PART ONE
MEANING AND MOVEMENT

1
Building the Kingdom

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal has never had a single identifiable charismatic leader in the Weberian sense, although among the movement elite there exists an informal hierarchy of charismatic renown based on reputation for evangelism, healing, or local community leadership. Neither has the movement had a dramatic history, although there have been apocalyptic moments, periods of internal tension and ideological split, and the occasional intrigue of high Church politics. It is certainly a phenomenon with roots in both Pentecostal and Catholic traditions, as well as a phenomenon with distinct local and global manifestations.^[1]   To begin, then, we will aim for a sense of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as a social and cultural phenomenon, a "movement," with the caveat that by the next chapter it will become necessary to problematize the very concept of movement.

Indeed, from the "indigenous" standpoint, Charismatics themselves have occasionally resisted describing the Renewal as a movement. They have often qualified the notion, sometimes emphasizing that theirs is a movement "of the Spirit" in the sense that it is inspired by and belongs to the deity, at other times insisting that it is a "movement" of the Spirit in the sense that what is moving is the Holy Spirit itself. In this latter sense the Renewal is not really a sociocultural phenomenon at all, but strictly a spiritual one. From the standpoint of anthropological theory, in recent years it has become clear that the standard paradigm for understanding social and religious "movements" faces problems in at least three respects: its conception of movements as discrete entities rather

than as phenomena characteristic or diagnostic of the cultures in which they are spawned; its ability to account for meaning in addition to causality and social dynamics of movements; and its assumption that the categorical subjects of movements are not necessarily only peoples, populations, or social types but indeterminate selves in a process of reorientation and transformation. We will return to these issues in the next chapter, but to sustain that discussion we must first survey the diversity among manifestations of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal first in its country of origin, the United States, then globally.

The United States

The year commonly accepted as the beginning of the movement is 1967. During a retreat at Duquesne University (the "Duquesne Weekend"), a group of students and young faculty members experienced the spiritual awakening of Baptism in the Holy Spirit through the influence of Protestant Pentecostals. They soon shared their experience with like-minded students at Notre Dame and Michigan State universities. Although on occasion one can hear individuals claim that they individually or with a small prayer group prayed in tongues before or independently of this point, the narrative of origin among this relatively young, well-educated, and all-male group is standard. It has consistently been recounted as a kind of just-so story in greater or lesser detail by virtually all social science authors who have addressed the movement (Fichter 1975; Mawn 1975; K. McGuire 1976; M. McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987; Bord and Faulkner 1983; Poloma 1982), while for some among the movement's adherents it has attained the status of an origin myth. The new "Catholic Pentecostals" claimed to offer a unique spiritual experience to individuals and promised a dramatic renewal of Church life based on a born-again spirituality of "personal relationship" with Jesus and direct access to divine power and inspiration through a variety of "spiritual gifts," or "charisms." The movement attracted a strong following among relatively well educated, middle-class suburban Catholics (Mawn 1975; Fichter 1975; McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987; Poloma 1982). Since its inception it has spread throughout the world wherever there are Catholics.

In the United States, development of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal can be roughly divided into stages:

1) Prior to 1967 Catholics who underwent the Pentecostal experience of Baptism in the Holy Spirit often were persuaded by their Protestant mentors that Catholicism and Pentecostalism were incompatible, and frequently left the Catholic church.

2) From 1967 to 1970 Catholic Pentecostalism was a collection of small, personalistic prayer groups emphasizing spontaneity in worship and interpersonal relations, loosely organized via networks of personal contacts, and not fully differentiated from other associations such as the Cursillo movement. Protestant Pentecostals and nondenominational neo-Pentecostals remained a strong influence.

3) From 1970 to 1975 the renamed Catholic Charismatic Renewal underwent rapid institutionalization and consolidation of a lifestyle including collective living in "covenant communities," distinctive forms of ritual, and a specialized language of religious experience. Prayer groups and covenant communities were often composed of both Catholic and Protestant members, though the leadership was predominantly Catholic.

4) From 1975 to the end of the decade the movement entered an apocalyptic phase, based on prophetic revelation that "hard times" were imminent for Christians. Many covenant communities saw their form of life as essential for coping with the coming trials, and a split occurred in the leadership between those who held that the prayer group is a separate type of Charismatic organization with its own role and those who held that it was an initial stage in a necessary development toward a full-scale covenant community.^[2]   In general, leaders attempted both to influence the direction of the Catholic church and to maintain an ecumenical outlook, while the Charismatic Renewal progressively attained international scope.

5) The 1980s brought recognition by movement leaders that its growth in the U.S. had dramatically decreased. They also saw an increasingly clear divergence between Charismatics gathered into tightly structured intentional communities who wanted to preserve the earlier sense of apocalyptic mission and those who remained active in less overtly communitarian parochial prayer groups. A second split occurred, this time among covenant communities themselves, over issues of government and authority, as well as over relations to the larger movement and the Church as a whole. By the mid-1980s both streams of the movement had initiated evangelization efforts directed as much at their less committed or

flagging Charismatic brethren as at the unconverted.^[3]   Also in the 1980s, a new wave of Protestant influence was introduced with the rising popularity of so-called Third Wave Pentecostal evangelists.

6) By the late 1980s and early 1990s some among the communitarians considered themselves a distinct movement. Among the parochially oriented stream, Catholic identity became heightened as fewer groups cultivated combined Protestant and Catholic "ecumenical" memberships and as the Church took a more active supervisory role. Meanwhile, boundaries between Charismatics and conventional Catholics became more ambiguous, as many who no longer attended regular prayer meetings remained active in their parishes and as many Catholics with no other Charismatic involvement became attracted to large public healing services conducted by Charismatics.

From its earliest days the movement began to develop a sophisticated organizational structure to coordinate activities such as regional, national, and international gatherings and to publish books, magazines, and cassette tapes of devotional and instructional material. The twelve-member National Service Committee has coordinated activities in the United States since 1970, based at first in South Bend under the sponsorship of the People of Praise covenant community, then moving in 1990 to a new "Chariscenter" headquarters near Washington, D.C.^[4]   The National Service Committee's work is supplemented by the National Advisory Committee, constituted of well over a hundred members chosen by geographic region. The International Communications Office began in 1975 at Ann Arbor under the sponsorship of The Word of God covenant community, moving eventually to Brussels and then to Rome as the movement sought to establish its presence at the center of the Catholic world.^[5]   Higher education is available at the Charismatic-dominated Franciscan College of Steubenville in Ohio.

Most American Catholic dioceses have appointed an individual, almost always a Charismatic, to serve as liaison to the local bishop, and the liaisons themselves meet periodically. The institution of diocesan liaison is instrumental in preserving cordial relations between the movement and the Church hierarchy, wherein there are perhaps only twenty bishops who affiliate with the movement. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops also has an ad hoc committee on the Charismatic Renewal, with one of its members serving as liaison to the movement. Official joint statements by the bishops comprising the national hierarchies

of various countries, including the United States, have been released periodically. Such statements typically adopt a cautiously supportive tone, urging participants to continue "renewing" Church life while warning them against theological and behavioral "excess."

From the early 1970s the most influential and highest-ranking cleric openly affiliated with the Renewal was the conservative Belgian cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens, who following an incognito reconnaissance visit established relations with The Word of God community and subsequently became Rome's episcopal adviser to the movement.^[6]   With Suenens's retirement and the declining fortunes of The Word of God vis-à-vis the Church in the 1980s, the most influential cleric became Bishop Paul Cordes, vice president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and Rome's new episcopal adviser to the movement. At the center, Pope Paul VI took note of the movement's existence as early as 1971 and publicly addressed its 1975 international conference in Rome. Pope John Paul II (1992) has continued to be generally supportive, apparently tolerating the movement's relatively radical theology for the sake of encouraging its markedly conservative politics, its militant activism for "traditional" values and against women's rights to contraception and abortion, and its encouragement of individual spirituality and contribution to parish activities and finances.^[7]

The division into covenant communities and parochial prayer groups has been the most evident feature of internal diversity among American Charismatics. By far the majority of active participants are involved in prayer groups whose members assemble weekly for collective prayer but do not maintain intensive commitments to their group and sometimes participate in several groups simultaneously or serially. At the opposite pole are the intensely committed and hierarchically structured intentional communities organized around the provisions of a solemn written agreement, or "covenant."

Several dimensions of variation in group organization are related to this primary one between prayer group and covenant community. The smallest prayer groups may have only a few adult members, whereas until 1990 the largest among covenant communities numbered 1,500 adults and another 1,500 children. An intermediate-size prayer group (from about 40 to 200) will likely include a "core group" of members who want both greater commitment and a greater sense of intimacy and common purpose with others. Such a group is typically led by a "pastoral team" of several members. It also exhibits a division of ritual labor into "ministries" with functions such as leadership, teaching, music,

healing, or provision to participants of movement literature. Leadership in some groups is primarily in the hands of lay people; in others it is deferred to priests and nuns and may be open to both men and women or restricted based on the fundamentalist principle of "male headship."

Charismatic groups may be based at a parish (though they often attract transparochial participation), a school, or a private home. Group membership may be either predominantly Catholic or "ecumenical," drawn from a variety of mainstream Protestant denominations. Although in general over time the proportion of Protestants appears to have declined somewhat, the degree of ecumenical participation also appears to vary by region, with Charismatics in the Northeast from the beginning having tended to form predominantly Catholic groups and those in the Midwest inclined toward ecumenical participation.^[8]   Denominational religious obligations in ecumenical groups typically take on the character of private devotion separate from community life, whereas predominantly Catholic groups integrate liturgy and sometimes Marian devotion into their ritual life. Nevertheless, the movement as a whole has consistently been in contact with Protestant Pentecostals (e.g., Assemblies of God) and nondenominational neo-Pentecostals, periodically adopting and adapting their ritual practices. Some groups are more charismatic in the sense of the frequency with which participants exercise "spiritual gifts" such as glossolalia, healing, or prophecy, whereas others never incorporate these characteristic features of ritual life.^[9]   Among more highly developed groups, ritual specialization in one or more of these charisms is sometimes found: it is said by some both that each individual is granted a charism to be used for the benefit of collective life and that each community is granted a distinctive charism that will complement the charisms of other communities within the Charismatic "Kingdom of God."

While all Catholic Charismatics share the communitarian ideal, it has been a point of debate within the movement whether everyone can or even should belong to a full-scale community. In such communities, each member must go through an initiation and indoctrination process lasting as long as two years. This "underway" process culminates in a ceremony of formal commitment to the provisions of the covenant. These provisions vary from one community to another and give it greater or lesser claim over the time and resources of the member. The particular focus here on covenant communities is warranted both because they have most fully elaborated the ritual life of the movement and because even among them there is an identifiable range of cultural di-

versity. We begin with brief characterizations of four exemplary communities. All four originated in the movement's early years, 1968–1969, and not only represent alternative communitarian models but reflect the regional diversity of North American Catholic culture as well. The first two are independent freestanding communities and will be treated only briefly. The next two are the centers of translocal communities or networks of allied communities, and their story is critical to understanding the central role of covenant communities within the movement as a whole.

A Benedictine abbey in Pecos, New Mexico, under Abbot David Geraets, has become a leading center of Charismatic teaching on spiritual growth and ritual healing, a kind of Catholic Charismatic Esalen. The community's influence is quite broad, since in addition to sponsoring popular on-site retreats, it operates one of two Catholic Charismatic publishing houses, Dove Publications. Although permanent membership is only about forty, structure as a conventional religious order allows virtually full-time participation in religious activities. Community structure and discipline are determined by Benedictine principles, except for the innovation of organizing as a "double community" that includes both men and women.^[10]   Community life and ritual healing are self-characterized as a "holistic" synthesis of Benedictine rule, Charismatic spiritual gifts, and depth psychology. The latter influence is prominent in defining the Pecos community in relation to other Catholic Charismatic communities in at least two ways. It defines relations between men and women as a "balancing and heightening of masculine-feminine consciousness" in an approach explicitly derived from Carl Jung. This is in sharp contrast to those covenant communities that promulgate "male headship," the ultimate authority of men over women based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Christian Scripture. The Pecos community also broadens the practice of ritual healing to include a range of elements of eclectic and holistic psychotherapies. This places its style of ritual healing at the "psychological" end of a continuum whose other pole is a "faith" orientation that purports to rely on the direct intervention of divine power.

Saint Patrick's in Providence, Rhode Island, began like many other Charismatic parish prayer groups, but under the founding leadership of Catholic priests John Randall and Raymond Kelley it had by 1974 transformed its base of operations into a "Charismatic parish."^[11]   The two priests were assigned to a decaying inner-city parish, and more than fifty families in the community eventually sold their suburban homes and relocated in the neighborhood surrounding the church. The principal

structural innovations were the sharing of authority among a pastoral team that included lay members, the adoption of collective living in "households," and the transformation of the parochial school into a Charismatic school staffed by community members and requiring all students and their parents to undergo the initiatory Life in the Spirit Seminar. Community members explicitly chose the parish model on the example (and under the guidance) of the Episcopalian Charismatic Church of the Redeemer in Houston, in contrast to the model of lay leadership, multidenominational membership, and independence of parish structure contemporaneously being developed by midwestern Catholic covenant communities. Due in part to the effort of maintaining a parish the membership of which never truly coincided with that of the community itself, as well as to the proportions of the task that included revitalizing a neighborhood and parish already in serious decline, this community had by the middle 1980s declined in vitality and visibility within the movement, though a core of original members maintains an active Charismatic community presence.

The two leading communities of the Midwest developed side by side, and for some time considered themselves to be closely allied sister communities. The People of Praise in South Bend was led by Kevin Ranaghan and Paul DeCelles, and The Word of God in Ann Arbor was headed by Steven Clark and Ralph Martin. All were among the group from Duquesne and Notre Dame that initiated the synthesis of Catholicism and Pentecostalism. All took the opportunity to turn the newly discovered experience and ritual forms into tools for the building of "community." Both groups underwent rapid early growth by recruitment from major universities, and between them they provided many of the resources for institutional development within the movement. The South Bend community remains the headquarters of the Charismatic Renewal Services and publishes the Charismatic magazine New Heaven , New Earth , until 1990 was the headquarters of the National Service Committee and its National Advisory Committee, and has been the force behind the movement's annual national conferences. The Ann Arbor community remains instrumental in publishing the movement magazine New Covenant and in operating the influential Servant Publications for books, founded the movement's International Communications Office, and for years was the leading force in training for national and international movement leaders.

The history of relations between these communities is essential to an understanding of the communitarian ideal among Charismatics. The

critical period was the first half of the 1970s, when covenant communities and the Charismatic Renewal as a whole underwent their most rapid expansion. Movement participation in the United States was estimated at 200,000 in 1972 and 670,000 by 1976 (World Christian Encyclopedia 1982), and in the same period the membership of The Word of God community grew from 213 to 1,243. A symbolic event of critical import to the movement's future course occurred with a decision in 1975 to hold the annual Charismatic conference, until then hosted by the People of Praise on the campus of Notre Dame University, at the center of the Catholic world in Rome. During the conference the pope formally addressed the movement. Charismatic liturgy including prayer in tongues was conducted in Saint Peter's Basilica, and in this symbolically charged setting, "prophecy" was uttered.^[12]

We will examine prophecy as a performative genre of ritual language in chapters 6 and 7. In the present context, I am concerned with the impact of the prophecies delivered at Saint Peter's, which were uttered principally by prophets from The Word of God community. Understood as messages from the deity spoken through a divinely granted charism, they warned of impending times of difficulty and trials for the Church. They stated that God's church and people would be different and that "buildings that are now standing will not be standing. Supports that are there for my people now will not be there." They declared that those who heard this divine word would be prepared by the deity for a "time of darkness coming upon the world," but also for a "time of glory for the church and people of God." An inclination to take these words literally and with urgency was reinforced by the Charismatic delegation from Lebanon, whose country had just entered the throes of its enduring civil war, and where indeed buildings that had been standing were already no longer standing. Members of the Beirut community returned to Ann Arbor and remained affiliated with The Word of God. The immediacy of their plight lent a sense of urgency to continued prophecies in the late 1970s. This sense of urgency was maintained in the 1980s by the affiliation to The Word of God of a community of conservative Nicaraguan Charismatics troubled by Sandinista attempts to create a new society in that country.

Until the Rome conference, prophecy had been understood by Charismatics as utterance intended for the edification of their own groups, or of individuals within the groups. Now for the first time, reinforced by the powerful symbolic setting of their utterance, these words were deemed to be a direct message from God to the public at large. The

"Rome prophecies," as they began to be known, were widely disseminated through New Covenant and widely discussed in Charismatic gatherings and conferences. Charismatics began to see fulfillment of the prophecies in the fuel shortages of the late 1970s, in disastrous mud slides in California, and in the blizzards of 1977 and 1978 in the Northeast. Beyond the signs included in natural disasters and in the perceived moral decline of American society, however, the prophecies were construed to indicate that the Catholic church was in peril. There was not only the long-observed decline in religious vocations, and the perceived retreat of Catholicism before Protestantism in the third world, but also a compromise with secular values and a consequent decline in moral authority that made the Church ill equipped for the coming "hard times." These concerns appeared to be referents of the Rome prophecies' warning, "Supports that are there for my people now will not be there."

