “hadn’t we already received the Holy Spirit in both the sacraments of baptism and confirmation?” Gradually, however, our questions were answered from three main sources: the witness of the New Testament, the writings of the Fathers of the Church on Christian initiation, and the documents of Vatican II. Our skepticism and doubt gave way to a desire to experience “more” of the Lord ourselves. And so on March 5th of 1967, we met with seven others to pray to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, to be filled with the gifts and the fruit of the Spirit that our lives might be more fully Christian and filled with the power to live the Christian life to the fullest. “Lord,” I prayed, “if there is more of your Holy Spirit you want me to have, then Lord, send me your Spirit now.” That night, there were no manifest charisms in the group. There was however, a marked increase in faith, newness in prayer, incredible joy, and a quantum leap in boldness.

A week later, on March 13th we attended a prayer meeting in the home of Ray and Mabel Bullard. Ray was the president of the South Bend chapter of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International, and a deacon in the local Assembly of God church. Ray invited several Pentecostal pastors to come to meet this group of university Catholics who, they were shocked to learn, claimed to have received a “Pentecostal” experience. What a night it was! Our differences were extreme-- culturally and theologically. Yet we were one in the Spirit in a unique and powerful way, and, again to the surprise and amazement of the Pentecostals, we all received the gift of tongues as we prayed. We were excited and grateful.

we all became evangelizers

From that night on, we all became evangelizers. We were eager to talk about our renewed faith, about the power of Jesus Christ’s saving love to transform each of us and the whole world. In the wake of the biblical renewal and the Second Vatican Council, many of us had already been holding bible vigils and prayer meetings of one sort or another. But now they took on a whole new life and form. They were more spontaneous. The charisms were present. We held prayer meetings in our homes and on campus and we testified to all that the Lord was doing among us. People flocked to experience the reality of Christ’s Spirit. The “movement” grew. We find a bit of humour in saying “the movement grew.” Because, of course, in l967 we didn’t actually know we were at the beginning of a “movement” at all. We knew only that we had to keep sharing the power and the joy that we had found. It became a “movement” because one person told another who told another and on it went, eventually around the world.

But the major impetus for this rapid spread of the movement came in the spring of 1967. We began to realize that we needed a retreat to pray about what had happened to us, and to seek the will of the Lord for what he might be asking of us. Some friends from Duquesne University and Michigan State University came to Notre Dame to join us in what was called “The Michigan State Weekend.” We numbered about 80 students, priests, and faculty from the three universities In retrospect we have often referred to this weekend as the “first international Catholic Charismatic Conference.” We called it international because one religious sister, who was present, was from Quebec!

Notoriety of first meeting

We had not expected 80 people and so we overflowed the confines of the building we had rented for the weekend, and had to hold prayer meetings in large classrooms, celebrate Mass together at the outdoor grotto of our Lady of Lourdes, and pray and eat together while sprawled over the lawns. The size and semi public character of this weekend brought us a great deal of unsolicited notoriety. The reporters came. Despite the occasional glaring confusion in their reports, the publicity did bring hundreds of men and women to the regular Friday night prayer meetings for the next few weeks.

During the university summer session of 1967, laypeople, priests, and religious brothers and sisters came as usual, from all over the country and the world to do further study for advanced degrees. But many who came that summer had heard about “happenings” at Notre Dame, and so a group of us set up a panel discussion on the Pentecostal experience. To our amazement, over three hundred attended. We gave a brief history of what had been happening, an initial theology of what it meant, and shared many testimonies of conversion and healing. People responded enthusiastically. For the next three weeks we held prayer meetings twice a week where upwards of 200 people jammed into classrooms. Priests, seminarians, religious and lay people were all eager to approach the Father through Jesus in the power of the Spirit. Significantly, many of these people who attended summer school at Notre Dame were missionaries or foreign students, and so, when they all returned to their respective homes at the end of the summer, they took the news and power of the baptism in the Spirit to many different countries. What had begun as a student weekend retreat at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh spread to a few friends at Michigan State and Notre Dame Universities, and from there a movement was born.

