BLIGHTED
LEAVEN WITHIN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
By Clark Logan
GUEST COLUMNIST, New York
ROCKVILLE CENTRE – LONG
ISLAND. The
Rockville Centre diocesan newspaper The
Long Island Catholic featured a lead article in its May 19, 1999 issue
called “Charismatics gather to feel the spirit of God the Father,” in which it
reported that 1700 members of Charismatic Renewal gathered at Long Island’s
University of C.W. Post Campus on May 15 “to feel the flame of the Holy
Spirit.” Father John Patrick
Bertolucci, a veteran of the Charismatic movement and associate pastor of Saint
Ambrose’s Church in the Albany Diocese, was the featured guest speaker, who
delivered the keynote address to his Charismatic audience. The day’s events, sponsored by the Rockville
Centre’s Charismatic Renewal Office, was designed to celebrate 1999 as “The
Year of the Father.”
The Charismatic movement has made tremendous inroads into the
life of the Catholic Church on Long Island over the past 35 years and continues
to be a strong religious sect. The
movement has made such gains that it can truly be cited as a powerful force
operating not only within the Rockville Centre Diocese but indeed within the
entire modern conciliar Church throughout the world.
In the Protestant world, the Pentecostal movement has often led people to separate from their parent churches and found new ones. However, the Catholic Pentecostal renewal movement has manifested no such tendencies. On the contrary, the Charismatic renewal has moved into the heart of the Church, and, in every parish, the Charismatic presence is well-represented. Over the years, Charismatic Renewal has developed its own diocesan infrastructures, which closely collaborate with diocesan officials to form a sort of parallel church functioning within the broader ecclesial community. Many of the leaders of the Charismatic movement, both on the local and national levels, have been enthusiastic promoters of the new liturgy and have been chiefly responsible for many of the liturgical abuses and desacralization which abound in our local churches. Many others engage in liturgical functions as eucharistic ministers and lectors and hold key position in the religious instruction of adults and children, and some even provide therapeutic counseling and healing, while others exercise their Charismatic ministry in nursing homes and senior residences.
Under diocesan auspices, there are a number of seminars and
workshops offered through the Diocesan Office of Charismatic Renewal, and all
of the retreat houses on Long Island provide a wide variety of “prayer styles,”
such as Eastern mysticism and centering prayer, from which the unsuspecting
laity can choose. Of course, traditional and Marian prayers and devotions, such
as litanies and novenas, are offered. However, the bulk of “prayer styles”
promoted is Charismatic in nature, and the Charismatic Renewal Office for the
Diocese of Rockville Centre publicly promotes Patti Gallagher Mansfield’s book As by a New Pentecost: The Dramatic
Beginnings of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Steubenville University
Press, 1992.
So-called Charismatic “healing masses” abound throughout Long
Island. A healing mass is “staged” in a facility in Uniondale that is shared
with the Indult crowd of the Latin Mass Committee. This raises questions
regarding the prudential judgment of the Indult Committee in using this
facility, because hosts allegedly “consecrated” at these healing masses are
reserved there and later on might be distributed to those in attendance at the
Indult Mass. Since there have been no assurances to the contrary, this is far
from being a hypothetical case — however, I digress.
CHARISMATIC RENEWAL:
BASED ON A THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE, EMOTIONALISM, SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
According to a veteran leader in the Charismatic movement on Long
Island, who was interviewed by Pete Sheehan in a series of articles on the
Charismatic sect featured in The Long
Island Catholic: “Prayer is the opening up to the power of the Holy Spirit
and [to the] personal experience of the Spirit, a more clearly felt sense of
the presence of God.”
Accordingly, in order for prayer to be efficacious, the individual has
to feel something, and it is this experience which, when a person acquires it,
makes him properly and truly a believer. Until he achieves the acquisition of
an experience, he cannot be considered a believer. This false notion of prayer,
once associated more with Protestant Pentecostal Churches, is pervasive
throughout the parishes on Long Island. Many of the clergy here probably hold
to this notion. What other reason can
be cited for its pervasiveness among the laity? As to the question of what this opening up to the power of the
spirit is, I will expand on this later.
Charismatics advance the claim that “people who are logical and
intellectually inclined look for Charismatic prayer because they feel something
lacking in their faith.” In other
words, there is a distinctive Charismatic prayer which is more efficacious than
non-Charismatic prayer, since the former rather than the latter will provide
what is lacking in their faith.