While some movement leaders had from the outset in the late 1960s expressed the goal of renewing the entire Church, and thus eventually becoming indistinguishable from the Church itself, the logic of the prophecies appeared to be that the role of the Charismatic Renewal was actually to protect the Church. Thus it was an ideal not only for Catholics to become Charismatic but also for Charismatics to band together into covenant communities and covenant communities into larger networks, for these were thought to be structures in which the faithful could best gird themselves for the impending battle with the forces of darkness. To be sure, not all Charismatics and not all covenant communities adhered to this philosophy, and a formal split between moderates and radical communitarians occurred at the movement's 1977 national conference in Kansas City. The difference was summarized polemically by a female Catholic theologian who was a disaffected early participant in the community at Notre Dame. Shortly after the Rome prophecies she published a book critically distinguishing "Type I" (world-renouncing, authoritarian, and patriarchal) and "Type II" (accommodating, liberal, and egalitarian) charismatics (Ford 1976). Meanwhile, in distinction to the radical vision offered in publications and teaching disseminated by the People of Praise and The Word of God, a more moderated "Type II" voice appeared with the introduction in 1975 of the periodical Catholic Charismatic , based at the freestanding Children of Joy covenant community founded by Fr. Joseph Lange, O.S.F.S., in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Without the compelling centripetal impulse of the prophetic vision, however, both the new publication and the community that supported it were short-lived. In contrast, the most dramatic instance of

community consolidation came in 1977 when more than a hundred members of San Francisco's St. John the Baptist community moved en masse to join the People of Praise in South Bend (see Lane 1978).

In this charged atmosphere, the radical formulation of the Rome prophecies marked the years between 1975 and 1980 as a phase that was the closest the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has been to a position of apocalyptic millennialism. Even prior to these developments, however, The Word of God and the People of Praise had for some time taken the lead in plans to formalize ties among covenant communities. The principle was that, just as in a single community each member is thought to be granted a spiritual gift or charism that contributes to the collective life of the community as a "body" or a "people," so each community had a particular gift or mission. Taken together, they could thus form a "community of communities," a divinely constituted "people" ultimately combining to build the Kingdom of God. The Rome prophecies increased the urgency of this plan, and in 1976 the Association of Communities was formed.

By 1980–1981, however, the two leading communities themselves acknowledged irreconcilable differences. A three-way split occurred in the network, with some communities following The Word of God, some following the People of Praise, and yet others following the Community of God's Delight from Dallas and their close allies in Emmanuel Covenant Community of Brisbane, Australia. The original association had included seven communities at the "council" or oversight level, and another thirty were involved to lesser degrees. Following their parting of ways, The Word of God founded the Federation of Communities, the People of Praise went on to develop the Fellowship of Communities, and the Community of God's Delight went on with Emmanuel to develop the International Brotherhood of Communities.^[13]   Under the leadership of The Word of God, the federation in 1982 became a single supercommunity, renaming itself the Sword of the Spirit. By 1988 the Sword of the Spirit included forty-five branches and associated communities, twenty-two of which were in the United States.^[14]   The six main communities within the fellowship, all in the United States, eventually came to consider themselves branches of the People of Praise but maintained a semiautonomous confederal relationship.^[15]   The even more loosely structured brotherhood increasingly cultivated its Catholic identity and relation to the Church. In 1990 the ecumenical brotherhood was succeeded by the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships, with three founding communities from the United States, six from Australia and New Zealand, and four from

other countries. In 1994, four more communities were advanced from underway to full membership in the fraternity. For the most part the three networks parted ways and remained essentially out of contact throughout the 1980s. Crudely speaking, the Sword of the Spirit went increasingly its own way, the People of Praise consolidated its links to the larger Charismatic Renewal, and the brotherhood communities consolidated their relationships with their local bishops.^[16]

At about this time The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit had applied for canonical recognition of the geographically dispersed Catholics among its multidenominational membership as an international association of Catholics. Given the political organization of the Church, this would have required either that the local branches of the community be under more direct control of local bishops or that Steven Clark, the community's paramount leader, be granted a status similar to the head of a religious order, equivalent to a bishop. The application was not approved. Now in the wake of the split among communities, the Vatican apparently decided to take a more active role in supervising the movement. The pope assigned Bishop Cordes, the episcopal adviser to the movement who replaced The Word of God's now retired ally Cardinal Suenens, to visit and assess the range of groups, communities, and structures within the Charismatic Renewal. After visits in two consecutive years in the mid-1980s, he invited the brotherhood communities to apply for canonical recognition. Reorganized as a fraternity excluding Protestant communities and individuals who had been members of the brotherhood, this network was granted status by the pope as a "private association of the Christian faithful of pontifical right." Following exclusion of the Sword of the Spirit from a status its leaders appeared to regard as essential to their role as vanguard of Church renewal, this ecclesiastical recognition was an explicit statement of Vatican preference for one of several extant models of covenant community networks.

Let us dwell for a moment on the differences among these communities with respect to structure, "vision" or goals, and practice. This will serve the purpose of summarizing the nuances of covenant community values, as well as the kind of issues that led to the historical split among the groups. In thus setting the stage for the later extended discussion of The Word of God, we will also guard against representing that one community as in all ways typical of the movement as a whole.

We will do well to begin by noting a demographic difference among the communities. That The Word of God was centered around the public University of Michigan reinforced its tendency toward an ecumeni-

cal or multidenominational membership, whereas the People of Praise connection with Notre Dame University reinforced the predominance of Catholics. In comparison to both, the Community of God's Delight was not closely affiliated with a university. From the beginning its members were somewhat older than those in the two leading communities—indeed, one of the personal dramas of the movement is that Bobbie Cavnar, head coordinator of the Dallas community, is the father of James Cavnar, one of the four founders of The Word of God—and its membership remained relatively stable from the early 1970s. While the Community of God's Delight also originally cultivated multidenominational membership (a community leader estimated that originally Catholics comprised 50 to 70 percent of the membership), with its increasing push toward a Catholic identity many Protestants moved away from the covenant community and back to local congregations. At the end of the 1980s membership in the Community of God's Delight was 95 to 98 percent Catholic, the People of Praise was 92 percent Catholic, and The Word of God was 65 percent Catholic.

Much of the difference that led to the split, however, has to do with the exercise of authority a) among related communities, b) in relation to the Church, c) among individuals within communities, and d) by means of prophecy. The Word of God's idea was that the association would be a single supercommunity under a single translocal government. This became the case in the Sword of the Spirit, where, for example, community leaders can be assigned to move from one branch to another to oversee or train members. The People of Praise preferred a confederation of semiautonomous communities, though as noted their constituent groups have come to regard themselves also as a single community. The Community of God's Delight and its brotherhood rejected any translocal authority, emphasizing that each member community "submit to the authority of" or "be in communion with" its local Catholic bishop. These differences in turn directly affect relations with the Catholic church. Indeed, that the Sword of the Spirit has a translocal government and that in principle this government is multidenominational rather than strictly Catholic has been one source of tension between it and the Church.

The leading covenant communities are all hierarchically structured under elders, or "coordinators." Decisions are made by consensus among coordinators as they jointly "listen for what the Lord might be saying in a particular area." Final judgments are made by an overall coordinator or head coordinator, but there is variation among communities as to

whether this role is one of ultimate authority or one of "tiebreaker" in the absence of consensus. In the model originated by The Word of God and the People of Praise, the general membership traditionally had input by solicitation from the coordinators in a "community consultation" about a specific major issue, but coordinators were not obliged to take these opinions into account. Coordinators were appointed by other coordinators, with the founders of each community remaining in authority insofar as they were the original coordinators. In the period following their divergence, the People of Praise instituted a modified form of election for its coordinators, described as midway between the community consultation and simple election. Nominations are solicited from full or "covenanted" members within each community subdivision. These members pick three people, from whom one is selected by the overall coordinator. The Word of God retained the older system of coordinator self-selection, adhering to the commonly heard dictum that "the Kingdom of God is not a democracy," or in the words attributed to Overall Coordinator Steven Clark, "Democracy is not a scriptural concept." In these communities the job of coordinator is a highly demanding full-time position. In the Community of God's Delight, by contrast, coordinators have jobs outside the community, which itself maintains only two full-time employees.

The exercise of prophecy is another key difference in the organization of authority among the communities. While all Charismatics recognize prophecy as one of the spiritual gifts or charisms, there is a significant difference both in the formal recognition of gifted individuals and in prophecy's authoritative role as directly inspired divine utterance. For some people, prophecy is an occasional and momentary gift; others are individually recognized as being gifted on a regular basis; some communities have an organized "word gifts" group composed of confirmed prophets who together "listen to the Lord" in order to "discern his word for the group." The Word of God developed prophecy into an institution, with the formal office of Prophet held by a man consecrated by the community as a specially gifted channel of divine communication to the community. He oversees not only a word gifts group within the community but also a translocal "prophet's guild" that originated in the early 1980s. The People of Praise has a word gifts group but no formal office of community prophet. The Community of God's Delight has no organized word gifts group, and the community elder who oversees this aspect of ritual life is charged not with prophesying but with "discerning" the prophecies of others who wish to share them in group settings.

All of the communities take prophecy quite seriously in that their leaders consider the meaning of prophetic messages in their deliberations concerning group life and publish certain of them in community newsletters. The structural differences, however, highlight the different degrees to which prophecy penetrates the various aspects of collective life as a medium of charismatic authority. Whether prophecies can be prepared in advance or are required to be spontaneous, whether there is a regular flow of prophetic inspiration from members to coordinators, whether prophecy is a feature of interpersonal as well as collective discourse, are related differences in practice deeply embedded in the habitus of each community. Again, we can here only point to these differences in preparation for a more thorough examination of one community, and again note that the institutionalization of prophecy as direct and authoritative communication from the deity is another dimension of tension between the Sword of the Spirit and those covenant communities intent on demonstrating their submission to the sole authority of the Catholic church.

I will briefly touch on four more specific differences in the organization of authority among the leading communities, including denominational structure, education of children, pastoral supervision of adults, and gender role prescriptions. First, The Word of God in 1979 created four "fellowships" internal to the community, partially collapsing denominational distinctions while maintaining differentiation among Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Free Church members.^[17]   Meanwhile, all members oft he People of Praise and the Community of God's Delight remained simultaneously members of local parishes, in effect limiting the pastoral authority of their communities.

Second, all three communities have schools for their children, with differences reflecting the degree of world renunciation cultivated in community life. In both The Word of God and the People of Praise, classes are segregated by sex; during the 1980s students at The Word of God school were also required to walk on opposite sides of a yellow line that extended the length of the corridors. Both are oriented toward Charismatic Christian education, though they differ in the importance they place on inculcation of Charismatic values at an early age: The Word of God school includes grades 4 through 9 while the People of Praise teach grades 7 through 12. In addition, The Word of God school restricts enrollment to children of community members, whereas the People of Praise school is also open to noncommunity children. Likewise, The Word of God curriculum was relatively more "scripture oriented," whereas

the People of Praise included the thought of "worldly" thinkers such as Socrates, Mortimer Adler, and Jacques Maritain. The Community of God's Delight's preschool adopted the Montessori method, and its classes through grade 12 are run by a Catholic religious order, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.

Third, all three communities formalized the practice of headship or pastoral leadership, in which individual members are supervised in their daily lives by a person regarded as more "spiritually mature." From the perspective of most observers, this is one of the most controversial aspects of covenant community practice, for it has to do with the critical theme of relinquishing personal control ("submission to authority") as a requirement of commitment to a covenant. I will discuss headship at greater length in a subsequent chapter, and here note only that the People of Praise have appeared interested in portraying themselves as somewhat less authoritarian in this regard than their counterparts in The Word of God. Yet the difference between the two communities appears exceedingly subtle and was indeed described by them as similar to the difference between regional accents by speakers of the same language.^[18]   The Community of God's Delight originally followed The Word of God model of headship but later instituted a substantial revision at the level of community coordinator. Concluding that authority over community activities should be distinct from authority over personal lives, a second coordinator was appointed for each geographic district within the community. One has responsibility for community activities such as "sharing groups," "service ministries," and collective gatherings; the other is devoted to pastoral care, with a reformulation of headship using the teachings of the Church on Catholic "spiritual direction."

Fourth, in all three communities the highest office that can be held by a woman is "handmaid," the responsibilities of which are to "teach women on womanly affairs, give advice, help in troubled situations," and lead specialized women's activities. The chief handmaid was always under the authority of a male coordinator in The Word of God; in the Community of God's Delight the handmaids meet with the group of coordinators once a month. Practices defining "men's and women's roles" in "scriptural" terms were of concern to both The Word of God and the People of Praise, though the latter regarded themselves as taking a more "flexible" position.^[19]   Both communities hold that a man not only is head of the household but must also be the "spiritual head" or "pastoral leader" of his wife, while his own "head" is another man. Domestic division of labor along culturally "traditional" lines was explicitly

held to be an essential part of Christian life.^[20]   The Community of God's Delight in principle professes more moderation, with male headship in the family residing in the role of tiebreaker in decisions between two otherwise equal spouses. Again, both The Word of God and the People of Praise prescribed gender-appropriate dress, prohibiting "androgyny" in clothing. Within The Word of God this principle led, for example, to public disapproval of community handmaids wearing slacks instead of dresses. Leaders of the People of Praise, on hearing of this practice in the mid-1980s, decided that their former partners were being overly rigid. Finally, the People of Praise claimed to encourage female higher education and employment, whereas The Word of God remained some-what ambivalent about these issues.

Although many of these differences among communities appear quite nuanced and even trivial, they are precise inscriptions in practice of what I will describe below as a rhetorical involution that determines the incremental radicalization of charisma and ritualization of life. The qualitative dimension of their differences in "vision" and "mission" can be summarized as a greater pessimism on the part of The Word of God about developments in the contemporary world, the Catholic church, and the Charismatic Renewal. The Word of God saw the Charismatic Renewal as ideally evolving into a tightly knit network of communities that could protect the weakened Church against impending hard times, basing their approach directly on Christian Scripture and literal interpretation of prophecies such as the Rome prophecies. On opting out of this vision, the People of Praise reformulated its approach to the surrounding world as a "Christian humanism" grounded in the Second Vatican Council's "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." In the words of one of their coordinators, they decided that the motivation for what they wanted to do had to be "love of God and neighbor" rather than the call to "gather the wagons in a circle." Whereas The Word of God mobilized to "stem the tide of evil" they discerned to be flowing over the earth, their former partners concluded that this was an "exaggeration."^[21]

By the late 1980s, many adherents of the Rome prophecies in the Charismatic Renewal regarded most of its elements as already fulfilled, save for an impending "wave of evangelism such as the world has never known." Anticipating this wave of evangelism, some began to reconceive the threat to the Church not so much as from the outside as from inside: they warned of the possibility of collapse when, in its perceived weakened condition, the Church was flooded with the expected rush of

new converts. This retrenched position was not only less dramatic but also offered a wide range of potential explanations should the predicted wave of evangelism fail to materialize. For many it also made reintegration into Catholicism easier. Meanwhile, The Word of God and the Sword of the Spirit network of communities itself underwent schism, moving increasingly away from the center of the movement and, according to some critics, increasingly distant from the Catholic church. We will take up the story of this third split in the movement in Part Two.

The International Scene

Ethnographic and social science literature on the international expansion of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is sparse. In general, the literature on the movement in North America (see the preface above) tends to emphasize issues of community and personal religious experience, that on the movement in Latin America is slanted toward its role as a conservative political force in opposition to liberation theology, and that on Europe, Africa, and Asia highlights practices of ritual healing within the movement. What follows is a tour of those locales for which some documentation on the movement is available, beginning with distinct national and ethnic communities within the United States.

North America and Europe

In the United States, by 1992 the movement's National Service Committee included "ethnic representatives" for Filipino, Korean,^[22]   and Portuguese Catholic Charismatics. Semiautonomous service committees had also been created for Hispanic and Haitian Charismatics. Here I will elaborate briefly only Hispanic participation in movement events, which was reported beginning in 1976 with the continental conference that included Spanish résumés and one Spanish-language workshop. Hispanic leaders in the United States met for the first time in 1977. In 1982 the movement's National Service Committee added a Hispanic member and allocated funds to support Missiones Hispanas, an arm of The Word of God community active both in Latin America and among domestic Hispanic groups. In 1988 Hispanic Charismatics from the United States were officially represented for the first time at the eleventh conference of Catholic Charismatic leaders from through-

out Latin America, and in 1991 a separate Hispanic National Service Committee was established with a structure parallel to the already extant committee.