Role of Notre Dame University in spreading CCR

Though Duquesne University in Pittsburgh is where the first set of Catholics was baptized in the Holy Spirit, the connection with Notre Dame University in Indiana was pivotal to the formation of the young movement. Not only is Notre Dame centrally located in the United States, but it is well known nationally and internationally as a Catholic University, and among those who were initially involved there, were theologians, historians and priests. The many theological questions present in the early days of this movement found discussion, analysis, formulation, and answers. That most important of questions, “hadn’t we already received the Holy Spirit in both the sacraments of baptism and confirmation?” was the first one tackled. The answer of course, was yes, and yet our experience was that what we had received was a fresh, new release of the power of those sacraments unlike anything we had experienced before. Years of subsequent theological research and debate has only confirmed our initial realization that, indeed, what we call baptism in the Holy Spirit has been poured out in the Church since the first Pentecost in every complete baptismal celebration.

But what is new in the experience of being baptized in the Holy Spirit reminds us of what that great Pentecostal, David DuPlessis, used to say of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. It’s like putting a steak on a hot grill. We may have had the steak for a long time. Perhaps it was in our freezer. But as it is put on the coals and sizzles over the fire, the steak becomes both attractive and useful. In being baptized in the Holy Spirit, we found and find that the power given to us in baptism and confirmation is actualized in a concrete living way.

As we said in our book, Catholic Pentecostals, which detailed the origins of the Pentecostal movement among Catholics, the experience of being “baptized” in the Holy Spirit took the wrappings off a gift we had already been given. It opened it up and revealed the treasure within us. As Charles Whitehead has written: it is “A personal experience of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit who brings alive in new ways the graces of our baptism. The Holy Spirit not only sets on fire all that we have already received, but comes again in power to equip us with his gifts for service and mission.” In other words, it is not given to us to make us holier than others. Nor is it a special devotion to the Holy Spirit or a strange new spirituality. In fact, it is not about “us” at all. The Lord has chosen to pour out his Holy Spirit in power in our day in order to equip us to serve. To him, it is all about this world that he so loved that he sent his only Son. We were given the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to come alive as the body of Christ and continue his work and mission in the world.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE

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A few months ago I was talking with a priest who teaches theology in the graduate school at the University of Notre Dame. This priest mentioned that, during one of his recent lectures, he quoted a section from one of Fr. Cantalamessa’s books about the charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church. One of his Catholic graduate students said: “what is charismatic renewal?” It is hard for many of us to believe that, 40 years after this great Pentecostal renewal has swept through the church, and has taken root in more than 100 countries, and has touched the lives of over one hundred twenty five million Catholics around the world, that there are still so many Catholics who have never been exposed to the renewal or to the power of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. We still have work to do! One of the first things we will have to do is to clear up the confusion about this movement of God. Almost 40 years ago, the student newspaper announced the first charismatic renewal prayer meetings at the University of Notre Dame with headlines which read: “Spiritualists Claim Gift of Tongues at Exorcism Rites,” and, “If they touch you, you learn to speak Chinese.” These headlines were, of course confused and confusing. They were factually and theologically mistaken. Fortunately, there were other reporters, such as one from the National Catholic Reporter, who wrote more balanced, objective articles reporting what was happening in the early days of the renewal. Because of this publicity, many people flocked to the meetings at Notre Dame. The curious, the skeptical and those who were seeking more from the Lord all came together. Soon, the meetings and the movement grew in both size and favour. The Pentecostal renewal among Catholics began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1966, among Catholic faculty members and students at Duquesne University. The faculty members were actively seeking a deeper relationship with the Lord. Several of them who served as mentors for the students had, themselves, been praying that the Holy Spirit would renew in them all the graces of their baptism and confirmation. Each day they prayed for one another the “golden Sequence” for the liturgy of Pentecost Sunday, “Come Holy Spirit.” Power from Baptism in the Holy Spirit During this time, at a Cursillo Convention in 1966, one of these professors was introduced to The Cross and the Switchblade, the story of David Wilkerson’s powerful ministry among gang members and drug addicts in New York City. Wilkerson claimed that the power in his work came from a “baptism in the Spirit.” As the professor and his colleagues read, their eyes were opened to many biblical texts which they had known for years, but which now shouted out to them that the culmination of Jesus’ messianic career was that just as he had received the Spirit to be messiah and Lord, so the same Spirit was his great gift to his disciples. They realized anew that they needed more of the life of the Spirit to be effective disciples. So they sought out a group of mainline church people, mostly Episcopalians and Presbyterians, who claimed to have received this “Pentecostal” experience and to have been “baptized in the Holy Spirit.” Soon they themselves were prayed with and received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. A couple of months later, a large group of their students were gathered together for a retreat. Without prompting, other than fellow student, Patti Gallagher Mansfield’s urging them to gather in the chapel at the retreat house, almost all in the group experienced powerful movements of the Holy Spirit, including charisms, once thought to have been meant only for the “early” church. Some spoke in tongues, others prophesied. Many of them fell prostrate, but all who were touched experienced a remarkable deepening of their faith. This event has come to be known as the “Duquesne weekend.” Wrestled with theological objections Dorothy had previously graduated from Duquesne University and we both knew all of these faculty members. So when their story first reached us at Notre Dame University in Indiana in January of 1967, we were both puzzled and intrigued. At first we struggled and fought against what they were saying. We wrestled with theological objections, the most important of which was: “hadn’t we already received the Holy Spirit in both the sacraments of baptism and confirmation?” Gradually, however, our questions were answered from three main sources: the witness of the New Testament, the writings of the Fathers of the Church on Christian initiation, and the documents of Vatican II. Our skepticism and doubt gave way to a desire to experience “more” of the Lord ourselves. And so on March 5th of 1967, we met with seven others to pray to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, to be filled with the gifts and the fruit of the Spirit that our lives might be more fully Christian and filled with the power to live the Christian life to the fullest. “Lord,” I prayed, “if there is more of your Holy Spirit you want me to have, then Lord, send me your Spirit now.” That night, there were no manifest charisms in the group. There was however, a marked increase in faith, newness in prayer, incredible joy, and a quantum leap in boldness. A week later, on March 13th we attended a prayer meeting in the home of Ray and Mabel Bullard. Ray was the president of the South Bend chapter of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International, and a deacon in the local Assembly of God church. Ray invited several Pentecostal pastors to come to meet this group of university Catholics who, they were shocked to learn, claimed to have received a “Pentecostal” experience. What a night it was! Our differences were extreme-- culturally and theologically. Yet we were one in the Spirit in a unique and powerful way, and, again to the surprise and amazement of the Pentecostals, we all received the gift of tongues as we prayed. We were excited and grateful. we all became evangelizers From that night on, we all became evangelizers. We were eager to talk about our renewed faith, about the power of Jesus Christ’s saving love to transform each of us and the whole world. In the wake of the biblical renewal and the