A couple of things.
First, St Paul never says that tongues is a foreign language…it is St Luke who **seems **to imply that in Acts 2. But several Biblical scholars have pointed out that what St Luke actually says is that everyone heard the Apostles speaking in their own language, not that there was someone speaking in each language – the miracle was in the hearing rather than the speaking. St Paul’s position is that speaking in tongues is prayer to God, not that it is a human language.
BTW, there was a recent study published in a scientific journal that shed some light on what is actually going on when a person prays in tongues, and it is surprisingly consistent with what Catholic Charismatic theologians have been saying all along. Here is the citation: *Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging *148 (2006) 67–71, “The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study”.
Second, the whole thing about “fainting” is a practice of some (okay, many) Charismatic groups, often as part of healing services (not the same as healing Masses). This practice of fainting (or “resting in the Spirit”, to use the current jargon) actually is a Protestant innovation from the late 19th century that developed in the Holiness Movement before the Pentecostal movement began in the early 1900’s.
Those early Pentecostals were Holiness adherents who simply brought the practice with them. It is one of those “accidents” of the Charismatic Renewal that is not part of the “substance” (not found in Scripture nor in the practice of the early Church) and that can safely be put aside.