Although the movement is developed among Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Hispanics, I will mention only the Puerto Rican case based on research I conducted in New England during the late 1980s.^[23]   The movement was introduced to the island in 1971 by Redemptorist missionaries from the mainland, then reintroduced to the mainland by members of their community invited to stage a retreat at a Puerto Rican parish in Boston. One intent of my interviews was to elicit leaders' perceptions of differences between Puerto Rican and Anglo-American Charismatics with respect to healing (see Csordas 1994a). Two issues emerged. First, Charismatic leaders suggested that healing was more "liberating" for Puerto Ricans. This was in part because they reportedly experienced "deeper hurts" with respect to poor self-image as a result of colonial exploitation. They were also prone to exaggerated guilt and remordamiento (remorse) arising from intense moralism and to harboring emotional pain that turns to hatred when it is left unexpressed out of respect for parents. Finally, they were felt to bear an ingrained fear of the dark, of curses, and of spirits. Second, Puerto Rican Charismatics appeared to place greater emphasis on family and interpersonal relations. This was said to be evident in the practice of home visits by the healing team, in which neighbors and relatives were expressly included. It was also evident in the practice of "deliverance" from evil spirits insofar as the common afflicting spirits appeared to reflect cultural differences (for Anglos, spirits with an ego locus such as Depression, Bitterness, Resentment, Fear, Self-Destruction; for Puerto Ricans, spirits with an interpersonal locus such as Hatred, Disobedience, Envy, Respect, Slander, Criticism, Robbery, Violence, Rejection of God, Impurities, Masturbation, and Homosexuality). There also appeared to be a difference in the cultural understanding of why people are vulnerable to affliction by evil spirits: for Anglos, emotional trauma is often regarded as the developmental occasion in which the demon gains entrée; for Puerto Ricans, trauma was acknowledged but not typically connected with evil spirits.

The latter difference may be accounted for by the fact that for Puerto Rican Charismatics the most prominent source of evil spirits is the competing religious practice of Espiritismo (see Garrison 1977; Harwood 1977; Koss-Chioino 1992). When Hispanic Charismatics say that the Renewal is "very effective against spirits," they tend to have in mind the spirits of the deceased encountered in spiritism, African spirits, curses,

and the evil eye. (Similarly, Haitian Charismatics often reinterpret the deities of voudou as demonic spirits.) My interviews suggested two general points: (1) Espiritismo is condemned as demonic deception insofar as an evil spirit is thought to be imitating the voice of a dead person, in that spiritist writings use Christian Scripture but admix folk belief and pagan ritual, and in that the devil has the power to heal as part of his repertoire of deceptive tactics; (2) Espiritismo is said to be characterized by negativity and is "not liberating" because it deals only with hate and revenge while also deceiving people and taking their money.

The movement has also in a limited way penetrated indigenous peoples such as the Navajo, where it began in the early 1970s in the Fort Defiance area and in the 1980s spread to the community of Tohatchi. One Charismatic healer, a Navajo nun, exemplifes the heteroglossia that renders notions such as syncretism obsolete in the postmodern condition of culture (see chapter 2 below). She regards herself as equally at home in traditional Navajo ritual, the practices of the Native American Church with its sacramental peyote, and in Christianity. Indeed, she planned to use the honorarium she received from our project to help finance a traditional Blessingway ceremony for herself, since her limited stipend as a religious sister made it difficult for her to afford the services of a medicine man. She identified fundamentalist Christian, Charismatic Christian, and New Age spiritualities as among those she could relate to. She was formally trained as a Catholic spiritual director at Loyola University and underwent a nine-month course in San Francisco related to the recovery movement and healing the inner child. She refers to traditional and Native American Church observance as part of her "prayer life," a term common among Charismatics. She also uses the same term, "prayer meetings," for both Native American Church and Charismatic services and defines the former as a spiritual way of life instead of as a church, so that like her Charismatic participation it does not conflict with her membership in the Catholic church.

Her account of becoming a healer is virtually identical to that of other Charismatics I have heard, with one symbolic and one ethnopsychological twist. She says that at a Charismatic conference three people asked her for healing prayer, which she politely obliged but which made her uncomfortable, so that she "disappeared." The next year at the conference seven people asked for prayer, and again she obliged but "disappeared" afterward. Then at another event she asked for a blessing from a Catholic Indian known for presenting an eagle feather to the pope. He

not only blessed her but also presented her with an eagle feather, which she at first protested she had not earned, but accepted as a responsibility on his insistence. At the next summer's conference she prayed for people who came steadily from ten o'clock in the evening until two o'clock in the morning. She now feels challenged to live a life of purification. Briefly, the ethnopsychological twist is the description of demurral from the calling as "disappearing," evocative of the Navajo tendency to self-effacement in certain social situations. The symbolic twist is the eagle feather as emblem of a Charismatic healing ministry. For this healer, the idea of "picking up the feather" leads to analogy between priest or healer and those traditional ceremonial clowns who in their capacity as protectors of ritual dancers must have a familiarity with evil, which she notes extends among the neighboring Pueblos to the point of acting out the perversities of the people.

Three studies document the movement in Quebec based on material from the 1970s (Reny and Rouleau 1978; Chagnon 1979; Zylberberg and Montminy 1980). They agree in dating the movement's advent to 1971, when one Father Regimbal returned from a Charismatic experience in Arizona to stage a retreat in the provincial town of Granby. Paul Reny and Jean Paul Rouleau (1978: 131–132) observe a rapid growth from its inception to fifty prayer groups in 1973, four hundred by 1974, and seven hundred (with an estimated membership of 60,000) by 1977 (cf. the more conservative estimate of 301 prayer groups in 1975 and 550 by 1979 by Zylberberg and Montminy [1980]). Participants were predominantly middle-class women of "mature age," but notably in comparison with the United States nearly 25 percent of members were men and women in religious orders, especially nuns; Jacques Zylberberg and Jean-Paul Montminy (1980: 139) concur that there are two "hard-core" elements of adherents, one composed of lower-middle-class, middle-aged provincial women and another composed of clerics shifting from a sacerdotal to a prophetic mode of attaining ecclesiastical prestige.

Zylberberg and Montminy (1980) attempt to place the movement in macrosocial context in relation to the dynamic of state, capital, and religion in Quebec. In a society historically characterized by clerical domination and a provincial state, they identify the movement as an ostensibly apolitical attempt to break the stalemate between future-oriented Catholic social activists and tradition-oriented Catholic conservatives. While 70 percent of Charismatics voted in elections, only 12.4 percent

chose the nationalist Parti Quebecois , and only six percent reported participation in any overtly political group. The authors interpret the nationalists as representing a state nationalism and organizational modernism that are not merely rejected but are symbolically opaque for Charismatics, with an emphasis on French monolingualism symbolically contradicted by the universal spiritual language of speaking in tongues. This is the case even though within the movement itself certain frustrations experienced by francophone participants in a bilingual Canadian Charismatic conference in 1973 led them to stage a separate francophone conference the following year (Reny and Rouleau 1978: 131). Support for the Liberal political party is by default and habit, resulting in adherence to the status quo. The priest/anthropologist Roland Chagnon (1979: 101, 140) likewise understands the movement's social impact as a reinforcement and enlargement of the base of the social status quo in the face of both the broad cultural malaise of the 1960s and the specific social conditions of Catholicism in Quebec. These conditions include the erosion of the traditional view of life with its emphasis on religion and the clergy, rural life, and the importance of a simple communitarian life, all said to have resulted in a crisis of identity for many individuals.

Following Charles Glock and Rodney Stark (1965), Chagnon distinguishes among religious experience that is confirmative of the existence of God, that which is correlative insofar as it is a reciprocal sense of divine presence and divine attention to the person, that which is ecstatic and combines the preceding two types with enhanced intensity, and that which is revelational or mystical insofar as the deity makes the person a confidant in an atmosphere of emotional serenity. Sixteen of twenty cases Chagnon documents are of the correlative type, none is confirmative, one is ecstatic, and three are mystical, and he concludes that what is characteristic of Charismatic experience is an "affective encounter with God" (1979: 82), a displacement of the sacred from the figure of a severe and distant God to that of a "God of love" (1979: 84), and in contrast to an emphasis on world transformation a distinct penchant "to remake the self, to reconstitute it in profundity" (1979: 91).^[24]   Finally, Chagnon summarizes Charismatic spirituality as characterized by the cultivation of the senses of interior peace and divine presence, affective encounter with both God and others, and participation in divine power through abandonment of the self to God (1979: 171–178). The other commentators draw the consequences of this kind of spirituality: given both an experiential interior and a social interior constituted by the

prayer group and its relations to the ecclesiastical community, there is an attitude toward external society characterized by the goal of "enlargement of interiority until it encompasses the exterior" (Reny and Rouleau 1978: 130), or in which "the exterior world has to be absorbed by the interior world" (Zylberberg and Montminy 1980: 143).

All three accounts take pains to account for the movement's significance with the sociopolitical and culture historical specificity of Catholicism in Quebec, warning against too close homology with the movement in the United States. It may be that the role of the clergy and of middle-aged women (more likely only the former) has been greater in Quebec, and that the movement in Quebec was co-opted by the hierarchy and declining in rate of growth somewhat sooner than in the United States. Nevertheless, Reny and Rouleau's (1978) comparison of the Charismatics with Catholic left-wing social activists ("les socio-politiques") corresponds closely with McGuire's (1974) similar comparison in the United States. The apolitical orientation and the cultivation of an interiority that presumes social transformation will occur as a consequence of self-transformation are also similar to those observed in the United States (Fichter 1975; McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987).

Catholic Charismatics in France acknowledge borrowing the movement from the United States. At the same time they point out the anomaly that for the first time in history a movement within Catholicism has come to them from across the Atlantic, and suggest that to the extent that French Charismatics find their identity to be national and ecclesial, American influence declines (Hébrard 1987: 245). The date of origin can be traced to 1971 when two Catholics among two hundred Protestants attended the first interconfessional Charismatic convention sponsored by a Charismatic element of the Reformed Church, L'Union de Prière de Charmes. By the third such event in 1973 there were two hundred Catholics alongside two hundred Protestants, and after that Catholics became dominant, with a movement and momentum of their own. By 1974 covenant communities had formed at Lyons, Grenoble, Montpellier, Cordes (mostly university towns), and Paris and began sponsoring their own assemblies (Hébrard 1987: 283).

The diversity among French covenant communities parallels that in the United States, and I will mention only two of the most prominent. Emmanuel community began in 1972 among a group associated with a Catholic school of oratory in Paris, when a young couple just returned from the United States gave a powerful testimony about their experience with the Charismatic Renewal. In a year the group had grown from

five to five hundred and took Emmanuel as its name, and the first collective household began in 1974. In 1976 thirty members visited covenant communities in the United States and in 1977, formally became a covenant community themselves. In 1986 Emmanuel had three thousand members distributed throughout Paris and the provinces, six other European countries, and four African countries. The orienting theme of community activities is evangelization: at the core of their organization is the Fraternity of Jesus, a missionary group comprising both lay and religious, and to which one must be initiated in order to take a leadership position in the community. Their outreach extends to multiple segments of the population, and like The Word of God in the United States they are a media force, publishing the periodicals Il Est Vivant and Psychologie et Foi and operating a book and tape distribution service. As of 1986, a community-based foundation for international spiritual, social, and economic aid (FIDESCO) was functioning in seventeen dioceses in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (Hébrard 1987: 57–70). As a conservative force favored by the Church hierarchy Emmanuel was recognized in 1986 as a Private Association of the Faithful by the French Cardinal Lustiger. In 1990 it became a foundation member, along with the Community of God's Delight of Dallas, U.S.A., and the Emmanuel Covenant Community of Brisbane, Australia, of the new Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. In 1992 Emmanuel community was recognized as a Universal Association of the Faithful of the Pontifical Rite by the Vatican.

The Lion of Judah and Sacrificial Lamb was founded at the tourist town of Cordes-sur-Ciel and exemplifies the postmodern melding of cultural genres. It is based at a monastery but in a tourist town, its members pursue professional careers but adopt a contemplative Carmelite spirituality, it emphasizes chastity while including married couples and their children, and it was founded by Protestants but is now thoroughly Catholic—with the addition of Hebrew Sabbath observances. Like the French Emmanuel community and the American Sword of the Spirit, it has spread its branches well beyond its origin, into twenty-five French dioceses and seventeen foreign countries. In 1991 the community changed its name to Community of the Beatitudes on the grounds that the Lion of Judah was an unacceptable symbol in some of the countries in which its members have moved. The community is particularly renowned for its healing ministry, based at its Château Saint Luc staffed by sixteen residents, its clinic staffed by physicians and

psychologists who "discern" as well as diagnose their patients, a group charged with visiting the sick, and the group Mère de Miséricorde that takes in women who have had or who have contemplated having abortions (see Csordas 1996). Their yearly gatherings held since 1983 produce videotapes of notable healings, and in 1987 the community organized a widely popular pilgrimage to Lourdes. At Saturday public healing services during retreats, participants regularly "rest in the spirit" (Hébrard 1987: 71–91).

The core of healing practice is "psychospiritual accompaniment," in effect two weeks of around-the-clock attention that allows, claim its practitioners, such innovations as decreasing a patient's dosage of neuroleptic medication to a minimum. Giordana Charuty (1987) has produced a vivid description of Charismatic healing in France and Italy that conforms in most respects to its practice in the United States (see Csordas 1983, 1988, 1990b, 1994a; McGuire 1982, 1983, 1988). She identifies the "healing of memories" as the guarantor of transformation in psychospiritual accompaniment. Community healers and therapists for whom Carl Rogers and Carl Jung are de rigueur also practice the revelatory charisms of prophecy, discernment, and word of knowledge, all the while condemning practices such as yoga and transcendental meditation as demonic. Charuty quite rightly identifies the therapeutic of a triple anamnesis: psychological through review of biographical memory, initiative through recovery of the emotional fundamentals of early religious experiences, and mythic through directing the person into the imaginal realm of early Christianity. In language directly relevant to what I will refer to below as religions of the self, she points to the centrality of"symbolic manipulations put in place to produce an acculturation to Christianity anchored in exaltation and the socialization of individual unhappiness" ( 1987: 463).^[25]

The Charismatic Renewal was introduced to Italy by foreigners in 1971. Here as in France, growth of the movement was reported to be dramatic following its first international conference in Rome in 1975. By the time of the first national leaders' conference in 1977, the movement had an estimated active membership of seven thousand throughout the country. The second national conference was held in 1979 at Rimini, as a challenge to present "Christian witness in an almost entirely Marxist environment" (ICO Newsletter , May–June 1979). The pope addressed gatherings of an estimated fifteen thousand Italian Charismatics in 1980 and again in 1986, and by 1988 the eleventh national conference at Rimini drew an estimated forty thousand participants. Enzo

Pace (1978) describes the movement in the region of Veneto as having two distinct manifestations: the Rinnovamento nello Spirito, or Spiritual Renewal, affiliated with the international Charismatic Renewal, which was initiated locally at Padua in 1972 and which is composed of both prayer groups and communities; and the Charismatic movement founded in Italy in 1967 by Franca Cornado, which was introduced into Veneto in the 1970s and whose adherents are primarily conservative elderly and middle-aged persons oriented toward the experience and documentation of manifestations of spiritual charisms. The latter is more explicitly politically conservative and pre-Vatican in its Catholic orientation; the former distinguishes itself from the political sphere by emphasizing the spiritual values of quotidian life, personal relations, and community, rejecting the close link between the "personal" and the "political" favored by left-leaning social activists.^[26]

Discussion of the movement in Europe would not be complete without reference to what was perhaps the most prominent religious event of the last two decades, the apparition in 1981 of the Virgin Mary to several children in the Croatian village of Medjugorje. Quickly approaching the stature of Fatima, Lourdes, and Guadalupe, Medjugorje attracted an estimated ten million Catholic pilgrims by 1986 (Bax 1987: 29). Although the role of the Franciscans has been noted in transforming Medjugorje into a prominent site of pilgrimage and spiritual tourism (Bax 1990; Vukonic 1992)—to the point where some cynics reportedly began to refer to the apparition as "Our Lady of Foreign Currency"—the importance of Charismatics is less well known. During my research in the 1980s one prominent New England healer suspended her ministry to lead groups of pilgrims to the site. Worldwide pilgrimage coordination was based at the Franciscan College of Steubenville in Ohio, which is the Charismatic institution of higher learning under the presidency of Fr. Michael Scanlon, a prominent movement leader. It is probably safe to say that had the Charismatics not been primed for an episode of world reenchantment of this sort, the global phenomenon at Medjugorje would likely not have blossomed.

South America, Africa, and Asia

Evidence suggests that the typical pattern for the movement's introduction in a third world region is as follows: a missionary priest visits the United States, is exposed to Baptism of the Holy Spirit, organizes a prayer group on his return, and subsequently calls on out-

side help for doctrinal instruction, healing services, or administration of the Life in the Spirit Seminar (a widespread initiation rite that provides both indoctrination and a controlled setting for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit). In some cases, such as that documented by Johannes Fabian (1991) in Zaire, there may be a preexisting network of non-Charismatic prayer groups that is subsequently co-opted into the international movement. Perhaps a dozen major figures regularly make excursions to movement outposts (non-Catholic evangelists are sometimes called on). There is an apparent tendency for groups to maintain relations with the individual or group responsible for initial instruction and organizational assistance. Such relations of moral dependency may be more than superficially analogous to those in the political-economic sphere between a "metropole" in a dominant region and specific locales in a dependent "periphery." However, regional integration on a continental basis has been ongoing for some time, in Latin America since the early 1970s through the Encuentros Carismatico Catolico Latino Americano (ECCLA), in Asia beginning with the 1980 Asian Leaders' Conference that attracted representatives from fifteen countries, and in Africa with the Pan-African Congress first held at the end of the 1980s and planned to take place every four years since 1992.

