The Charismatic Renewal

On Passion Sunday, 3 April 1960, Dennis Bennett, rector of St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, told his congregation that he had received the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and had spoken in unknown tongues (An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, Bennett, Dennis Joseph). He wrote ten years later that on that day he did what he should have done five months earlier (Bennett, Nine O’Clock in the Morning, his account of Passion Sunday, 3 April 1960). He and some parishioners had had the experience in 1959; the sermon aroused opposition, and he resigned and went that year to St Luke’s Church in Seattle (An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, Bennett, Dennis Joseph). The Episcopal Church’s dictionary describes the charismatic renewal as the impact on the mainline churches of Pentecostalism, which claims to experience again the gifts of Pentecost, especially tongues (An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, Charismatic Renewal, or Neo-Pentecostalism). On that movement’s beginnings see the Azusa Street Revival.

David du Plessis, a Pentecostal who had organised the Pentecostal World Conferences of 1949 and 1952, tells in his own book how he met John Mackay of Princeton in 1951 and how the secretary of the World Council of Churches asked him to go to its assembly at Evanston in 1954 (Du Plessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go, biographical note; account of Princeton (1951) and Evanston (1954)).

Among Catholics the Second Vatican Council had taught in 1964 that the Spirit distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank, and that these charisms, the simpler as well as the more outstanding, are to be received with thanksgiving, though those who preside in the Church are to judge them (Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 12). In January 1967 four Catholics from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh went to a prayer meeting of Christians of several churches and, by the account of a student whose study group two of the professors led, two of the men received the baptism in the Holy Spirit there (Mansfield, testimony on the Duquesne Weekend). On 17 February about twenty-five students left for a retreat at a house outside the city (Mansfield, testimony on the Duquesne Weekend). Patti Gallagher, one of them, later described how on the Saturday night she and another student were overcome in the chapel by a sense of the presence of God (Mansfield, testimony on the Duquesne Weekend). A document drawn up for Catholics in the movement in 1974 dates the beginning of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal to the experience of a group of professors and students in the United States in 1967 (Malines Document 1 (1974), ch. I, 1).

That document was the work of theologians and lay leaders gathered at Malines by Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens (Malines Document 1 (1974), Introduction). It marks a difference from the Pentecostal churches. Classical Pentecostals, it says, teach two stages, conversion and then baptism in the Holy Spirit; for Catholics what is particular to the renewal is that the power of the Spirit, already given in Christian initiation, comes to be consciously and personally experienced (Malines Document 1 (1974), ch. III, 2). On 19 May 1975 Paul VI received the movement’s international congress in Rome. He asked how such a spiritual renewal could fail to be a “chance” for the Church and the world, and recalled Paul’s rule not to quench the Spirit but to test everything (Paul VI, address of 19 May 1975).