For the
Charismatic, faith is primarily a matter of feeling and sentiment. “They might
be practicing, active and involved Catholics, but sense that they are working
hard at their faith without feeling the consolation of faith, the clear sense
of God’s presence, love and support.”
When the
disciples asked Our Lord how to pray, He taught them the Our Father. Simple.
Not an emotional, energy-packed experience. Not a “gift” which some receive, while others do not, but a
simple prayer which any man, woman or child can say.
The
lives of the Saints clearly reinforce this truth. Their methods of prayer did not resemble sporadic outbreaks in
unknown, unintelligible utterances.
They became Saints on the traditional prayers of the Church: the Creed, the Our Father, the Glory Be, the
Acts of Faith, Hope and Charity; the Act of Contrition, prayers based on the
Psalms and, of course, the lifting of their minds and hearts in true religious
sentiment in gratitude to God.
AN ECUMENICAL FORCE & IDEOLOGY
On a
broader level, the Charismatic movement can be considered to be an ecumenical
force within the official Church by the very fact that it is not an institution
competing with other institutions, because it does not share the rejection of
or contempt for institutions that is so widespread in our day. Charismatics
have no hesitation at all in participating in interfaith prayer and worship
services, despite Pope Pius XI’s prohibition of such promiscuous gatherings, as
contained in his encyclical letter, Mortalium
Animos.
Charismatic Renewal is well-equipped to work from within ecclesial
structures for the cause of ecumenism, while avoiding the appearance of schism
from the official Church. It is able to impose its ideology under the guise of
renewal, unity, peace and social justice.
The latest attempt to bring Charismatic renewal down to the parish level
is not the Cross of our Savior, but a dead tree stump with sprouts of leaves
among the dead branches.
As an
ideology, the driving force of the modern Charismatic movement is humanitarian
and naturalistic. It seeks to build an
earthly habitat and to establish an illusionary world utopia of love and
harmony and peace and justice by holding out an empty promise that a new
springtime is in the process of dawning on mankind, as if its followers knew
something from an esoteric or gnostic science.
It is the total evisceration of the sense of the supernatural in the
life of the Church.
FATHER
OF PENTECOSTALISM
Charismatic Renewal derives its inspiration mostly from Pentecostalism, which owes its origins and development to John Wesley (1703 – 1791), a former Anglican minister, who broke from the Church of England in 1738 and started his own religious sect popularly known as Methodism.
John Wesley worked on his book entitled A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, completed in 1777,
describing what he believed and taught.
He rebelled against the Calvinism of his day, with its belief in
predestination and its notion of the total depravity and corruption of
man. Wesley preached the “Baptism of
the Spirit” and developed the theology of the “Second Blessing.” It was John Fletcher, a colleague of Wesley,
who called the Second Blessing the Baptism of the Spirit and held that it was a
personal, inner experience. The
hallmark or sign of the manifestation of the Baptism in the Spirit is
glossolalia, the incoherent, unintelligible utterances popularly known as
“speaking in tongues,” which has no scriptural basis at all.
The Greek philosopher Plato (429 – 347 B.C.) could well have
been speaking of Charismatics of our day when he examined the effects of
intense religious healing on the minds of its adherents and found that among
most there was a transient and temporary altered state of consciousness and
impaired judgment which rendered worshippers vulnerable to psychosomatic
manipulation. In his magnum opus Phaedrus and Timaeus, Plato wrote about
those who were engaged in prayer associated with prophecy and interior
locutions. According to Plato, they
were possessed and out of their minds.
Some of these religious exercises, he said, even brought physical
healing to the worshippers. He further
observed that persons who participate in such worship and receive private
revelation, often accompanied by prophecy, vision or healing are demented or
possessed. Hence, there is an acute
need for Catholics to exercise vigilance in regards to arbitrary Charismatic
claims that certain people have the gift of healing.
THE BIRTH OF THE “CATHOLIC” CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT
In August 1966, some lay
professors of Duquesne University attended the Congress of the Cursillo
movement, held at Notre Dame University. Apparently dissatisfied with the
Catholic Faith, the Pearl of Great Price, they set out for something of their
own choosing and hoped to find a novel spirituality in the Cursillo movement
that had started in Spain before the Second Vatican Council. The Duquesne group had already been involved
in the liturgical, ecumenical and peace movements of the Cursillo movement and
had been disillusioned with all of them.
At the Cursillo Congress,
they met Steve Clark and Ralph Martin, who were considered the leaders of the
Ann Arbor community and who were coordinators of student activities in Saint
John’s Parish, East Lansing, Michigan.