In Mexico the initiation of Catholic Pentecostalism is attributed to the American Missionaries of the Holy Spirit. In 1971 Mexico City had one prayer group of forty members; by 1975 it was estimated that more than ten thousand Mexicans had become involved in the movement. As described by a Charismatic priest (Talavera 1976), a Mexico City group based at the Archdiocesan Social Secretariat began the first move to incorporate the "very poor" in Ciudad del Lago, a squatter settlement adjacent to the city's airport. Population growth in this area had been extremely rapid: from 1960 to 1970 the municipality directly east of the airport grew from sixty thousand to six hundred thousand (Cornelius 1973). The Social Secretariat group established a satellite prayer group at Ciudad del Lago in 1972, two years after the settlement appeared, with a resident factory worker as leader.

The Pentecostal experience was credited with significant motivational change in members of both parent and satellite groups. The middle-class organizers began to conceive their task as "conversion to Christ" instead of as "concern for the poor." By the priest's account, squatters began to abandon an individualistic materialism that emulates the middle class for an increasing communitarianism and pride of status. The new group developed communal patterns of authority and decision

making and established patterns of labor exchange. A women's group began to knit and sell clothing as the basis for a common fund for emergencies, loans to needy members, and wholesale group food purchasing. Families took turns preparing a communal Sunday meal.

In addition to their emphasis on conversion, the middle-class group provided legal advice, architectural planning, and financing, which assisted the squatters in gaining legal title to land in Ciudad del Lago. They proposed to build individual family dwellings but decided against individual ownership of lots. The combination of religious motivation and middle-class patronage also affected the squatters' attitudes toward civil authority. Whenever police came to search for illegal building materials, or lawyers came talking of eviction, the people began to greet them with hospitality instead of anger and fear. Whereas their communications with authorities had been characterized by submission and flattery, they began to demand recognition as rights-beating citizens. The prayer group successfully resisted a government resettlement plan that would have separated its members in different quarters of the city (Talavera 1976).

A similar situation arose among squatters near the municipal dump in the border city of Juarez, which by 1969 had a total of thirty-eight squatter settlements (Ugalde 1974). Several local social workers were converted to Catholic Pentecostalism and in 1972 established liaisons with a middle-class Catholic Pentecostal group across the border in El Paso, Texas, which was interested in helping "the poorest people they knew." Working together, they facilitated reconciliation between two factions of peperiadores (scavengers) at the dump, who subsequently organized their trash industry into a profit-sharing cooperative. Following a 1975 crisis in which the dump manager refused to pay for sorted and collected trash, the governor ceded the dump's management and income to its residents. Critical to this enterprise was assistance from middle-class Charismatics in the form of administrative work, identification of markets, and research on importation procedures (Talavera 1976).

In Chile, Catholic Pentecostalism was introduced in 1972 by Maryknoll and Holy Cross missionaries from the United States. Movement sources report that middle-class groups account for about a third of the total number of prayer groups and two-thirds of the groups are located in poor neighborhoods. Although specific data are not available, it may be surmised that similar liaisons have developed between Charismatics across class lines. A movement leader (Aldunate 1975) describes a

Charismatic retreat among the Mapuche Indians of Chile that was organized on the analogy of the traditional Mapuche fertility rite, or nillatun (Faron 1964). The retreat included participation of the female ritual specialist, or machi , whose traditional function includes dispersion of evil spirits, healing, and the utterance of unintelligible inspired messages, functions that directly correspond to Pentecostal deliverance, faith healing, and prophecy in tongues. Indeed, Protestant Pentecostal congregations in this region feature female prophets who speak in tongues and healers (Lalive d'Epinay 1969: 200–203), but within a ritual organization that is separate and exclusive while remaining formally analogous to the indigenous model. Catholic Pentecostalism in this instance assimilates the indigenous model directly, converting Mapuche culture as well as Mapuches themselves and thus creating a single ritual totality, a single horizon of possibilities for sacred reality (see Csordas 1980b).

In Brazil, Catholic Pentecostalism is described by Pedro A. Ribeiro de Oliveira (1978) as found almost exclusively among the middle and upper middle classes, "gens des couches aisées." Certainly the topography of religious participation in Brazil is complicated by the diversity of options, including Afro-Brazilian and spiritualist groups. If Ribeiro de Oliveira's report is correct, however, Brazilian Charismatics come from a generally higher-class background, with greater prior involvement in Catholic organizations. To a degree much greater even than in the United States, they may be wary of the "lower-class" associations of faith healing practices and threatened by the powerful presence of Protestant Pentecostalism as a religious option. Such insularity appears atypical in Latin America, and it is likely that the survey method overlooked the kind of liaisons with the disenfranchised undertaken by the Brazilian Catholic Pentecostal community Esperança e Vida in the rehabilitation of drug addicts (ICCRO 1987). By 1992 the movement's international office reported two million Catholic Charismatics in Brazil (for additional discussion of the movement in Latin America, see Csordas 1980, 1992).

The origin and context of Charismatic Christianity in Nigeria is discussed by Matthews A. Ojo (1988), who observes that the movement originated in the early 1970s among college students and university graduates of various denominations. As in many third world settings a primary emphasis is divine healing, but in addition there is much attention to restitution "for one's past sins, mistakes, and every sort of unchristian act" (1988: 184), reflecting aspects of the traditional Yoruba concern for purification. Restitution often takes the form of returning

stolen articles, which Ojo interprets as a reaction against the quest for material wealth following the Nigerian oil boom of the 1970s, and which is being duplicated during the mid-1990s among students at American Christian colleges in a wave of public confessionals quite likely in reaction against the quest for wealth during the "yuppie me generation" of the 1980s (Associated Press 1995). Restitution applied to marriage assumes the greed of a polygynous man who makes amends by divorcing all but his first wife (Ojo 1988: 184–185).

Among Catholics, by 1976 the movement's first national leadership conference in Benin City attracted 110 participants with official support from the local bishop. In 1983 the National Advisory Council was formed to oversee movement activities. Francis MacNutt, the first and most widely known among American Catholic Charismatic healers, recounts a Charismatic retreat in Nigeria in which traditional deities were cast out or "delivered" as occult spirits, including the following case of a man in Benin City:

An outstanding Catholic Layman, he was a convert who had been brought up in the old religion. He discovered as a child that after certain practices of dedication his toes were affected by a divining spirit. If the day of his plans were to be propitious, one toe would pinch him; if they were to be unlucky, a different toe would pinch. Consequently, he came to plan his life around these omens, which he said always came true, even if he tried to disregard them. When he desired to pray out loud at our retreat, however, his unpropitious toe began to act up; at this point, he decided that these strange manifestations must be from an evil spirit and had to be renounced. (MacNutt 1975: 9)

This incident is a variant of the time-honored Catholic strategy of ritual incorporation of indigenous practices based on acceptance of their existential reality but negation of their spiritual value, condemning them as inspired by the demonic forces of Satan.

This pattern recurs in especially vivid form in Zambia. Here the movement had two beginnings: one in the early 1970s led by Irish missionary priests (ter Haar 1987) and one in 1976 led by Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Lusaka, who in that year established a relationship with The Word of God community and founded his own Divine Providence community, after having quite independently begun to practice faith healing in 1973 (Milingo 1984). In 1979 the archbishop was a prominent participant in a Charismatic pilgrimage to Lourdes. By the early 1980s there was irreconcilable tension between the missionary-led and Milingo wings of the movement, with the latter prevailing and the archbishop being recalled to Rome in 1983.

The archbishop's case is remarkable for two reasons. First, it shows a simultaneous "indigenization" of Charismatic ritual healing and a "Charismatization" of a distinctly African form of Christian healing. As described in his own writings, Milingo's (1984) services included typical elements of Charismatic ritual such as resting in the Spirit, speaking in tongues, naming evil spirits after problematic emotions or behaviors, calling out evil spirits to identify them, recognizing problems caused by ancestral spirits, calling on angels and saints for spiritual protection, anointing of supplicants by lay assistants, and in general a distinction among three types of healing termed physical healing, inner healing, and deliverance. However, within his cultural context God took on material as well as paternal features, and Jesus was reinterpreted as an intercessor of a kind similar to traditional ancestors except in that rather than an ancestor for a single family he was a universal ancestor for all. Moreover, Milingo distinctly recognized and addressed his practice to mashawe , a form of spirit affliction recognized in the traditional cultures of Zambia. He made a critical distinction between orderly, intentional liturgical dances appealing to ancestral spirits for protection and disorderly, spirit-controlled dances in what he called the satanically inspired "Church of the Spirits" (Milingo 1984: 32–33). As in traditional culture, but also like many other Catholic Charismatics, he acknowledged that family ancestors could cause affliction, but he also recognized evil spirits that sometimes "take noble names, such as those of famous men. . . . Thus they want to be honored" (1984:119). Finally, he distinguished between witches, figures from traditional culture who he defined as having given themselves over completely to Satan, and the possessed, who retain sufficient free will to seek help for their condition. To date, this sketchy outline is as far as ethnological scholarship can go in documenting the adaptation and transformation of the Charismatic healing system to a culture different from the Euro-American one in which it originated.

The second remarkable feature of Milingo's case is that within a decade his healing ministry had created such controversy that he was recalled to Rome.^[27]   There he was detained and interrogated. In a deal with the Vatican, he eventually relinquished his ecclesiastical post, in return for which he was granted an appointment as special delegate to the Pontifical Commission for Migration and Tourism, with the freedom to travel (except to Zambia), and was reassured by the pope that his healing ministry would be "safeguarded" (Milingo 1984: 137). Gerrie ter Haar (1987) plausibly suggests that three lines of political cleavage

converged to determine this event. First was the cleavage between Milingo and Rome over the extent and legitimacy of the Africanization of Catholicism. Second was that between Milingo as a popular and charismatic figure and the other Zambian bishops as a bloc representing the ecclesiastical status quo. Third was the cleavage between the missionaryled wing of the Zambian Charismatic Renewal whose approach revolved around prayer groups and cultivation of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and Milingo's version of the Renewal oriented toward healing in large events, personal encounters, or communal settings. Ironically, given that the overt goal of his recall was in part to protect Zambian Catholics from what must have appeared to Church officials as a kind of neopaganism, Milingo has subsequently become immensely popular as a healer among Italian Charismatics (Rev. Kenneth Metz, pers. comm.). With established followings in ten Italian cities, and already a figure on national television, in 1987 he moved his public healing service from the church of Argentini of Rome to a large room in the Ergife Hotel. Once again in 1989 his controversial ministry was temporarily suspended by the Church and later renewed outside Rome in Velletri (Lanternari 1994). He moved to a new diocese yet again in the early 1990s, and in 1994 the bishop's conference in Tuscany issued a pastoral note on demonology and witchcraft quite likely targeted at Milingo's ministry.

Vittorio Lanternari has written on the Italian adventure of Milingo since 1983. He describes the effect as a "religious short-circuit" between Africa and Europe, and in a surprisingly postmodern image, as the replacement of metaphysical mythology by science fiction mythology (1987, 1994). Lanternari is intent, however, on demonstrating the African provenance of many of Milingo's ideas on witchcraft and sorcery and its homology with folk Italian notions about witchcraft, sorcery, evil eye, and occult powers (see also Charuty 1987: 454), rather than the way it articulates with the Charismatic Renewal. He also makes the observation that devotees in both Rome and Lusaka share the same behavioral manifestations of demonic crisis but attributes this directly to what he describes as Milingo's techniques of instigating then calming these crises by evoking emotional contagion and dependency. Even if relevant, such contagion is no more unique to African Charismatic prophets than to American Protestant Charismatic healers from Derek Prince and Don Basham in the 1960s to John Wimber in the 1980s. (At the same time Lanternari appears to acknowledge that some of the similarity may be due to social milieus that in either the Italian or the African setting

create "the sense of bewilderment and impotence in confrontations with common disorder.") Again, what Lanternari refers to as the indiscriminate intertwining of exorcistic and medical-charismatic models of healing may be no more than recognition of the Catholic Charismatic genres of deliverance and physical healing (Csordas 1994a). A generally negative attitude is revealed in the author's accusation that patients in crisis are mocked with such statements as "These are not human beings," which a more generous critic might interpret as referring to the afflicting demons rather than the afflicted persons. However, what in the end Lanternari describes as most typically African is perhaps also most typically postmodern: linking illness not with the more (or biological) but with the domain of impurity, danger, contamination, and pollution. For in then looping back to link illness and evil through multiple entities like Satan, witches, malign spirits, vices, and disgraceful behavior, Archbishop Milingo contributes to a decentering of meaning that cannot but take place in a global movement whose key symbol is, after all, the verbal multiplicity of speaking in tongues.

For Zaire, Fabian (1991, 1994) has discussed the Charismatic Renewal's existence in an urban milieu alongside the Catholic Jamaa movement, the African Bapostolo movement, and traditional African mediumship. On Fabian's account, prayer groups in Lubumbashi appear to have been founded by several local women around 1973. These women in turn cultivated the involvement of several indigenous Catholic clergymen in the role of healer. Only subsequently, largely through the policy of the local archbishop, did these groups come under the influence of the international movement represented by several Jesuit missionary priests and by visits from internationally known figures including ( probably in the mid-1970s) Archbishop Milingo from Zambia.

Roughly similar to the distinction noted above for Italy and Zambia, Fabian observes two loosely related types of groups, designating them as charismatiques and renouveau . The former draw membership from both the middle class and the working poor and are organized into prayer groups based on exercise of the Pentecostal charisms by a core group assembled around a principal leader, with a wider circle of participants who seek to benefit from the charisms around them. The latter consist largely of young, educated adults, are not organized around a single leader, and tend to deemphasize use of the charisms while making group prayer their principal activity. Healers typically take seriously traditional problems caused by sorcery (fetichisme ), the use of magical

objects for protection (dawa , or bwanga ), and spirit affliction (bulozi ), though preoccupation with spirit possession and witchcraft appears to be greatest in groups with only indirect connections to the international movement. Occasionally politically powerful individuals resort to the Charismatics to escape the escalating necessity of invoking increasingly powerful and dangerous traditional means of spiritual protection. In spirit affliction, the causal agents often appear not to be demonic spirits but those of persons, living or dead and frequently relatives of the afflicted, who are identified and name themselves through the voice of the patient.

Fabian notes several intriguing links between the Jamaa and the Charismatic Renewal. Like Milingo later in Zambia, the Belgian founder of the Jamaa, Fr. Placide Tempels, was recalled from Africa in part for his indigenizing moves, but quite notably had as a protector the Belgian Cardinal Suenens who later emerged as the highest-ranking Church official within the Charismatic Renewal. However, Tempels consistently suppressed Pentecostal manifestations such as glossolalia that probably occurred under the influence of the contemporaneous Protestant Pentecostal Bapostolo movement. Nevertheless, by the 1970s the new Charismatic groups were drawing their leaders and followers from among the ranks of the Jamaa, resulting in the melding of Jamaa ideas and modes of discursive practice with those of the Charismatics. Fabian contrasts the optimism, humanism, and universalism of the early Jamaa with the inward-looking ritualization of personal problems and interpersonal relations characteristic of Charismatics. Along with this, he draws a contrast between the language-centeredness of Jamaa with respect to its oral initiatory practices and the Zairean Charismatics' emphasis on inspired reading of Scripture and their relatively elaborated ritualization of practice. As a note for comparative research, language-centeredness was also characteristic of Catholic Charismatics in the United States at least through the 1970s (Csordas 1987, 1996), but with relatively less emphasis on teaching than on prophecy, a genre of ritual language that from Fabian's account appears to be little elaborated among contemporary Charismatics in Zaire.

Fabian suggests that a feature of social differentiation between the two movements may be that whereas the Jamaa promotes and even requires that its members be married couples, Charismatic groups do not prohibit participation by unmarried youth, adolescents, and divorced people. A second feature is that whereas the followers of Placide Tempels

were predominantly workers, the Charismatic Renewal strongly appeals to the growing professional class. This is in part related to what Fabian sees as a general embourgeoisement of Zairean society, but must be seen in the context of the postmodern condition in its Zairean manifestation. For what finally strikes one in Fabian's account is the current state of diversification within Jamaa, the overall proliferation of religious alternatives in the cultural milieu, and the dispersal of charismatic (in the Weberian sense) authority through society. Moreover, access to power is enacted in terms of ingesting and incorporating powerful substances rather than by occupying a territory or imposing order, such that "power is here tied to concrete embodiments rather than to abstract structures" (Fabian 1994: 271). Fabian suggests that this "expresses a cultural preference for a kind of anarchy . . . that encourage[s] the ardent pursuit of power, as well as the proliferation of its embodiments" (1994: 272). In line with the analysis I am developing here, this preexisting local cultural preference takes on particular significance as it is highlighted or comes to the fore in the context of the global hypertrophy of semiosis characteristic of the postmodern condition.