Second Vatican Council, many of us had already been holding bible vigils and prayer meetings of one sort or another. But now they took on a whole new life and form. They were more spontaneous. The charisms were present. We held prayer meetings in our homes and on campus and we testified to all that the Lord was doing among us. People flocked to experience the reality of Christ’s Spirit. The “movement” grew. We find a bit of humour in saying “the movement grew.” Because, of course, in l967 we didn’t actually know we were at the beginning of a “movement” at all. We knew only that we had to keep sharing the power and the joy that we had found. It became a “movement” because one person told another who told another and on it went, eventually around the world. But the major impetus for this rapid spread of the movement came in the spring of 1967. We began to realize that we needed a retreat to pray about what had happened to us, and to seek the will of the Lord for what he might be asking of us. Some friends from Duquesne University and Michigan State University came to Notre Dame to join us in what was called “The Michigan State Weekend.” We numbered about 80 students, priests, and faculty from the three universities In retrospect we have often referred to this weekend as the “first international Catholic Charismatic Conference.” We called it international because one religious sister, who was present, was from Quebec! Notoriety of first meeting We had not expected 80 people and so we overflowed the confines of the building we had rented for the weekend, and had to hold prayer meetings in large classrooms, celebrate Mass together at the outdoor grotto of our Lady of Lourdes, and pray and eat together while sprawled over the lawns. The size and semi public character of this weekend brought us a great deal of unsolicited notoriety. The reporters came. Despite the occasional glaring confusion in their reports, the publicity did bring hundreds of men and women to the regular Friday night prayer meetings for the next few weeks. During the university summer session of 1967, laypeople, priests, and religious brothers and sisters came as usual, from all over the country and the world to do further study for advanced degrees. But many who came that summer had heard about “happenings” at Notre Dame, and so a group of us set up a panel discussion on the Pentecostal experience. To our amazement, over three hundred attended. We gave a brief history of what had been happening, an initial theology of what it meant, and shared many testimonies of conversion and healing. People responded enthusiastically. For the next three weeks we held prayer meetings twice a week where upwards of 200 people jammed into classrooms. Priests, seminarians, religious and lay people were all eager to approach the Father through Jesus in the power of the Spirit. Significantly, many of these people who attended summer school at Notre Dame were missionaries or foreign students, and so, when they all returned to their respective homes at the end of the summer, they took the news and power of the baptism in the Spirit to many different countries. What had begun as a student weekend retreat at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh spread to a few friends at Michigan State and Notre Dame Universities, and from there a movement was born. Role of Notre Dame University in spreading CCR Though Duquesne University in Pittsburgh is where the first set of Catholics was baptized in the Holy Spirit, the connection with Notre Dame University in Indiana was pivotal to the formation of the young movement. Not only is Notre Dame centrally located in the United States, but it is well known nationally and internationally as a Catholic University, and among those who were initially involved there, were theologians, historians and priests. The many theological questions present in the early days of this movement found discussion, analysis, formulation, and answers. That most important of questions, “hadn’t we already received the Holy Spirit in both the sacraments of baptism and confirmation?” was the first one tackled. The answer of course, was yes, and yet our experience was that what we had received was a fresh, new release of the power of those sacraments unlike anything we had experienced before. Years of subsequent theological research and debate has only confirmed our initial realization that, indeed, what we call baptism in the Holy Spirit has been poured out in the Church since the first Pentecost in every complete baptismal celebration. But what is new in the experience of being baptized in the Holy Spirit reminds us of what that great Pentecostal, David DuPlessis, used to say of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. It’s like putting a steak on a hot grill. We may have had the steak for a long time. Perhaps it was in our freezer. But as it is put on the coals and sizzles over the fire, the steak becomes both attractive and useful. In being baptized in the Holy Spirit, we found and find that the power given to us in baptism and confirmation is actualized in a concrete living way. As we said in our book, Catholic Pentecostals, which detailed the origins of the Pentecostal movement among Catholics, the experience of being “baptized” in the Holy Spirit took the wrappings off a gift we had already been given. It opened it up and revealed the treasure within us. As Charles Whitehead has written: it is “A personal experience of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit who brings alive in new ways the graces of our baptism. The Holy Spirit not only sets on fire all that we have already received, but comes again in power to equip us with his gifts for service and mission.” In other words, it is not given to us to make us holier than others. Nor is it a special devotion to the Holy Spirit or a strange new spirituality. In fact, it is not about “us” at all. The Lord has chosen to pour out his Holy Spirit in power in our day in order to equip us to serve. To him, it is all about this world that he so loved that he sent his only Son. We were given the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to come alive as the body of Christ and continue his work and mission in the world. TO BE CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE << Top Home >>