Corpus Cristi said:
Well, I’ve gotten some info on the charismatic movement, and it actually came out of the Catholic Church.
You got the wrong information.
The contemporary Charismatic Movement began in a small protestant sect in Topeka, Kansas. Anybody, any website, any individual, any literature that tells you otherwise has been either misled or is lying to you.
It began with Catholics receiving a Protestant mock-sacrament of ‘baptism of the spirit’, not through the established sacramental channels of grace, but through association with heretical sects. From Pittsburgh it spread to Notre Dame, from Notre Dame it spread to Michigan. Within four years the Catholic Pentecostal movement spread all across the USA and Canada. Ralph Martin was one of the first traveling Pentecostal salesmen who began to spread the new baptism to laymen, priests and religious. Many priests and religious, not willing to wait for Ralph Martin’s arrival went out and found some local Pentecostals to pray over them and so they too began to spread the “Spirit” among Catholics in their area. If you take a close look at the testimonials of other traveling salesmen of the Renewal, you will find that many of them did just that, they got their first anointing from their “Pentecostal brethren”. Is this Catholic? NO!
“In 1966 Pentecostalism entered the Roman Catholic Church as the result of a weekend retreat at DuquesneUniversity led by theology professors Ralph Keiffer and Bill Story. As glossolalia and other charismatic gifts were experienced, other Catholic prayer groups were formed at Notre DameUniversity and the University of Michigan. By 1973 the movement had spread so rapidly that thirty thousand Catholic Pentecostals gathered at Notre Dame for a national conference. The movement had spread to Catholic churches in over a hundred nations by 1980. Other prominent Catholic Pentecostal leaders were Kevin Ranaghan, Steve Clark, and Ralph Martin. The most prominent leader among Catholics, however, was Joseph Leon Cardinal Suenens, who was named by popes Paul VI and John Paul II as episcopal adviser to the renewal.
In order to distinguish these newer Pentecostals from the older Pentecostal denominations, the word “charismatic” began to be used widely around 1973 to designate the movement in the mainline churches. The older Pentecostals were called “classical Pentecostals.” By 1980 the term “neo - Pentecostal” had been universally abandoned in favor of “charismatic renewal.”
Unlike the rejection of the earlier Pentecostals, the charismatic renewal was generally allowed to remain within the mainline churches. Favorable study reports by the Episcopalians (1963), Roman Catholics (1969, 1974), and the Presbyterians (1970), while pointing out possible excesses, generally were tolerant and open to the existence of a Pentecostal spirituality as a renewal movement within the traditional churches.”