Crossing now to Asia, the Charismatic movement was introduced to Indonesia by Protestants. Indeed, an inspirational book popular among American Catholic Charismatics in the early 1970s was Like a Mighty Wind by the Indonesian Protestant neo-Pentecostal Mel Tari. As of 1976 it was still reported that Jakarta prayer groups tended to be half Catholic, an ecumenical mix common in the Midwest of North America but apparently in few other regions. It was said that the movement had made such an impact among Christians in Indonesia that the principal distinction was no longer between Protestants and Catholics but between "those who clap in Church and those who don't," referring to the ebullient style of Charismatic worship (Shelly Errington, pers. comm.).

According to S. E. Ackerman (1981), in neighboring Malaysia the Renewal began in the early 1970s through the activities of a French missionary priest who had become involved in the movement and began to exercise charismatic healing in conjunction with his official status as a diocesan exorcist in Kuala Lumpur. His lay assistant exorcists were active in establishing other Charismatic groups and stimulating growth of the Renewal in the area. Ackerman describes Catholic Pentecostalism in Malaysia as an idiom of spiritual power that replaces those used by traditional mediums and folk healers as a means for dealing with evil spirits

and other supernatural forces while at the same time being "derived from concepts of power embedded in popular supernaturalism" (1981: 94). Ackerman describes the experience of an individual who, following episodes of hallucination and uncontrollable violence that he attributed to the effects of sorcery, sought treatment from a bomoh (shaman). Having experienced a cure the man began a process of initiation as a shaman himself, only to reject the opportunity in exchange for a parallel role in the "deliverance ministry" among Catholic Charismatics on the grounds that as a traditional practitioner he would be feared and loathed while as a Charismatic healer he would be respected. Ackerman describes spirit possession cases as exceedingly frequent among Malaysian Charismatics, requiring a great deal of lay assistance that innovatively provides opportunities for lay leadership, thus redefining the relationship between laity and clergy. However, there are indications in Ackcrman's account that the surge of popularity of deliverance declined somewhat when ministers backed off from an overwhelming demand, and it would be worth investigating whether this corresponds to the surge and decline of deliverance in the United States at roughly the same period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1992 the movement's national convention, with the local archbishop in attendance, attracted over two thousand participants from Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore, and a covenant community called Light of God was active in the Malaysian city of Taiping.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in Japan in 1972 when Canadian missionaries at a Tokyo parish began a prayer group following a Holy Spirit Seminar conducted by a visiting ecumenical team from Canada and the United States. Members of this group played a large role in spreading the movement. In 1975 the first national leadership conference was held, with roughly half of the participants missionaries from French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking countries. By 1995 there were some seventy-five prayer groups from Hokkaido to Okinawa with a total participation of approximately one thousand (Mathy 1992). Ikegami Yoshimasa (1993), writing on a Protestant Charismatic church in Okinawa, emphasizes both the continuity and competition between them and traditional yuta (shamans) with respect to exorcism of demonic spirits. He suggests that although in comparison to the rationalizing and promodern "new religions" of the 1950s and 1960s the Charismatics count among the magical-spiritualistic "new new religions" that participate in the reenchantment of the world, in comparison to

traditional shamanism they favor an individualism compatible with modern society rather than the yuta's fatalistic orientation toward life. Further research could examine whether this relation holds among Catholic Charismatics in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan.

Conclusion

Our global survey of the Charismatic Renewal is only a glimpse at the scope and diversity of the movement. Certainly the phenomenon offers a rare opportunity for ethnological analysis, for although there have been attempts to compare different religious movements or different forms of ritual healing, there has never been a comparison of cultural variants of what is ostensibly the same movement or form of healing on a scale more manageable than that, say, of a comparison between "European Catholicism" and "African Catholicism." In this respect the current chapter stands as the barest of outlines and an exhortation to comparative research.

The survey also allows us, or more accurately requires us, to identify multiple dimensions of social analysis relevant to the course of the movement's development across different national and cultural contexts. Within the movement these dimensions sketch the analytic space between radical and moderate visions of community, between parochial and covenant community standpoints, between emphasis on mass manifestations of healing charisms and on collective prayer and worship, between the routinization of charisma and the continued impetus for charismatic renewal. Within the Catholic church they sketch the space between Charismatics and movements espousing social activism, between laity and clergy, between movement and hierarchy. In society at large they outline interaction between the movement as an element of Christian neoconservatism and trends of secular society and culture, between microsocial and macrosocial analysis with respect to interpersonal interaction and institutional constraint, between personal and political with respect to issues of power and experience, between local and global with respect to cultural process and relations of dependency, between premodern and postmodern with respect to the structure of meaning and authority.

Certainly the tensions, dynamics, and consequences within each of

these dimensions could be drawn out in greater detail and analyzed as symptomatic of the contemporary condition of culture. For economy of argument, however, I will collapse these issues into a single question. In this respect the global survey will constitute the backdrop against which, in the next chapter, we will consider the empirical and theoretical consequences of what it means to characterize the Charismatic Renewal in its local and global manifestations as a "movement" in the postmodern condition of culture.

2
Religion in the Postmodern Condition

In early March 1973, I made arrangements to attend my first Catholic Pentecostal prayer meeting. I was especially anxious to hear speaking in tongues and was reflecting on the latest anthropological accounts that identified such "ecstatic speech" as a phenomenon of altered states of consciousness.^[1]   I rode from campus to the suburban midwestern church where the weekly meeting of the Christ the King prayer group took place with a male medical student and a female undergraduate who were group members. On the way, the medical student suggested prayers as a way to prepare spiritually for the meeting. I was in the back seat of the car as both people in front devoutly spoke in tongues. Theories of trance and altered states of consciousness completely preoccupied my thoughts as we approached a red traffic light. I wondered whether someone in trance could stop in time, and why my first empirical evidence on the topic had to be acquired with such apparent risk. Nothing happened. I had no sense even that the driver's reaction time was slowed. Yet that initial encounter was a critical moment in the development of questions that were to guide my research on this religious phenomenon.

It became increasingly evident that the significant questions were not about psychological states, or even about characteristics of people who were attracted to a movement that included speaking in tongues. Instead, I became concerned with the meaning of such ritual utterance across the shifting states and settings of a daily life transformed by experience of the sacred, that primordial sense of otherness the capacity for

which defines us as Homo religiosus (Eliade 1958; van der Leeuw 1938). More precisely, I became concerned with the creative processes by which this sense of otherness was mobilized to transform daily life in the first place. Charismatics aspire to a culturally coherent world of ritual, experience, language, value, interaction, and presupposition. It is not a world into which they were born but one which is an ongoing collective project, synthesized over a period of some thirty years. The process of this synthesis is a cultural one, of rhetoric and self-persuasion, enacted both in ritual performance and in everyday social practice. Its modus operandi is not one of conversion in the usual sense from nonbeliever to believer (see Harding 1987; Stromberg 1993) but of cultural creation that forges a sacred self. This sacred self, transcending the standpoint of individual experience, exists insofar as it participates in what I take to be the sine qua non of culture: a world that is taken for granted in a deep sense and a life conditioned to be lived in terms of that world.

Yet as a student of the anthropology of religion, from the time of my first encounter the expression "Catholic Pentecostalism" struck me as a perfect oxymoron. Far from designating a reality that could be deeply taken for granted, it suggested the blend of what I assumed were two incompatible versions of Christianity. The "postmodern" was not yet current as an analytic category that could subsume such an apparent cultural anomaly. There was at the time only a limited repertoire of anthropological and sociological concepts to describe what I was observing. Thus Catholic Pentecostalism was a "revitalization movement" that aimed at breathing new life into a tired cultural tradition, in this case Roman Catholicism. The mix of Catholicism and Pentecostalism was a kind of "syncretism," the fusion and mutual reinterpretation of formerly alien cultural traditions. The growing complexity of symbolic, behavioral, and organizational forms within the movement was an example of" intracultural variation" within a "religious subculture" or "part-society." In the two ensuing decades, interpretation and hermeneutics, a revived concern with cultural criticism in an interdisciplinary cultural studies, and the reformulation of anthropology in poststructuralist and postmodern terms have rendered these concepts entirely problematic. In this view revitalization can be transformation and movement can be dispersal; syncretism erroneously presupposes discrete forms that are subsequently mixed; intracultural variation becomes multiculturalism; and subcultures are fragments in a cultural pastiche (see Lyotard 1984; Baudrillard 1983; Featherstone 1991; Tyler 1987; Marcus and Fisher 1986; Sangren 1988; Strathern 1987).

Karla Poewe has argued specifically that Charismatic Christianity as a whole, both Protestant and Catholic, is a postmodern phenomenon particularly in its interpretation of experience, the universe, and history in terms of metonymic signs that directly manifest and point to the creative activity of the Creator rather than in terms of metaphor (1989: 367; see also Roelofs 1994). My argument is that the Catholic movement is not accurately described as a postmodern cultural phenomenon because of marked impulses toward traditionalism and centralism (see Cohen 1986, 1993; Hébrard 1987). Nevertheless, it does exist within a postmodern condition of culture. Specifically, there are three features of this postmodern condition that I have found valuable in understanding the Charismatic movement: the dissociation of symbols from their referents in such a way as to facilitate a free play of signifiers over the cultural landscape; the decentering of authority in meaning, discourse, and social form; and the globalization of culture associated with consumerism and the information revolution.^[2]   In the remainder of this chapter I will examine this thesis, bringing to bear critical conceptions of movement, identity, self, performance, practice, and habitus.

Movement: The Conventional Problematic

Let us first review some of the more conventional formulations by which one might account for the phenomenon of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, then turn to a more critical problematization. In one sense the synthesis in the United States of Catholicism and Pentecostalism, the latter of which has been described by Martin Marty (1976) as the only real indigenous form of Christianity in that country, is a culmination of the "Americanization" of Catholicism begun with the proletarianization of Catholic European peasants who came as strangers and immigrants to the cities of an already established nation (McAvoy 1969).^[3]   This blending of forms might also be situated in the context of the Catholic movement of "modernism" over the past century and a half, including features such as liturgical reform, ecumenism, revitalization of biblical scholarship, a more responsible role for the laity, collegiality in Church government, and the engagement of the Church in the "external world" (O'Dea 1968).

In addition, the moment in which the movement originated coincided with the beginning of the "post-Tridentine" epoch of Catholic

history, the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965 marking the end of a regime of doctrine and practice that had lasted four hundred years since the Council of Trent in 1545–1563. Changes instituted in the immediate post-Vatican period created the conditions of possibility for the Charismatic Renewal in several respects. The council's position on the theoretical possibility of charisms^[4]   opened the way for the adoption of the Pentecostal spiritual gifts in their already extant ritual forms. Reinterpretation of the sacraments, wherein penance or confession became the sacrament of reconciliation (rather than of guilt) and extreme unction or the last anointing became the sacrament of the sick (rather than of the dying) opened the way for Charismatic faith healing. Changes in liturgical form such as turning the altar to face the congregation and adopting vernacular language opened the way for paraliturgical innovation such as the Charismatic prayer meeting. The new biblicism has been taken up wholeheartedly by Charismatics, sometimes to the point of fundamentalism, and the movement is a stronghold of lay initiative and ecumenism.

These changes coincided with the culmination of the post-World War II era in the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Its racial strife, the morally devastating Indo-Chinese War, and mass college enrollments of the baby boom generation spawned movements of black power, feminism, and eventually the New Age. Catholics had a variety of options ranging from the Christian Family movement, Marriage Encounter, the Cursillo, the Christian Worker movement, and the "underground church"^[5]   to discussion and encounter groups, home masses with avant-garde liturgies, and the political thought of liberation theology. Many of these were characterized by motives of community and renewal, and the catalyst of Pentecostalism added a totalizing enthusiasm and experience of the sacred, precipitating a new movement out of post-Vatican II Catholicism.

To suggest that the Charismatic Renewal is a "crisis cult" (La Barre 1970) that developed in response to cultural malaise within the Church and within society at large does not, however, account either for its success or for why some people and not others become Charismatics. Neither does it account for the movement's dramatic international expansion across a multiplicity of local cultural settings. When we turn to the question of whether individual participation was precipitated by a discrete personal crisis of faith or meaning or by a traumatic life event, the results are mixed.^[6]   While some American participants acknowledge joining in the wake of an intense personal crisis or conversion experience,

others regard it as a perfectly natural step to have taken at a particular moment in their lives. While it is acknowledged that the movement attracts "needy" and "wounded" people, it also attracts the well adjusted who regard it as their responsibility to care for and "minister to" the troubled. Even as a response to crisis, the intensity with which someone embraces the movement may be rather subdued, as in the case of one North American Charismatic who stated matter-of-factly that she had been suffering from postpartum depression following the birth of her second child, that attending the Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting "seemed to help," and that consequently she and her husband decided to continue their participation.

Alongside crises in meaning and traumatic events we must also consider, at least within North American culture, the role of expectable crises of psychosexual development. Two suggestive facts are that the Charismatic Renewal originated among graduate students and young university faculty and that Benedict Mawn's (1975) data from the early years of the movements reveal that 40 percent of Charismatics were between the ages of twenty and thirty-four. We can hypothesize, then, that the movement's interpersonal and ritual style owes a great deal to a cohort of people who were at the developmental stage, following Erik Erikson, defined by the ego conflict of "intimacy versus isolation." In this period a person must "face the fear of ego loss in situations which call for self-abandon: in the solidarity of close affiliation, in orgasms and sexual unions, in close friendships and in physical combat, in experiences of inspiration by teachers and of intuition from the recesses of the self" (Erikson 1963: 264). With the synthesis of Catholicism and Pentecostalism, the developmental need for the "solidarity of close affiliations" became realized in the Charismatic ritual forms of personal relationship with the deity, collective prayer, and communal life. Coming to grips with "intuitions from the recesses of the self" took the public form of divinely inspired prophetic utterance and the private forms of "inner healing" from emotional disability and "leadings from the Lord" through prayer and inspiration.^[7]

While this formulation might be appealing, it will not do to characterize the movement by too much youthful vitality, for since 1967 it has undergone a demographic transition. Aside from the smaller covenant or intentional community segment, Charismatics themselves have not only aged but have also attracted increasingly older members, such that the modal age of participants is at present probably in the fifties. The Charismatic Renewal is no longer the vanguard movement it conceived

itself to be in its first phases. It has a stable bureaucratic organization, and by the late 1980s it had participated in a Vatican conference on an equal footing with Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei, Marriage Encounter, and the Cursillo. In this sense it has become one among other conservative movements in global Catholicism, as well as in contemporary North America (see Smidt 1988), while in another sense it has fulfilled a goal of merging back into the mainstream Church with renewed spirituality, since many former Charismatics remain active in parochial affairs. By 1990 the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was composed of some five thousand prayer groups in the United States and an unspecified number internationally, various diocesan renewal centers and independent covenant communities, three more or less tightly structured covenant community networks (two of these being transnational in scope), and an international office based in Rome with links to the hierarchy as well as to national service committees around the globe. Despite diversity and even disagreement, participants continue to recognize not only that they have common roots in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal but also that they are part of the larger Pentecostal world.^[8]

This leads us to another question central to the conventional problematic, what constitutes an identity as a Catholic Charismatic? This question can be taken in two senses: that of social identity reflected by the statement "I am a Charismatic" and that of personal identity constituted by what it means to be Charismatic. Parallel to the reserve noted at the beginning of chapter 1 about calling the Charismatic Renewal a "movement," especially in the early years some participants would reject the label "Charismatic" because it appeared to violate their sense of spontaneity. They would say that they could not be Charismatics because it was "not an organization but a movement of the Spirit." As the movement progressed, some would refuse the label because it might "appear elitist" within the Church, or alienate other Catholics who had come to regard Charismatics as religious weirdos.

Nevertheless, there are various resources that allow us to assess the number of individuals claiming identity as Charismatics. Table 1 shows an estimate of the relative numbers of classical and neo-Pentecostals (see chapter 1, note 1, for the distinction) as of 1980. These figures, however, do not reflect the dramatic growth of Pentecostalism in the past fifteen years. By the end of the 1980s George Gallup and Jim Castelli (1989: 126) estimated that there were 14,117,000 Protestant and 2,500,000 Catholic Pentecostals or Charismatics in the United States. The theologian Harvey Cox (1995; xv) cited a worldwide membership

of 410,000,000 just in the formal Pentecostal churches alone, with an annual growth rate of 20,000,000 per year.

A critical point in the movement leadership's own assessment of the numbers of Catholic Charismatics, evident in the discrepant figures for that year and for 1987 in table 2, occurred about 1980. The smaller figures represent the leadership's perception of decline in active participation; the larger figures reported by outside observers most likely include three categories in addition to currently active participants: those who were once but were no longer active, those who were only periodically or occasionally active, and those only peripherally exposed to Charismatic activities.