Clark had just read a book in which he found certain ideas that greatly
influenced him, and he in turn introduced the book to the lay professors of
Duquesne University. It was entitled The Cross and the Switchblade, authored
by David Wilkerson — an auto-biographical story of a Protestant pastor who was
led by strong inner impulses of a vague idealism to abandon the life of a
salaried parish minister and to embark on a self-appointed apostolic mission to
the delinquents and drug addicts of Brooklyn. This book provided the Duquesne
group with a kind of customized spirituality for which they were looking, and
it provided them with the basis for their prayer meetings and discussions.
Needless to say, the ideas found in The Cross and the Switchblade represent a radical departure from
the time-honored principles upon which authentic Catholic social action and
renewal are based. The book’s author thinks he can replace these Catholic
principles with something better. He and the Duquesne group would have done
well to ponder the words of Pope Saint Pius X in his encyclical Our Apostolic Mandate:
Then Ralph Keifer came across another book on Pentecostalism:
John Sherrill’s They Speak in Other Tongues, which offered practical ways and means
of attaining an experience of the spirit. In the Fall of 1966, the Duquesne
group met for a period of planning, during which these University Catholic
laymen asked themselves whether it might not be time to discuss matters with
some Pentecostalists, despite the reputation of the latter for spiritual
extremism and anti-Catholicism. W.
Lewis, an Episcopalian minister, put them in touch with one of his women
parishioners involved in the speaking-in-tongues movement. The meeting on the Feast of the Epiphany,
January 6, 1967, brought the Duquesne group an invitation to take part in a
prayer meeting the following Friday, January 13, with the speaking-in-tongues
Pentecostalists.
In the early days of the infiltration of the movement into the
Church — 1967 through 1975 — there was a great deal of discussion among the
movement’s leadership and adherents as to the choice of a name for it. Yves Congar, O.P., commenting on the
movement, stated: “We are seeing the
beginning of a very promising movement.
We must find for it a name that is beyond reproach.” His statement was quoted in the French
journal La Croix, January 19, 1974.
It was not until Pentecost Sunday 1975, during an
International Congress for followers of the movement held at Rome, that the
name Charismatic was used. In his address to the participants of the
International Congress, Paul VI said that he saw in the movement, “an
opportunity for the Church.” While speaking extemporaneously in Italian at the
end of the audience, he applied the word Charismatic to the movement for the first
time. Father Walter Abbott, S.J.,
associate editor of America magazine,
stated that at that moment “the Charismatic renewal was decisively accepted
into the Catholic Church.” A few years
later, Paul VI observing the auto-demolition of the Church, lamented that “the
smoke of Satan, as though through some fissure, has entered the very sanctuary
of the Church.”
Leon Joseph Cardinal Suenens, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels
and Primate of Belgium, was chiefly responsible for developing broad guidelines
and policies regarding Charismatic beliefs and practices. On November 12, 1945,
Suenens was appointed Auxiliary Bishop to Cardinal Van Roey, Archbishop of
Malines. Upon the death of Cardinal Van
Roey in August 1961, the name of the See was changed from Malines to Malines-Brussels,
and Suenens was named to head the Archdiocese.
On January 4, 1980, Suenens was succeeded by Godfried Danneels, bishop
of Antwerp.
From 1974 to 1986, Suenens composed a series of six “Malines
documents”:
· Charismatic Renewal with the assistance of Kilian McDonnell, O.S.B.,
the lead consultant
· Ecumenism and Charismatic Renewal, 1978
· Charismatic Renewal and Social Action in collaboration with Dom Helder
Camara of Brazil
· Renewal and the Powers of Darkness with a forward by Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger
· Le culte du moi et Foi chretienne, 1985
· Resting in the spirit, “slaying in the spirit”
Liberation and empowerment, of which the Charismatic man
boasts, are contrary to the virtue of humility, because they foster a sense of
self-reliance and pride. On the contrary, liberation and empowerment do not
strengthen faith; rather we see it as a sort of psychic drug that eventually
will cause the degradation of the faith and the mental well-being of
individuals.
Furthermore, the so-called Baptism of the Spirit and the
empowerment that accompanies it place the individual at a spiritual and
psychological risk, because he then becomes vulnerable to both internal and
external suggestions. His sense of
judgment is impaired, and consequently he is rendered unable to distinguish
wheat from chaff, light from heat, and the authentic from the counterfeit.
