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.