Of the first category, those who had "gone on to other things" and no longer actively participated might or might not still consider themselves to be Charismatic, and might or might not continue to speak in tongues in private. Regarding the second category, there is evidence that Catholic Charismatics are more likely to be occasional participants than their Protestant counterparts. Although Gallup and Castelli's (1989: 126–127) survey found that 15 percent of Charismatics/Pentecostals are Catholic, only 11 percent of those who attend regularly are Catholic. Table 3 shows an estimate of regular active participation in the United States drawn from the movement's own irregularly published directory of prayer groups. These figures are only indicative, however, in that it is impossible to determine from the average reported attendance the size of the stable core of those who participate every week and those who attend

occasionally and in that the directories appear to exclude most of the movement's covenant communities, although at a generous estimate these account for no more than five thousand to seven thousand additional adults. Finally, much of the peripheral exposure of the third category undoubtedly took place in healing services led by Charismatics, which became frequent after 1975 and which by the late 1980s were quite popular among Catholics across the country. Many who attended these services did not consider themselves Charismatics and may not even have been aware that they were participating in a Charismatic activity.^[9]   Indeed, among all those who attend Charismatic/Pentecostal services or prayer meetings, Catholics are the most likely (33%) to have

attended only once (Gallup and Castelli 1989: 127). It is this level of participation that is reflected in the inflated estimates in table 4.

Given the variations both in willingness to claim Charismatic identity and in degrees of participation, there is yet a way to identify Charismatics by their engagement in a coherent body of key ritual practices. Using data from our late 1980s survey of participants in New England Catholic Charismatic healing services, we adopted attendance at prayer meetings and speaking in tongues as two practices suggested by ethnographic experience as valid criteria of Charismatic identity. We categorized frequency of attendance into weekly and less than weekly (including never) and frequency of speaking in tongues into often and never. The analysis showed that healing service participants clustered predominantly into two large groups, one identifiable as Charismatics who attended prayer meetings and spoke in tongues and one identifiable as non-Charismatics who rarely if ever attended prayer meetings and never spoke in tongues (table 5). When we then compared these categories with respect to whether people had ever experienced divine healing and how often they had undergone the experience of resting in the Spirit,^[10]   analysis showed that those people we classed as Charismatics were significantly more likely to respond affirmatively.^[11]   In other words, those people had in fact engaged in Charismatic ritual practices (typically involving laying on of hands) leading to experiences of healing and resting in the Spirit.

These analyses show in statistical form what can also be observed ethnographically, namely, that Charismatics participate in a coherent system of ritual performance. The importance of such performance for defining Charismatic identity is evident in situations where a Catholic prayer group may already exist but defines itself as non-Charismatic or pre-Charismatic. In her study of a Catholic prayer group's efforts to "become" Charismatic, Frances R. Westley (1977) shows that speaking

in tongues alone is not a necessary and sufficient criterion of being Charismatic. Instead, the performative ritual genre of "sharing" (see chapter 6) the intimacy of one's life experiences and thoughts "was not only seen as an important part of becoming a charismatic, it was at times expressed as the essence of charisma. . . . [I]ndividual members saw the moment that they began sharing as the moment of their rebirth," and members stated that until they began sharing their prayer group was not a Charismatic group (Westley 1977: 929).^[12]   What is critical here, and what will become clear as the discussion proceeds, is that sharing is not a casual form of interaction but a named genre of ritual language. Correspondingly, the badge of identity is best described not as individual behavior but as the collective performance of self in ritual terms.

However, personal identity as a Catholic Charismatic is not merely a function of experiencing the Pentecostal Baptism in the Holy Spirit, of being healed, or of participating in prayer groups or communities. Despite the currency of the notion of being born again, Charismatics are more likely to say that religious experience allows them to discover their "real self" than to claim that they have been given a "new self." This is identity in the sense of coming to know "who I am in Christ." It is where collective life and ritual healing converge as self-transformative dimensions of Charismatic life. This convergence is essential and accounts for why Charismatics typically say that everyone is in need of healing and that spiritual growth is a process of healing. It has been observed in one way or another by previous commentators on Catholic Pentecostalism. Meredith McGuire (1982) treats community life and ritual healing in separate sections of her monograph while giving equal

treatment to both. Charuty (1987), writing on Catholic Charismatics in France and Italy, views the experience of conversion through Baptism in the Holy Spirit as strictly analogous to that of healing through the practices of healing of memories. Neither is it accidental that my own treatment of the phenomenon appears in parallel monographs or that the notion of self is critical to the theoretical underpinnings of both.^[13]

Movement: The Critical Problematic

To conclude simply that the Charismatic Renewal has passed through the process described by Max Weber (1947, 1958) as the "routinization of charisma" or completed Anthony F. C. Wallace's (1957) life cycle of a "revitalization movement" would not be entirely accurate. Neither would it address the questions we have set for ourselves about religion as a form of human creativity and its role in the life of culture and the performance of self in the postmodern condition. Accordingly I must make good on the promise to adopt a critical attitude toward my use of the term "movement" in a way that shows why what is to come is necessary. Traditional anthropology often assumed that a movement can be treated as a bounded unit of analysis, a kind of "tribe" or "subculture," in spite of the fact that movements are invariably reactions to or attempts to alter conditions in their cultural milieu. Ralph Nicholas (1973) compared this conception of movements with Alfred Kroeber's description of peasant societies as "part-societies with part-cultures" but remained within the standard paradigm in wondering whether such units of analysis were "representative" of anything larger than themselves. Such a position fails to recognize either that the issues raised by a movement are coterminous with themes of the culture in which it occurs or that the course of the movement is itself bound up with the interaction of its participants with the society through which they are "moving." This point is underscored in the observation made by Fabian (1971) that in the Catholic Jamaa movement in Zaire there were few visible social activities, and none of the ritual paraphernalia, insignia, biblical attire, or communal buildings typical of many African religious movements. Faced with this lack of overt boundaries, he concluded that a movement could neither be taken for granted nor postulated theoretically as a discrete entity.

The Charismatic Renewal and the neo-Pentecostal movement of which it is a part are themselves significant in problematizing the notion of a

movement as a social entity. First, while charismatic leadership was always a principal concern of research on religious movements, the standard paradigm cannot account for the observation first made by Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine (1970) that Pentecostalism has a "reticulate and acephalous" organization. In other words, it is characterized by more or less closely interacting networks of groups and has no single recognizable leader. Second, while a major achievement of the standard paradigm was an explanation of religious movements as reactions to deprivation, or the perception of deprivation relative to more privileged groups, it was inadequate to deal with the fact that many Charismatics and neo-Pentecostals are relatively affluent and have relatively stable lifestyles.

Beyond the issue of boundedness, the very concept of movement is in fact highly metaphorical. James Fernandez (1979) identifies three kinds of movement implicit in this metaphor: analytic movement that creates abstract dimensions of scientific thought; moral movement or the change in qualitative states through the use of metaphors themselves; and architectonic movement or the change in qualitative state achieved by the movement of bodies through culturally structured space. He implies that the creativity inherent in moral and architectonic movement is missed by studies of religious movements that are primarily descriptive or concerned with questions of causality. The latter in particular tend to regard "movement" as something that happens to people rather than something they accomplish, and is often concerned primarily with the discovery of mechanisms that could explain its existence. Thus the dominant questions have been those of movement dynamics: what caused the movement, what was the role of charismatic (in the sense elaborated by Weber) leaders, what were the mechanisms of recruitment and indoctrination, and what were the typical stages in the life cycle or natural history of movements. These are by no means invalid questions, but a different sense of what a movement must be begins to emerge with the shift from concern with the social mechanisms that account for it to the phenomenon as a formulation of meaning in its cultural milieu.

A third issue relevant to rethinking the concept of movement is that the standard paradigm was developed in large part to account for movements occurring in situations of culture contact and colonial domination. Virtually all were what we can refer to as religions of peoples . Though they were typically described as requiring personal transformation and cultivation of a "new man," the ultimate subject of their spirituality is an ethnic or political collectivity. The classic examples are Mel-

anesian cargo cults, the American Indian Ghost Dance, peyote religion, Handsome Lake religion, the African Watchtower movement, and Zulu Zionism. This paradigm might appear to apply to a movement like the Charismatic Renewal that includes a ritual self-definition as a "people" of God and a goal of "revitalizing" the Catholic church. However, early attempts to apply the classic explanation of relative deprivation in the face of an apparent lack of oppression led to such strained suggestions as that Catholic Charismatics suffered from "affective deprivation" (McGuire 1976) or "transcendency deprivation" (Mawn 1975). In contrast to the religions of peoples, there is another and heretofore virtually unrecognized category of religious movement that we may refer to as religions of the self . These occur under somewhat different conditions, and whatever social or political change they desire is expected to be a side effect of their ultimate goal of subjective transformation. They include the Indian Radhakrishna bhajanas, the Javanese aliran kebatinan mystical sects, Japanese "new religions," African Aladura churches, perhaps some early European heretical movements and more recent enthusiastic movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and certainly the American New Age movement. Among these religions of the self, I would argue that the Charismatic Renewal's desire to become a "community" and a "people" does not qualify it as a religion of a people but instead idealizes a kind of self characteristic of what Ferdinand Tönnies long ago labeled "gemeinschaft" (personalistic, sociocentric community) in distinction to the autonomous self of "gesellschaft" (impersonal, egocentric society).

These three issues—conceiving a movement as an entity, facing the problem of meaning, and accounting for religions of the self—intersect with the features of the postmodern condition of culture identified earlier. Specifically, a movement can hardly exist as a bounded social and cultural entity in a milieu constituted by unbounded and free-floating signifiers. The source of meaning can hardly be secure given the decentering of authority in meaning, discourse, and social form. Not only the self, but a particular form of self, takes precedence over peoples under the condition of globalization of consumer culture.

Placing the notion of movement in this critical light has the immediate advantage of allowing the original designation of Catholic Pentecostalism to appear not as an isolated oxymoron or cultural anomaly but as an example of the breakdown of boundaries between symbolic forms whose referents are no longer stable. A similar point can be made in response to Lanternari's (1987) characterization of the appeal of former

Zambian Archbishop Milingo's healing ministry to Italian Charismatics as a "short-circuit" between African and European forms of spirituality: there is less, not more, anomaly in the Milingo case if it is acknowledged that the contemporary situation is best represented not as a modernist circuit diagram but as a postmodern montage of transposable spiritualities.

Moreover, not only does the movement merge Pentecostalism and Catholicism, it participates to varying degrees and with varying degrees of self-acknowledgment in other contemporary cultural trends—certainly with religious neoconservatism in its advocacy of "traditional" gender roles and its opposition to abortion rights, but also with the New Age in its emphasis on personal growth, community, healing energy, the Sufi Enneagram (a technique of personality evaluation), and the integration by some faith healers of techniques like "therapeutic touch" with Pentecostal "laying on of hands." Hollywood movies like The Exorcist series are of immediate concern, and are condemned not as sensationalist superstition but as sensationalist exaggeration of real, sober spiritual warfare against the demonic legions of Satan; and there are real "Ghostbusters" who do not regard their work as amusing. The influence of popular psychology is present in the appeal to Charismatics of "twelve-step" programs and of concepts of the psychosomatic, addiction, codependency, "adult children" of alcoholic parents, and the "inner child" buried in a person's psyche. Charismatics cite research findings that stress may be implicated in certain types of arthritis to support their conception that faith healing works not directly on the physical affliction but by removing the emotional stress that causes it. Evil spirits are sometimes described in psychological terms as "autonomous complexes." Healers cite Jung on the shadow, on the importance of spirituality, and on the healing power of imagery processes. The experience of resting in the Spirit, a sacred swoon in which one is overcome by the power of God, is at once described in terms of Teresa of Avila's exposition of three types of ecstasy and compared to Abraham Maslow's eleven criteria of peak experience.^[14]

In the background is the constant drone of speaking in tongues, a form of sacred utterance lacking any semantic component and hence the ideal typical case of free-floating signifiers. Indeed, glossolalia was an early image of the postmodern semiotic deluge in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon (Lhamon 1976), and it is relevant to my argument both as a ritual practice and as a linguistic phenomenon. As a ritual practice, with the advent of the neo-Pentecostal movement, it became de-

tached from its evident sociological moorings. No longer merely an ecstatic manifestation of spirituality characteristic of a bounded lower-class segment of society, it moved out of small Pentecostal churches and became routinely available across Christian denominations, and out of the back woods and inner cities to become routinely available in suburban living rooms and college campuses. As a linguistic phenomenon, the issue is more complex, for Charismatic glossolalia is less an instance of the free play of signifiers than it is a problematization and commentary on the second characteristic of the postmodern condition, the decentering of meaning. First, while speaking in tongues emphasizes the detachment of linguistic utterance from its semantic moorings, it at the same time emphasizes utterance as a bodily act, a giving voice. Second, glossolalia may occur either in the highly centered, authoritative genre of prophecy, an inspired message from God, or in the form of prayer that democratically (narcissistically?) expresses the private intention of the speaker. Third, as prayer, while in principle it may mean everything and nothing, it is frequently assigned the unitary meaning of expressing "praise" to the deity. Fourth, while it allows for infinite improvisation, in practice this is frequently repetition of a limited repertoire of phrases, and different sets of glossolalic phrases are sometimes recognized as distinct "prayer languages," of which an individual may be "gifted" with more than one.^[15]   Finally, as a simulacrum of language in the sense described by Jean Baudrillard (1983) as characteristic of postmodern American culture, it is precisely a phenomenon that problematizes expressive authenticity by becoming more true and more profoundly meaningful than natural language.^[16]

The problematization of a center for Charismatics takes place in sociological terms as well. One of the earliest accounts of Protestant neo-Pentecostalism is famous for describing the social organization of the phenomenon as "acephalous and reticulate" (Gerlach and Hine 1970). At the time this struck many observers as an anomaly among religious movements—an anomaly on the same order as the apparent oxymoron of Catholic Pentecostalism—since such movements are typically assumed to be led by a single Weberian charismatic leader. The Roman Catholic version of neo-Pentecostalism, given its cultural context in a postmodern condition and its institutional context within one of the most tenacious of premodern institutions, has undergone a series of revealing and sometimes painful recenterings. As we have seen, while it began as a loose collection of prayer groups, it soon established a centralized bureaucracy around its National Service Committee. Moreover, it has from

the outset been characterized by tension between local prayer groups and tightly organized communities that claimed a central, vanguard role in the movement. Finally, as the movement proliferated internationally in what was at least initially a grassroots, reticulate manner, its coordinating office moved from the control of a North American community in Ann Arbor to Brussels under the dual auspices of the Word of God community and Cardinal Suenens and finally to the ultimate center of Rome and beyond the control of the original covenant community leadership. The Word of God neither moved to the center as the leading force behind the international office nor received legitimacy from the center as an international covenant community, losing out in the latter respect to the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships, but instead became the center of its own international network of covenant communities (the Sword of the Spirit), only to once again undergo a decentering when it split into two factions in 1991 (see chapter 3).

The international proliferation of the movement introduces the third element of the postmodern condition, the globalization of popular culture. This overlaps with the problem of centering in two ways. First, glossolalia is again the key image of universal communication, each individual in a "personal" relationship with the deity, regardless of whether the phonologist can identify regional "dialects" of speaking in tongues. Second, there is no consensus over whether the movement spread initially from a North American center, and later from its official center in Rome, or whether separate local movements eventually became coopted by the Charismatic Renewal and hence tied to its social center and ideological agenda. As I noted above, it appears typical for the movement to have been introduced into third world nations by a missionary priest who became involved during a visit to the United States, organized a prayer group on his return, and subsequently called for outside help with doctrinal instruction and other assistance, eventually setting up a national service committee tied to the movement's international office in Rome. However, Setha Low (pers. comm.) has suggested for Costa Rica and Johannes Fabian (1991) has documented for Zaire that non-Charismatic Catholic prayer groups began independently and were subsequently co-opted into the international movement. In Zambia, the movement had two origins, one with missionary priests and one with former Archbishop Milingo (1984). In Italy independent groups appear to have existed outside formal movement sanction (Pace 1978).

Let us take the argument one step farther, and for the sake of future analysis distinguish among three complementary positions that can be identified by the phrases "world system," "local and global dialectic," and "postmodern condition" (see also Csordas 1992). From the generalized world system position (Wallerstein 1977; Chirot and Hall 1982), the need to account for a phenomenon such as the Charismatic Renewal suggests adding an explicit ideological/religious dimension to the notion of a global social system (see also Csordas 1992; Robertson and Chirico 1985; Robertson 1992; Friedman 1994; Wuthnow 1980). Specifically, it would appear that the increasing articulation of the world social system generates an ideological impulse toward formulations of universal culture such as this movement. However, to the extent that world systems theory is concerned with the social relation of dependency between center and periphery, there is a tendency to neglect a process identified by a second position, the cultural dialectic between local and global processes (Fabian 1991; Poewe 1989, 1994). There is doubtless more than meets the eye, for example, in Charismatics' acknowledgment that everywhere in the world they "do the same things" in the practice of ritual healing but that there are some "very different manifestations" (Rev. Kenneth Metz, pers. comm.). The case of Archbishop Milingo is perhaps the most vivid example of local-global interaction, insofar as the resumption of his healing work in Italy with substantial impact on Charismatics there somewhat ironically expanded the global influence of a centrally repressed local "ministry."

