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]