I’m interested in learning more about charismatic catholicism, and was wondering how I can go about finding a parish that offers such a thing.
Contact your Diocese and ask about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Someone there should be able to direct you. Here are a couple of links that might help:
I’d like to find a church that DOESN’T have it personally. Our Diocese is pretty much ramming it down everyone’s throat.
Amen! I grew up in a Pentecostal church before converting to RCC. Why any Catholic would want to incoporate that into the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is beyond me. Prejudice? Perhaps but these people have told me that I’m not “a real Christian” now that I’m Catholic. Whatever. Good luck to those who do choose to participate but what are you really getting?
Totally unnecessary comment. The poster asked a simple question and two people have now made inappropriate comments to the question rather than answer the question. Nobody was asked their opinion. How rude.
This may be offensive to the OP who is looking for this and has a right to. I don’t agree with the CCR either, because it doesn’t fit my spirituality, but if someone asks for information on it, they should be given it. Also you don’t what someone’s intention is behind going.
Pray for those who slander you and rejoice that you’re no longer a member of that religion, but don’t discourage someone from doing something that the Church has given permission for regardless of whether or not we like it.
Amen
Let the seeker find what they are seeking. Should they seek it outside of the Church when it may be found inside?
When we receive the Holy Spirit (normally at Confirmation), we receive a heavenly gift, or charism. That gift is intended to be used for the building up of the Church. It can be a noisy gift, or a quiet one, but it is not to be kept locked in a hardened heart. Our Lord spoke about this in His parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30). Our Master has given each of us talents, according to our abilities. When He returns, He will ask what we have done with our gift. I do not want to be the servant who feared and buried his gift. None of us should choose to be that fearful servant, who ended up being cast out of the Master’s house.
Time for a little testimony, I guess. I entered the Church at the age of 35. I can tell the doubters or the discouragers that I was a poor-to-mediocre Catholic for my first 15 years in the Church. Often missed mass. Received our Lord in a state of mortal sin. Didn’t have time for God many days. Rarely prayed. At my wife’s prompting, I attended a Life in the the Spirit seminar at our parish. I received the baptism in the Holy Spirit when our Priest laid hands on me. With God’s grace, I forced myself to let go and become docile to the Holy Spirit, simply asking Him to release the gift that I had already received at my Confirmation.
It did not occur immediately. Slowly, my charism was revealed. I was drawn to adoration of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, when I had never been interested before. My prayer life expanded and deepened profoundly. I was drawn to the Rosary and later, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. I experienced miraculous occurrences during prayer before our Lord at adoration. I lost the fear of speaking of my faith. At that time, I was a police officer, and began to evangelize to those without hope, such as alcoholics and drug addicts. I could see the Lord restoring their hope and the amazing part was that He was using me, a horrible sinner, to accomplish that.
The greatest blessing of all is that, unbeknownst to me, all of this was preparing me for cancer. And, not just cancer, but a rare, aggressive, incurable, inoperable, highly chemotheraoy-resistant non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Stage IV, with 50+ tumors and cancer in my bone marrow. I had about two months left to live. My poor prognosis was poor, but dropped to very poor when it relapsed immediately after four months of intensive chemotherapy. There was nothing left to use against it. When all hope seemed to be gone, I prepared to embrace death. I was at peace and simply let go of my life, trusting in the Lord Whom I claimed to love. And, when I let go of my life and prepared for the end., He gave my life back to me. He was waiting for me to simply trust Him. An experimental drug appeared and I have been in remission now for over three years. I am now considered a medical miracle - but this is the Lord’s doing, and not mine.
I boast only in the Lord. I am evidence of what the Lord can accomplish when one allows Him to. It all began with saying “yes” to the Holy Spirit at that charismatic seminar. By the way, I have never spoken a single word in a tongue. Not my gift.
You decide if it was all worth it.
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Great testimony but tongues and charismatic worship are not for me. I see pictures of charismatic masses where people are sprawled out all over the floor and it brings literal real FEAR in me.