These considerations lead back to the third position, that of the postmodern condition . Rather than presuming that the disjunctive features of the "postmodern" are incompatible with the integrative implications of a world "system," could it not be that postmodernism is a label that usefully describes the cultural structure associated with such a global political-economic system? I do not believe that this suggestion requires reducing the principles of either position to those of the other. Consider Mike Featherstone's argument that under contemporary conditions "the sacred is able to sustain itself outside of organized religion within consumer culture" (1991: 126). If this means that consumer culture and its spectacles relocate and diffuse the sacred into culture at large, it would seem to be a postmodernist version of Robert Bellah's (1970; Bellah and Hammond 1980) civil religion thesis. In fact, Charismatic religion as religion is highly adaptable to postmodern forms, as Susan Harding (1988) has shown in her examination of the world of televangelism.

Furthermore, the notion of a postmodern condition does not imply that modern meanings are superseded by postmodern ones, but that in becoming decentered they are resituated such that their authoritativeness is altered with respect to competing or divergent meanings, thus constituting the multiplicity and relativity much touted as characteristic of the postmodern. For example, and specifically with respect to the Charismatic Renewal, Martine Cohen (1993) has compared two French covenant communities, arguing that one conforms to the ethos of advanced, postindustrial capitalism (particularly in that it molds the notions of salvation and self-realization) while the other conforms to the ethos of paternalistic capitalism (in its mode of embracing hierarchical order).

At the same time, as literature on Catholic Pentecostalism in different cultural settings begins to allow the kind of international sketch I presented in the preceding chapter, it is apparent that the movement embodies the dialectic between local and global processes as much or more so than earlier forms of classical Pentecostalism. In what Featherstone (1991) has called the postmodern "globalization of diversity," the cultural other ceases to be exotic as cultures stand face-to-face and natives talk back. Where otherness among humans becomes mundane and taken for granted, the Charismatic formulation of a universal culture in the sense posited by world systems theory reasserts the sacred other as a kind of cultural counterweight. It offers a distinct metalanguage for the heteroglossic simultaneity that exists due to the "overproduction of signs and loss of referents" in global consumer culture (Featherstone 1991). It is the language of charisma and community, but most critically it is the language of absolute otherness. After all, there is no more characteristically postmodern phenomenon than speaking in tongues—which means nothing, but which everyone can understand.

Clearly no definitive conclusions can yet be drawn from such an outline. It can be said, however, that the multiple reinterpretations, reflections, backwashes, anchorings, hybridizations, and discontinuities of the Charismatic Renewal in its global manifestations is an ideal showplace of the postmodern condition of culture. Further, it can be argued that globalization is not isomorphic with Westernization. Consider the example of Satan, the West's great subsuming symbol of the spiritual domain, portrayed by Miguel Asturias in his remarkable novel Mulata as the colonial master of all dark forces. A conventional approach to colonialism or cultural imperialism would see in Satan a homogenizing function and a reduction of moral indeterminacy to moral dualism. The postmodern hypothesis would call attention instead to the entropic de-

stabilizing of key symbols such as that of Satan, with the consequence of semiotic decentering and fragmentation. To borrow from the Bible, with a nod to Alexander Leighton, an underlyingly unitary Satan can no longer announce "My name is legion," but a dissolved and suspended Satan must be recognized whose "essence is legion." The leaders of the movement at its international office in Rome have a vested interest in uniformity, and orthodoxy. Yet the tension between local and global, uniformity and multiplicity, is being worked through every day among participants in this proliferating social phenomenon. Global culture is not homogeneous, nor are its dynamics determined by homogeneous processes.

Reason and Religion

Not the least significant feature of its existence in a postmodern condition of culture is the style in which Catholic Charismatics integrate science and religion (see also Poewe 1994). If the interaction between medical and religious sensibilities is vivid in the French healing community discussed in the preceding chapter, an even more striking example is the Charismatic medical and scientific examination of the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje. Going well beyond the practice of Catholic authorities who attempt clinical verification of miracle healing at Lourdes, a Charismatic theologian and his surgeon colleague conducted a series of electroencephalogram, electro-oculogram, heart rhythm, and blood pressure tests of the visionary youths (Laurentin and Joyeux 1987). Their purpose was in part to inquire into the normal or pathological character of the experiences, but also to examine the physiological correlates of ecstatic/mystical states. Their striking photographs of pious youth with heads crowned by a halo of electrodes emphasize the postmodern juxtaposition of science and the sacred. In yet another of Medjugorje's postmodern juxtapositions, while international Charismatic pilgrims were praying for healing in their way, Mart Bax (1992) reports, traditional peasant women were being terrorized by devils and evil spirits. The women complained of experiencing mental and physical ailments, and there was a growing incidence of accidents, deaths, and domestic mishaps. According to Bax, on being dismissed as hysterical by the priest they approached for exorcism, they went to "wise old women" instead for advice on illness "of the head" and "of the heart" and for exorcism, amulets, and protective herbs.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a priest whose followers typically experience the sacred swoon of resting in the Spirit (see Csordas 1994a) was eager to conduct electrocardiogram measurements to demonstrate not only the reality but also the beneficial nature of the phenomenon. Medical school researchers declined to collaborate on the grounds that there were too many variables involved. Again, a Catholic physician extrapolating from the pathophysiology of a rare neurological condition published an article attributing the common experience of warmth while laying on hands to divine activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, causing increased blood flow to the afflicted body part of the patient and often as well to the hand of the healer. Finally, a team of Charismatic healers documented on film an attempt in a Catholic hospital to clinically validate the effects on illness and injury of prayer with laying on of hands.

Despite the apparent incongruity of these juxtapositions, careful consideration of their underlying cultural logic suggests caution about what is implied by terms such as "modern" and "postmodern." Those who conducted the tests at Medjugorje were not looking for a natural cause except to rule out pathology, and still less were they looking for physiological explanation of the phenomenon. They did not interpret sensory disengagement and spontaneous behavioral coordination among the visionaries as evidence of hypnotic dissociation and suggestion, but as ecstatic concentration on a spiritual object, and they supported this interpretation with EEG results that provided neither pathological nor somehow "special" data but showed "normal" wakefulness and attentiveness. Thus scientific data are used to determine psychophysical correlates of mystical experience, or to establish evidence for whether the cause is divine. In the case of the physician explaining warmth during laying on of hands, parasympathetic activity describes not a cause but a mechanism , or at most a proximate cause of the phenomenon. The ultimate cause is again presumed to be divine action. Scientific reason is not denied but is used only to understand the mode of divine action and not for purposes of explanation: for the faithful, science addresses the how but not the why of phenomena.

This observation about science and religion recalls the well-known argument by Robin Horton (1970) analogizing traditional African religion and European science. The analogy is appealing in that both are male-dominated institutions for the control of privileged knowledge, but Horton's concern with comparing the modes of thought character-

istic of those institutions ultimately becomes strained. At one point he develops a distinction between common sense and theoretical reasoning by evoking the example of the industrial chemist who simultaneously entertains understandings both of the domestic use of common table salt and of its chemical properties as defined by atomic theory. He then argues that a similar distinction between common sense and theoretical knowledge exists within African traditional thought (1970: 141). What is missing from Horton's example is that the Western industrial chemist might also entertain a religious use of salt. Such a use is exemplified in the Charismatic practice of sprinkling blessed salt through a house to protect it from malevolent spiritual influence, or on the occasion of a ritual prayer for casting out evil spirits. To argue that this is an isolated case of which Horton could justifiably remain unaware is unacceptable given the long use of sacramental blessed salt in Catholic ritual. The contemporary Charismatic practice is itself a popularization or laicization of what was formerly an esoteric prerogative of a male-dominated institution for the control of ritual knowledge. This third understanding of salt suggests a weakness of Horton's analogy and makes us wonder what would have been the result if he had compared Western religious thinking with African religious thought.

Let us pursue this question—what is known in anthropology as the "rationality" question or the question of the apparent irrationality of "primitive" thought—with a consideration of Edward Evans-Pritchard's (1976) discussion of how misfortune is accounted for among the Azande. Evans-Pritchard gives the example of an expert woodcarver who typically explained cracks in the bowls and stools he made by the action of witchcraft perpetrated by jealous and spiteful neighbors. When the anthropologist replied that those neighbors appeared well disposed toward the craftsman, the latter held up a cracked utensil as concrete evidence, excluding the priority of natural or coincidental reasons. A more famous example cited by Evans-Pritchard is the occasional collapse of an Azande granary, resulting in the injury of a person resting in its shade. The people typically acknowledge that the granary actually collapsed because its supports were eaten away by termites and that the person sitting there at that moment was there to seek shelter from the midday sun. However, by referring to the action of witchcraft, they are also able to account for why what we would regard as coincidental events occurred at precisely that time and place.

Compare these Azande examples with the report by a Charismatic

couple that soon after they began attending prayer meetings their five-year-old began waking up at night screaming and crying because of nightmares. Two electroencephalograph tests at local hospitals concluded that there were no neurological abnormalities, but that the child was a sleepwalker. The episode ended after six months. What made it the relevant content of a religious narrative was that the parents did not stop attending prayer meetings even though the incident was the kind of thing "that happens so you'll stop going." If pressed, these parents might acknowledge that the child may have been reacting to their unaccustomed absence from home at night. However, the coincidence is explained by demonic harassment , the attempt by Satan to interfere with the parents' exposure to God through Charismatic activities. Such harassment is frequently reported by people involved in healing or evangelization, consistent with the cultural assumption that Satan has a great deal at stake in disrupting such work of God. Other examples, cited by a husband and wife who worked as a team in ritual healing, included a garbage disposal that turned on and off by itself at the time when they were first becoming deeply involved in the practice of healing, glass in front of their fireplace cracking during the summer when there was no fire, the battery on the husband's fishing boat going dead the day after a session of ritual healing, and damage to the woodwork in their house by a squirrel that had entered through the chimney while they were out of state conducting a session for casting out evil spirits. While proximal causes may be acknowledged (faulty switch, humidity, infrequent use of the battery, greater likelihood of entry by animals when the occupants are away), the ultimate cause linking apparently coincidental events is demonic harassment.

The equivalence between witchcraft among the Azande and demonic harassment among Charismatics subsists primarily in the mode of reasoning and not in the cultural content. Specifically, Azande witchcraft is unequivocally an interpersonal affair, whether or not a direct accusation is ever made. Demonic harassment among North American Charismatics, however, is an affair of the self, for if the misfortune is attributed to a spiritual entity, no occasion for social conflict can ensue. Although there are exceptions, the existential significance of the adverse event for Charismatics typically has to do with one's ability to fulfill a religious goal and not with any impediment to social life imposed by jealous neighbors or enemies. A second cultural difference is relevant to Horton's (1970) argument that science and religion differ as systems of thought because science is logically open to alternatives whereas tradi-

tional religious thought is closed due to isolation and its consequent lack of pluralistic lines of reasoning. As we have already seen, Charismatic thinking is neither isolated nor closed even to scientific reasoning itself. It is precisely this openness that situates the Charismatic Renewal within the postmodern condition. One must not only account for the relation between common sense and science, or between common sense and religion, but must also include the relation in Charismatic thought between religion and science. Being able to identify the openness that blurs and crosses boundaries among these modes is a distinct methodological contribution of invoking the postmodern—the condition of culture conditions the phenomenon. Interpretation thus eludes the methodological traps of labeling it a "subculture," treating it as a kind of "tribe," or construing it as the religion of a "people," all of which isolate it from a cultural milieu in which its participants are themselves significant actors. It frees us to examine precisely the manner in which those actors creatively constitute existential boundedness, meaning, and self in the postmodern milieu.

Self, Habitus, and the Daily Life of Charismatics

I have suggested above and in previous writing (Csordas 1994a) that through ritual performance and everyday social practice a Charismatic sacred self comes to inhabit a deeply taken for granted cultural world. In light of the discussion of religion in the postmodern condition of culture, it will not do to construe the notion of a sacred self as favoring the individual standpoint over the collective, emphasizing psychological process over social practice, or theoretically privileging self over world as the locus of analysis. Just as earlier I identified a tension between local and global in terms of otherness, the notion of a sacred self summarizes a tension in the Charismatic phenomenon between pre-modern and postmodern at the critical cultural nodes of boundedness, meaning, and authority. In comparison to religions of peoples, such a religion of the self is a creature of modernity; and to the extent that its participants must come to terms with contemporary trends toward the fragmentation and commodification of self, it must adapt to the condition of postmodernity. However, given the traditional Christian conception of the sacred that includes a discrete and bounded personal identity,

a unitary and explicit meaning to life in terms of salvation, and a centered patriarchal authority, an appeal to the sacred is a turning toward premodernity. In the end, the uneasy juxtaposition of premodern and postmodern images, as in the media marvel at Medjugorje, is itself symptomatic of the postmodern condition of culture.

I have chosen the term "self" from among a large set of related and near-synonymous terms^[17]   both because it is compatible with the goals of our study and because it most accurately reflects the core existential concerns expressed in the movement we are studying. Indeed, commentators on the Charismatic Renewal such as McGuire (1982) have acknowledged this concern. Chagnon (1979: 91) argues that a principal aim of the movement is "to remake the self, to reconstitute it in profundity." Mary Jo Neitz (1987) devotes a chapter to comparing the Renewal with the "personal growth movement" with respect to the theme of self-awareness. Especially because the larger contemporary culture and popular discourse are preoccupied with matters of self, however, we must take care to distinguish our theoretical notion of self from any of these.^[18]   In my work on Charismatic healing (Csordas 1994a) I formulated a working definition of self intended to be sufficiently general for application across cultures, avoiding intellectual commitment to cultural presuppositions of substance, entity, or Cartesian autonomy of consciousness as a priori defining features. Instead, I take self to be an indeterminate capacity to engage or become oriented in the world, characterized by effort and reflexivity. Self processes are orientational processes in which aspects of the world are thematized, with the result that the self can be objectified as a person with a cultural identity or set of identities.

This formulation owes much to the work of A. Irving Hallowell (1955, 1960), the first anthropologist to move toward a phenomenological theory of the self. Hallowell defined the self as self-awareness, the recognition of oneself as an "object in a world of objects." His concern with the cultural context of self processes is summarized in the term "behavioral environment," borrowed from the Gestalt psychology of Kurt Koffka. Hallowell's protophenomenological approach accounts for an essential feature of this behavioral environment, namely, that it includes not only natural objects but also "culturally reified objects," especially supernatural beings and the practices associated with them. The concept thus did more than place the individual in culture, linking behavior to the objective world, but also linked perceptual processes with social constraints and cultural meanings. Accordingly, the focus of Hallowell's for-

mulation was "orientation" with respect to self, objects, space and time, motivation, and norms, and this is what I mean by orientation in the world.

The Charismatic sacred self is objectified and represented as a particular kind of person with a specific identity in relation to other sacred selves. However, precisely because persons are representations or objectifications, the cultural world may be inhabited by a variety of types of persons other than human persons. Among the Ojibwa, for example, Hallowell (1960) showed that persons are any phenomenologically real beings that inhabit the cultural world and with which human beings presumably may come into interaction. A similar situation holds among Charismatics, for whom the domain of person includes not only human beings both adult and child but first of all God. The Charismatic deity is really three persons, each with a character corresponding to one of the three parts of the tripartite human person. Thus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit correspond with mind, body, and spirit, and implicitly each divine person is most congenial with its matched subfield within the human person.^[19]   Also considered persons in this sense are deceased human spirits, and at the opposite end of the life course, human embryos and fetuses. Relative to societies in which they are actively propitiated, ancestral spirits are largely neglected, except insofar as they are occasionally held to be the cause of some affliction. Unborn spirits are, however, a cause célèbre that lead Charismatics to intense political involvement in the North American cultural debate about abortion (see Csordas 1996).

Evil spirits or demons also populate the Charismatic behavioral environment, though Charismatics would doubtless prefer not to grant them the "dignity" of being persons and instead use a term like "intelligent entities." One healer was on such disrespectfully familiar terms with her adversary (ultimately Satan, despite the multiplicity of individual demons under his dominion) that she referred to him as "the Old Boy" and "the creep." Other spiritual persons are of decreasing salience for interaction with humans. The importance of the Virgin Mary is proportionally less in "ecumenical" groups where Catholic devotees demur out of politeness to Protestants, whose traditional culture excludes defining Mary as a person who interacts with humans. Saints are not prominent actors even in predominantly Catholic groups, in this case not out of deference to Protestants but largely because they become relatively superfluous as intermediaries in a religion that cultivates direct person-to-person interaction with the deity. Michael the Archangel is invoked as a protector against evil spirits or as a reinforcement in episodes of "spiritual

warfare" against them, but angels as a class of spiritual person are typically absent from the Charismatic world, appearing but rarely in healing or prophetic imagery.