Let us consider the effect of this on young men and women of
16-20 years of age at a Charismatic Youth Rally. Here we find them all in one crowd. Many, if not all, are immodestly and shamefully dressed. Let say a Charismatic friar comes on stage
and starts strumming his guitar to rock music; let us say that this group of
young men and women have just participated in a Charismatic prayer session,
where psychological restraints have been weakened; let us say that a sex
educator starts her public discourse regarding sexual matters. I say that in this setting the results can
be disastrous, because this is a perfect recipe for the emergence of carnal
impulses and desires which moral theologians call temptation. In short, the
conditions of the highly charged emotional setting described above are such
that they can constitute an occasion of sin for a great number of young people.
Next
year, World Youth Day (WYD) will take place in Toronto from July 23 – 28. In addition to these days, various diocesan
events entitled “Days in the Diocese” will take place. James Francis Cardinal
Stafford, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, is chiefly
responsible for the preparations and overseeing of this huge event, in which
over one million young people are expected to descend like a swarm of locusts
on Toronto from various parts of the world.
Cardinal
Stafford hopes to instill in the youth gathered on WYD a sense of tolerance and
the exercise of freedom in a pluralist environment, where all can live with one
another in respect of the faith and the opinions of each other. Stafford hopes
to provide a vision of a Church that is open and welcoming. He added that, with some leaders of
[renewal] movements, “We are exploring the possibility of introducing a healing
prayer for youth in the program, especially from a psychological point of
view.”
Your
Eminence, rather than introducing the youth of WYD to healing prayer from a
psychological point of view, wouldn’t it be far better to introduce them to a
sense of Christian modesty and decorum by promoting the Magisterium’s position
on modesty in dress? Wouldn’t it also
be far better to promote at WYD a ban on provocative rap music which pretends
to be Christian and on sex education which tends to arouse certain impulses?
The
Charismatic network consists of an extensive array of affiliate organizations
made up of religious and laypersons, who collaborate, coordinate and promote
Charismatic renewal. They operate
within the official ecclesial structures on local and national levels.
· Franciscan University of Steubenville is the veritable vortex of Charismatic
activity and planning. Under the presidency of Fr. Michael Scanlan, T.O.R.,
Franciscan University has organized numerous summer Charismatic conferences,
ranging from high-school age youth conferences to priests’, deacons’ and
seminarians’ conferences. Some of the
participants and attendees of the 1998 conference were Fr. Benedict Groeschel,
CFR, Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Karl Keating, Patrick Madrid, Ralph Martin and
Bishop Sam Jacobs of the Diocese of Alexandria, Louisiana, and members of the
community of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word (MFVA).
·
The Community of the
Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (CFR) was established in May 1999 as a Diocesan Institute
in the Archdiocese of New York. It is
located in the Bronx, New York, where it maintains several friaries. Among the founding members, who are former
Capuchian friars, are Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Fr. Andrew Apostoli and Friar
Stan Fortuna, known for his so-called Christian rap music at youth rallies and
conventions and for his tapes and CDs marketed through Francesco Productions.
The ubiquitous Frs. Groeschel and Apostoli have been hosts of a series of
programs on Mother Angelica’s Eternal Word Television Network and have
established a collaboration with the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal
Word. Friar Stan Fortuna has appeared
sporadically on EWTN. Fr. Benedict Groeschel and Friar Stan Fortuna have
appeared at Charismatic youth rallies in the USA and Toronto, in close
collaboration with Ralph Martin, one of the pioneer leaders of the Charismatic
renewal movement, who pushed the movement into Eastern Europe, particularly
into the Ukraine.
In an article that appeared
in The Long Island Catholic dealing
with the Charismatic movement’s assessment of its own strengths and challenges,
Fr. Groeschel was described as an author and psychologist and a “longtime
supporter of the Charismatic renewal,” who is following the future role of the
movement in the Church. “Charismatic
renewal is going to make a contribution to the growth of a fervent Catholic
minority in the United States." He
added that such fervent [Charismatic] Catholics believe in prayer
experiences filled with reverence, adoration and devotion. With this whitewash description, it appears
that Fr. Groeschel is attempting to put a face-lift on the public image of the
renewal movement known for its spiritual excesses and extremism.
In a later interview in The
Long Island Catholic, Groeschel laments the decline of Eucharistic devotion
in the last thirty years, but fails to cite the reason why devotion has declined
— namely, that many priests on Long Island no longer believe in the Real
Presence and Transubstantiation. He
sidesteps the issue entirely. He also attempts to rehabilitate Martin Luther by
saying that the apostate monk “told others that the Eucharist is not just a
symbol.” “Until the day of his death,
Luther celebrated the Mass,” Groeschel said.