I was 3 years old, and I remember it so vividly 34 years later, when a guest evangelist at the pentecostal church I was raised in, “tore the house down” you might say. People yelling, speaking in tongues, running fast in place, etc.
He was on the mic yelling at people. My mother was crying with her hands raised and in my mind, I thought something was wrong with her and I, as a 3 yr old, could not help her and nobody was “coming to help”. I began to cry profusely because I WAS SCARED. All I could think was how come this God was mean and angry and what did he get out of people acting like this. Why are they scaring me? What did I do wrong? Why does he want to scare me?
When I got home, I told my parents with as much courage as a 3 yr old could, that I was never back there again. My parents took me to my room, made me get down on my knees and ask for God’s forgiveness with no supper until I was to do so. I began crying. I couldn’t approach this mean, hateful God. I kept sobbing and I remember them telling me no food until I did this. To them, I had just “spit in God’s face”.
I have NEVER forgotten this. I am in counseling partly because of this and a powerful addiction to masturbation which is somewhat based on my pentecostal upbringing. I could name countless pentecostal stories over the years that I have witnessed. People running on top of the pews, Jericho marches, preachers that would tell me I was playing around with God, etc.
Can any of you tell me that I am wrong to hate these manifestations because of my experiences!!! I know pentecostals to this day, that will tell anybody that I will go to hell because I’m Catholic and you all expect me to rub elbows with catholics that practice these same manifestations!!! I know the CCR Masses are not that bad, and I pray they never are.
If I seem mean, I don’t mean to be. Just put yourself in my shoes…Peace to all.
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Not at all. You have experienced a disordered use of the gifts. They are not for us, but have come from the Lord and must be directed toward Him and for His purpose. The purpose of my post was only to show what a difference the Holy Spirit - the forgotten member of the Trinity - can make in one’s life. I do not attend charismatic masses or events, except maybe once every three years or so for a “tune-up”
I like that!
My parents went a few times over the years. They drug me to one and a bunch of people prayer over me in weird voices… I never went back.
Honestly, I do not remember hearing much when being prayed over, since I am also praying. Some of what is heard may be the “inexpressible groanings” that Paul wrote of in Romans 8:26. I have heard it described as a prayer language, and I’m fine with that. I just don’t speak a word of it.
I was fairly certain the “groanings” were only between the Holy Spirit and the Father, not through humans. Actually, I take it back. I can speak in tongues. I can mimic exactly what I heard from people doing it in my church. Does that count?
It has to originate with God, or it’s false. Simple, but complicated.
I take it you’re “into” it…no problem, just don’t like mandates…and feeling like it’s mandated.
LOLOL!!! :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
Think I knew that. I am also positive a lot of people fake it.
I got sick of it when someone said that people were doing things as the spirit “led” them. OK fine. I watched a group dancing “in the spirit”…fine. A woman walks in, sets down her Bible, takes off her shoes, looks around to see whose watching her and jumps in the middle and starts dancing like she’s at a rock concert. That just confirmed to me that a lot of it is emotional hype.
You rock!
Thanks. I just harbor a LOT, I mean a LOT, of repressed feelings from that and at 37, I am still not over a lot of it. Thank God for a good Catholic shrink. My parents, God love them, are still pentecostal, but not as hard up as they used to be. I have taken them to several masses over the years and they love it, my mother more than my dad though.
See, mom was raised Presbyterian and dad was always pentecostal. She gave up Presbyterianism for him and then went right along with it. My sister, God love her 1000 times over, jumped to the RCC in 1992 while she was in college and made it easy for me. She took a lot of **** though and I hold her almost in sainthood.
Yeah, as a professional in debt collections/customer service, I’ve noticed the majority of Christians over the years who don’t pay their debts are either a)pentecostal or b)baptist…but yet they are holier than me. Unreal. And before anybody starts, as a professional collector, I do know the difference between someone who can’t pay versus somebody who won’t pay. In fact, had a southern baptist preacher hang up on me the other day and all I asked was how did he want to pay his bill, credit card or personal check?
Yet, I’m going to hell…