A behavioral environment is composed not only of culturally constituted types of persons and entities toward which the self becomes oriented but also of psychocultural themes in terms of which the self becomes oriented. These are themes in the broad sense introduced by Morris Opler (1945) to describe global preoccupations of a culture, but in the phenomenological sense they are also issues thematized or made salient in the orienting processes of self-objectification. Three such themes present in the cultural world of contemporary North America are of preeminent importance in this discussion of the Catholic Charismatic sacred self. Spontaneity is sought after in American culture both as a personal trait and as a feature of interpersonal relations. The kind of person who initiates or at least participates in "impromptu gatherings" or events is valued (Varenne 1986), and the notion that mental health is related to the "spontaneity of the self" is found in some versions of professional psychological theory (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983: 200). Charismatics, reacting to the ritualistic Catholicism in which many were raised, are highly motivated by the ideal of spontaneity in spiritual experience as well as interpersonal interaction. The theme of control is likewise prominent in the cultural psychology of Americans. Robert Crawford (1984), for example, has analyzed the American concept of health as a symbol that condenses metaphors of self-control and release from pressures. Charismatics thematize both positive and negative aspects of control. On the one hand, they learn not only that they should "surrender" themselves to the will of God but also that overwhelming situations can be "given to the Lord." On the other hand, the influence of evil spirits is suspected precisely when negative behaviors or emotions are out of control. Finally, intimacy is the primary cultural ideal for relations between spouses, summarized in the notions of romantic love and close communication (Bellah et al. 1985; Levine 1991). When an American refers to a group of friends or co-workers as like a family, the connotation is more likely to be that members are intimate and so close that one can tell them anything than that they are loyal solely because a social relationship exists. Charismatic self processes of intimacy are found in the genre of ritual language known as "sharing," in their motive toward community, in the body technique of laying on of hands, and especially in the form of intimate relationship cultivated by a private "prayer life" with a divinity conceived explicitly as a "per-

sonal God." These themes appear repeatedly in performance and practice among Charismatics.^[20]   They are critical features of the cultural world in which the indeterminate self becomes sacred insofar as it comes to be oriented in the world, and to define what it means to be human, in terms of the wholly other than human (Otto 1927; van der Leeuw 1938; Eliade 1958).

While Hallowell's conceptualization of the self in its behavioral environment is valuable for its emphasis on orientation, in itself it does not go far enough for my purposes, and to take my argument further I will now expand on some earlier reflections about why this is so (Csordas 1994a: 5–6). Although for Hallowell the self is always already in the world in that it is constituted by orientational processes, his emphasis on reflective self-awareness as the defining abstract feature of self leaves it as a discrete entity, a kind of Cartesian mind in contrast to the indeterminate capacity for orientation by which I define it above. In defining the self as the product of a reflexive mood, he could not take full cognizance of the constant reconstitution of the self, including the possibilities not only for creative change in some societies but also for varying degrees of self-objectification cross-culturally. Moreover, relative to the early interactionist sociologist like George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley (his near-contemporaries), Hallowell excluded the essential presence of other selves from his outline of elements in terms of which the self was oriented. There is a discrete individual self and its "behavior," distinct from though oriented within an "environment."

We can at least in part circumvent the potential solipsism in this conception of self by translating Hallowell's notions of behavior and environment into the more contemporary language of "practice" within a "habitus." We owe this language in large part to Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 72), who defines habitus as a system of perduring dispositions that constitutes the unconscious, collectively inculcated principle for the generation and structuring of both practices and representations. For our purposes, this language offers an important element of theoretical balance: the notion of practice "socializes" that of behavior by introducing the connotation of shared and culturally prescribed routine, and the notion of habitus "psychologizes" that of environment by defining its constitution in terms of dispositions. Collapsing the dichotomy between psychological and social corrects for a Cartesian understanding of self and allows for our conception of self as indeterminate capacity for orientation. In so doing it also begins to account for the susceptibility to processes of commodification and fragmentation characteristic of self in the

postmodern condition, as well as for the possibility of transformation and reorientation in ritual performance.

Indeed, there is a stream of research that has emphasized the constitution and reconstitution of self in ritual performance (e.g., Kapferer 1979c; Schieffelin 1985; Roseman 1990; Csordas 1990a, 1994a; Laderman and Roseman 1996). Performance is typically a collective undertaking—and more formalized than everyday social life. There is a danger in confining analysis of self process to events of ritual performance, however. Just as there is an unacceptable theoretical gap between self and environment in Hallowell's conception, there is a gap in the conceptualization of ritual performance between event and self-transformation. In some performance theory that gap remains invisible due to what Bourdieu (1977: 81–82) refers to as the "occasionalist illusion" that presumes the meaning of an event to be exhausted by what goes on within the boundaries of that event. This leads to a predicament quite different from Hallowell's, but just as problematic. Whereas for Hallowell the definition of self was pinned to an a priori reflexivity, performance risks a definition of self pinned to a posteriori objectification. Focusing solely on the formal representations of ritual performance could easily lead us back to a conception of self as a kind of entity, objectified or represented. For these reasons, I will insist as much as possible on the permeability of boundaries between ritual events and everyday life, indeed looking for the meaning of those events in life beyond the events themselves. Stated in other words, my analysis will show the creation of meaning to be a function of the continuity between performance and everyday practice. To observe self processes, or processes of self-objectification, is then not only to observe a striving for a sense of entity through performance but also to examine a series of shifting orientations among performance, experience, habitus, and everyday practice.

There is an interpretive advantage to bridging the conceptual gap between self and environment with the notion of habitus and to filling the conceptual gap between event and transformation with practices of everyday life. In the case of the Charismatic Renewal, that interpretive advantage is to facilitate conceptualization of how performance transforms conventional dispositions that constitute interpersonal, domestic, civic, and geographic spaces. It is also to allow conceptualization of how performance transforms time, both in the sense of altering the sense of duration and in terms of establishing sequences of ritual events. Much of the subsequent discussion will be dedicated to showing how these per-

formative transformations come about. To conclude this chapter, it will suffice to summarize these elements of space and time in the Charismatic habitus.

Transformation of interpersonal space . In the foreground of this category is the classic body technique of laying on of hands while praying. While often physically experienced as a transfer of divine power, laying on of hands also condenses a series of symbolic meanings. It imitates the divine healing touch of Jesus portrayed in the Bible; it enacts the solidarity of the Christian community, especially when a group lays hands simultaneously on a person; and it achieves intimacy insofar as touch breaks the culturally constructed interpersonal barrier constituted by an ethnopsychological notion of the individual as a discrete, independent entity.^[21]   Thoughtful Charismatic leaders acknowledge, however, potential negative consequences of this overcoming of interpersonal boundaries. This is evident in the occasional report of someone being overwhelmed and "smothered" by an overzealous group attempting to lay on hands. The possibility of inappropriate eroticization is recognized in the dictum that participants should be wary of one-on-one healing sessions between members of the opposite sex.^[22]

One of the most obvious features of a Charismatic prayer meeting to anyone attending for the first time is the use of an embrace in greeting. The "holy hug" as a ritual greeting originated as a bodily expression of both spontaneity and intimacy, in contrast to the culturally typical handshake or verbal greeting alone. Parallel to the hug of greeting, the characteristic Charismatic prayer posture of hands open palm up was a bodily expression of "openness" and "receptivity," in contrast to the traditional prayer posture with hands closed palms together. As the movement has developed it has become more frequent to observe, in addition to the palms-up posture, a palms-out posture with a hand or both hands raised above one's head, as if laying hands on the situation being prayed about, directing the force of prayer outward (see pl. 5).

These gestural practices are the primary means by which Charismatics modify interpersonal space. Clothing plays a comparatively small role in the Charismatic presentation of self. Ritual assistants in healing services, and members of some covenant communities, sometimes wear an additional identifying item of ritual garb over their regular clothes (see pls. 1–4). Such ritual clothing is not an element of everyday practice but is worn only in settings of ritual performance. In some covenant communities, a particularly bland style of dress characterized by

gender-differentiated standards of appropriateness has come to predominate. A final way in which interpersonal space is transformed is that people who become Charismatic frequently report shifting their loyalties and social activities away from previous friends and acquaintances and toward other Charismatics. This at times includes weakened ties between younger Charismatics and their parents, but also between older Charismatics and their adult children.

Transformation of domestic space . Well beyond the traditional crucifix on the wall, or the statue of the Virgin in the yard, religious objects are common in the domestic decor of Charismatics. The simplest Christian religious representation—say, a pillow embroidered with the slogan "Jesus is Lord"—is perceived as having some spiritual value. Especially in the 1970s, Charismatic households were often draped with colorful wall banners bearing religious slogans. An affectively consequential transformation of domestic space was effected by a Charismatic couple who replaced the photographs of their non-Charismatic adult children with images of saints—a change perceived by the children as a gesture of rejection. In another case, a healer having difficulties with the sometimes trying work of praying for others was, in a moment of prayerful frustration, graced with the appearance in her yard of a kind of bird that she had never seen in that area. Taking this as a sign from God that she should continue her work, she adopted the bird as a personal totem. Gradually her home became filled with representations of the creature, both collected by her and given as gifts by other Charismatics.

The architectural configuration of domestic space may also be transformed, as some Charismatics set aside or even build an additional room to serve as a prayer room. Domestic units can also be constituted as Charismatic households. Especially common in the 1970s in covenant communities as elaborations of communal intimacy, such households might be composed of two nuclear families along with one or more unmarried adults, or of a group of same-sex unmarried adults.

Domestic space is also transformed by a series of Charismatic ritual techniques for protection from demonic influences. Prominent among these is use of the traditional Catholic sacramentals holy water and blessed salt, which may be sprinkled about the house to repel evil spirits. The practice of "calling down the blood" involves symbolically, and sometimes in visualization, "covering" the premises with the blood shed by the crucified Jesus. The spiritual power of the divine blood is held to be not only redemptive but protective as well, and in this ritual technique

it forms a kind of curtain, barrier, or coating against malign influence. Finally, angels and archangels are sometimes invoked to surround the house with their protective presence.

Transformation of civic space . This dimension is most strikingly evident in events in which spiritual influences are projected into public spaces. In one such case, a well-known healer noted that a quarry near his home was frequently used by local youth for activities he found objectionable, such as nude swimming, sex, and consumption of alcohol and drugs. Presuming either that such activities attracted evil spirits or that the youth were attracted to the locale and to their activities by resident demons, he proceeded to pray for "deliverance," to cast out the spirits from the quarry. In another such event, a Charismatic gathering was held in the public library of a city where fourteen violent deaths had occurred among teenagers in a one-month period. Participants conducted a mass, along with prayers for casting out evil spirits named Suicide, Violence, and Death from the library, city hall, and other civic locations. Again, a Protestant Pentecostal evangelist visiting a large Catholic Charismatic community discerned a spirit named Unbelief hovering over the university town where the community is located, and cast it out.^[23]

A subtler transformation of civic space took place in a covenant community where local neighborhood districts instituted as a pastoral structure became superimposed on and overlapped with the boundaries of other culturally defined units such as school districts, precincts, parishes, and dioceses. One can imaginatively grasp this transformation as the creation of a city within a city, or as the superimposition of a sacred city on a secular one. In another covenant community, a controversy over civic space arose when neighbors complained to the authorities that Charismatic multifamily households violated local zoning regulations.

Transformation of geographic space . Charismatics have renewed interest in pilgrimage to traditional sacred sites of Catholicism such as Rome, Jerusalem, or Lourdes, and as I have noted are among the most enthusiastic visitors to the site of the contemporary Marian apparitions at Medjugorje. The Charismatic map of the United States is also transformed, with "destination cities" for travelers not traditional vacation attractions like New York City or San Francisco but centers of Charismatic activity like Ann Arbor or Pecos. Accompanying this transformation of geographic and global space is a transformed conception of natural processes. This conception was articulated by a prominent

Charismatic leader speaking to ten thousand people at the movement's national conference, during the peak of apocalyptic fervor and divine empowerment in 1976.

When we're dealing with nature, because man's supposed to have a loving domination over nature, what we do is command and give orders for the rain to stop, or the storm to cease, or for the rain to begin again in time of drought. That's a command or order we can give when God says [indicates to us] that this is what he wants.^[24]

No metaphor is intended in this passage, which claims for contemporary ritual healing prayer the capacity to repeat the miracles attributed to Jesus, including those in which he commanded the forces of nature. The Charismatic transformation I am describing is thus not only a transformation in the sense of place but also in the mode of inhabiting natural space.

Transformation of time . Charismatics typically cultivate a "personal prayer life," which ideally includes time set aside for prayer every day. Other routines involving the organization of time include periodic events such as weekly prayer meetings, periodic seminars and courses, retreats, workshops, "days of renewal," and annual regional or national conferences. Some covenant communities have a more elaborated ritual calendar of periodic gatherings culminating in an annual community anniversary celebration and ceremony of "public commitment" to the community. It is not only the organization of time that is transformed, however, but also the experience of its duration. Whether in personal prayer or in a prayer meeting, the temporal aspect of glossolalia is virtually one of pure duration, since it is speech with no semantic dimension, no argument or conclusion. The common experience of resting in the Spirit while overcome with divine power (see note 10 and Csordas 1994a) is also a suspension of the temporal flow of daily life. Finally, the inevitable ambiguity of personal affairs is addressed by cultivating a specific disposition for patience referred to colloquially as "waiting on the Lord" and based on the notion that if one prayerfully "submits" or "surrenders" difficult decisions or situations to the divine will, the appropriate course of action will eventually become clear.

A related alteration of temporality can be observed in the Charismatic housewife who in exhaustion declares, "I cannot do this housework, Lord, you'll have to do it for me." This is quite distinct from a more conventional supplication such as "Lord, give me strength," and its motivation is likewise distinct from that of an agent forcing herself to

do the work "for her husband and children" or even "for the Lord." Neither is it interpretively adequate to conclude simply that the housewife succeeds in her task by going into "trance," even though in the narrowest sense she may in fact do so, praying in tongues all the while. This is because, along with the experience of time passing tolerably, we are faced with reorientation in her experience of effort , which was identified above as an essential characteristic of self (see also Csordas 1994a). In the woman's abdication to the deity of her struggle for control in her daily environment, we also have a vivid enactment of key psychocultural themes I have identified. Control over the very source of effort, and hence an essential self process, is displaced. The existential meaning of having the intimately personal Lord do the work must then be understood in terms of how the themes of intimacy and control, even of one's ability to act, are integrated among the above aspects of a pragmatically orchestrated Charismatic habitus.

The ritual transformation of dispositions related to temporality must be distinguished from the alternation between mundane and sacred time that takes place in rituals of the fixed, liturgical type. As Rappaport (1992) has observed, such rituals are invariant and precoded for the performers. Insofar as Charismatics increasingly have rediscovered and cultivated a Catholic sacramental spirituality, they participate in this alternation that is intrinsic to the temporal structure created by a liturgical order. However, the kind of ritual transformation I am pointing to is more like what Rappaport gets at in discussing rituals that occur so frequently that

the liturgical order attempts, as it were, not only to regulate daily behavior, but to penetrate to the motivational bases of that behavior. . . . High frequency . . . may be instrumental in rooting whatever dicta are encoded in the ritual so continually and routinely in everyday life that they seem to be natural, or at least of "second nature," rather than merely moral. To abandon them, if this is the case, would be painfully self-alienating. (1992: 18)

Rappaport's language of penetrating the motivational bases of behavior, creating a second nature grounded in sacred dicta, and risking profound self-alienation if such dicta are abandoned describes precisely what is at issue in the performative transformation of habitus. It is hardly an accident that the Orthodox Jews whose attempts through frequent rituals and observances of the Halakah to "bring the divine into this world" and those cloistered communities of religious specialists who try through both long and frequent rituals to "spend their lives partway to heaven" are examples cited by Rappaport (1992: 19) that have

also appealed to Catholic Charismatics, especially those in covenant communities. Phenomenologically it is moot whether the alternation between sacred and mundane time is still experienced, whether it becomes extinguished, or whether it becomes so rapid as to be imperceptible. The coordinated dispositions of the habitus that generates practices and representations are altered, and therefore, as in the example of the housewife and her experience of effort, mundane time itself is fundamentally altered.

The dispositions toward space I have summarized for the Charismatic habitus are ways of inhabiting space, ways of projecting oneself into the world, taking it up and making it a sacralized human space. The dispositions toward time are particular ways of being in time, organizing it and experiencing it as duration. As we shall see, the movement from an everyday habitus to a distinctively Charismatic habitus has been the function of what we can call the ritualization of life, a process on whose horizon lies the potential for a radicalization of charisma. Let us now begin to take a closer look at the social setting in which the above elements of habitus are most elaborated and integrated into a collective form of life, the Charismatic covenant community.