Fr. Groeschel failed to
inform his audience, though, that the “Mass” Luther was celebrating was
eviscerated of the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence and
Transubstantiation and that Luther rejected the Mass as the Sacrifice of
Calvary and taught that it was merely a memorial meal. We will not cite here Luther’s blasphemous
remarks concerning the Catholic Mass and the Papacy.
· The Fraternity of Priests was founded to introduce the Charismatic renewal
into the ranks of the priesthood. In 1975. Franciscan University of
Steubenville, under the leadership of Fr. Michael Scanlan, TOR, started the
“Priests and Deacons Conference.” At
practically the same time, Fr. George Kosicki, CSB, a Charismatic priest,
started Bethany House of Intercession for Priests (1973 – 1983). Other priests were involved in Charismatic
Covenant Communities throughout the country.
In September 1980, some priests of the Diocese of Providence formed a
“Priest Community.” At a “FIRE Rally,”
the Providence group of priests took part, and the outcome was the formation of
the Fraternity of Priests in September 1983.
· FIRE
was formed in May of 1983 as the Catholic Alliance of Faith, Intercession,
Repentance and Evangelization. It was
formed as an outreach ministry of the Catholic Covenant Communities in Ann
Arbor and Steubenville. Team members
Fr. Michael Scanlan, Fr. John Bertolucci, Sr. Ann Shields and Ralph Martin were
instrumental in the introduction of Charismatic renewal into the ranks of the
priesthood, and often “Clergy Days” were held in conjunction with FIRE Rallies.
The following bishops sit on the Board of the Fraternity of Priests: Sam Jacobs
of Alexandria, Louisiana, Gilbert Sheldon of Steubenville, Ohio, Donald Wuerl
of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Thomas Daily of Brooklyn, New York, and John
Myers, formally of Peoria, Illinois (now from New Jersey).
CATHOLIC RESTORATION VERSUS CHARISMATIC RENEWAL
Charismatic renewal is blighted leaven within the Catholic Church,
striving to maintain itself within Catholicism, in order to work its corruption
throughout the Church. And by succeeding in avoiding the appearance of a sect,
Charismatic Renewal has gained the approval of many Church officials, whose
zeal in supporting and directing the movement is excelled only by their
abhorrence for Catholic Tradition. Other churchmen make no effort to uproot
Charismaticism from their dioceses, but concentrate on maintaining peace among
everyone, while others are powerless to rid their dioceses of Charismaticism,
so entrenched has it become.
The enemies of the Catholic Church are well-organized from
within her very bosom to form a fifth column, the purpose of which is to
undermine the Church. It is time to
expose these dangers to the Catholic Faith that Charismatic Renewal
promotes. It is time for Catholic
Restoration to bring to light the rotten members that have infected the other
members of the Church. It is time to
tear off the masks they wear. Catholic
Restoration and Charismatic Renewal are incompatible with each other and cannot
coexist within the Catholic Church.
Each is an obstacle to the goals of the other. Unlike their Protestant predecessors of the 16th
century who broke with the Church, Charismatics have doggedly remained inside
the Church and have no intentions of leaving or of relinquishing power.
Charismatics should be called what they truly are: “Charischismatics.”
Charismatic Renewal has advanced its cause at the cost of the
traditional teachings of the Church — in particular, by its total disregard for
the Social Kingship of Christ by failing to speak out against religious liberty
and ecumenism; its failure to raise its voice against the abuse of authority
within the ranks of the hierarchy; and by its wholesale rejection of the
traditional Catholic Mass in favor of a Protestant-style one, with all the
accompanying abuses attendant upon it.
Among the more extreme forms of Charismaticism, it will only be a matter
of time before they acquiesce to the ordination of women.
What is
the final judgment on the Charismatic Renewal Movement? We will let the great Pontiff Gregory XVI
render the verdict:
Blind that they are and leaders of the blind, inflated with a
boastful science, they have reached that pitch of folly where they pervert the
eternal concept of truth and the true nature of the religious sentiment. With that new system of theirs, they are
seen to be under the sway of a blind and unchecked passion for novelty,
thinking not at all of finding some solid foundation of truth, but despising
the holy and apostolic traditions, they embrace other vain, futile, uncertain
doctrines, condemned by the Church, on which, in the height of their vanity,
they think they can rest and maintain truth itself.
PRAY FOR THE TRIUMPH OF CATHOLIC TRADITION
Return to The Remnant’s Main Page