Do you mean with regard the comment that quoted 1 Corinthians 14:2?
St Paul is hard to understand,
even St Peter said so, so I don’t think many can be blamed for picking him up wrong. However, also in 1 Cor 14, St Paul went on to say this:
Although 1 Cor 14 is
the text that is snipped to support this practice, when you take the entire chapter for what it says, the correct interpretation becomes much clearer. The gift of tongues is an aid for communication. It is meant to help with converting gentiles. It can be sought too much by people who are eager for manifestations, and by the people who do have it, they can use it wrongly by speaking but not bringing revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching, IE, it is supposed to be understood. Yet, nevertheless, it will not always be understood by those who have been converted because the gift gives a real language that has a real target audience.
Even in this odd-sounding circumstance, he also directs that if a person genuinely has the gift and is given some divine message to say, in order for him to do so in church there are particular instructions:
“If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God.” (1 Cor 14: 27-28)
Corinth was a multilingual city after all, if nobody was present to understand, then the person ought to be quiet. He ends the same paragraph with “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”
Really, when we take the whole picture on board. What we know to be true is this:
1.) There are prophecies in the Old Testament regarding a time when God will call the gentiles by their own (foreign) languages.
2.) Every time the gift has an application within scripture, it always involves understanding.
3.) Every time the gift has been used throughout the history of the Church, it has always been to aid in conversion or to help in understanding (think, Padre Pio).
But on the other hand, what we know to be true about the so-called charismatic renewal is this:
1.) That they teach that God has given a power to some people to effectively help them get high.
2.) That they teach that God gave this to the first century Christians, but that everybody forgot about it and had to be reminded by a group of protestants in the 1970’s.
3.) The group of protestants that had to remind us do absolutely crazy stuff like
this or
this and are known to carry real cases of possession.
4.) They also disobey St Paul by practising this in Church by the bucket load and without anyone to interpret. Where the text they use to try to prove the charismatic way to be correct actually clearly teaches against this.
5.) The whole movement is fundamentally undignified and usually very irreverent.
I don’t doubt that God will still act through people of good will even if they do things wrongly without knowing, but as for the movement itself, it cannot be from God. This is one thing I never quite understood why St JP II encouraged. I would have to assume that he just didn’t know exactly what was involved. Even a Pope like him can make mistakes sometimes.
To be fair, though everything attracts weird people, I can understand how like could be drawn to like with things like this. Though the main problem is that it doesn’t help people who really have problems. God might still work in them, of course, but it only encourages any problems they had. In other ordinarily normal people it only tries to train them to think in a weird way. Add into the equation that this tends to be fed to young people in youth events and diocesan youth Masses, which only has the effect of either teaching them that worship is about emotion or of putting them off altogether. It’s an unfortunate disaster.
