The Charismatic Movement Explained

1. What Is the Charismatic Movement?

The charismatic movement is the spread of Pentecostal experience and practice inside the historic churches, beginning around 1960 among Episcopalians and Lutherans in the United States and reaching Catholics in 1967. Charismatics seek what they call baptism in the Holy Spirit, a conscious personal encounter with the Spirit, and they expect gifts such as tongues, prophecy and healing to appear in ordinary parish life today. The feature that defines the movement is that its people stayed where they were, keeping the creeds, the sacraments and the ordained ministry of the churches they belonged to.

The word charismatic comes from the Greek charisma, a gift freely given. Saint Paul uses it for the particular graces the Holy Spirit distributes through the body of Christ for the good of everyone, and his lists in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4 are the movement's constant point of reference. A charismatic Christian holds that those lists describe what God still does, and that the gifts belong to the ordinary equipment of the Church in every century.

Three Terms People Confuse

Three labels get used interchangeably and mean different things. Pentecostal names the denominations that formed after 1901 around Spirit baptism as a distinct experience after conversion, bodies such as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ; our guide to Pentecostalism and its denominations covers that family in full. Charismatic names the renewal that carried the same expectations into Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist congregations from the 1960s without founding anything new. Third Wave names the evangelical current from the early 1980s, associated with John Wimber and the Vineyard churches, which sought the same gifts while declining the language of a second experience entirely.

What Charismatics Are Not Claiming

Catholic charismatics do not claim a new revelation, a new sacrament or a superior class of Christian. The Catholic renewal has consistently taught that baptism in the Holy Spirit adds nothing to the sacraments and confers no rank, and that a Catholic who has never prayed in tongues lacks nothing necessary for holiness. Where individuals have claimed otherwise, they have been corrected by the renewal's own leadership as well as by bishops.

2. Where the Movement Came From

The charismatic movement grew out of Pentecostalism, which had spent its first fifty years largely outside the historic churches. Pentecostal Christianity is usually dated to the Bible school of Charles Parham in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 and to the Azusa Street revival led by William Seymour in Los Angeles from 1906. For decades Pentecostals were poor, socially marginal and treated by mainline clergy as an embarrassment, and Pentecostals in turn regarded the historic churches as spiritually dead. Neither side expected any traffic between them.

The Bridges of the 1950s

Several bridges were built in the 1950s that made the crossing possible. The Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, founded in 1951 by the dairyman Demos Shakarian, gathered Pentecostal laymen for breakfast meetings that mainline Protestants and Catholics could attend without joining a Pentecostal church. Healing evangelists drew mixed audiences. Television and paperback publishing carried Pentecostal testimony into homes where no Pentecostal preacher would have been welcome. By the end of the decade a Lutheran or an Episcopalian could encounter Pentecostal practice as a personal question rather than as a denominational one.

Van Nuys, 1960

The event usually taken as the start of the charismatic movement happened in an Episcopal parish in southern California. Dennis Bennett, rector of St Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, told his congregation in April 1960 that he had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues. The parish divided, Bennett resigned, and the story reached the national press. He was sent to a struggling parish in Seattle, St Luke's, which became a centre of the movement, and his 1970 memoir Nine O'Clock in the Morning introduced the experience to a very wide readership.

Similar accounts followed quickly in other bodies. Larry Christenson, a Lutheran pastor in San Pedro, California, received the experience in 1961 and became a leading Lutheran voice in the renewal. Harald Bredesen, a minister of the Reformed Church in America, is commonly credited with helping to fix the term charismatic renewal in the early 1960s in preference to the label neo-Pentecostal, precisely because the new movement had no intention of leaving the historic churches.

Dates and names in this section follow the standard reference literature on the movement, principally the New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Zondervan, revised edition 2002). Where accounts of a personal experience rest on the testimony of the person involved, they are reported here as testimony.

3. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in February 1967 with a student retreat organised by lay faculty of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, an event the renewal has always called the Duquesne Weekend. This section gives the summary that the wider movement's story needs; our full guide to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal treats its theology, structures and internal debates at length. The participants had been reading the Acts of the Apostles and two popular books, David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade and John Sherrill's They Speak with Other Tongues, and they had asked to be prayed with for a fuller experience of the Holy Spirit. What they reported afterwards, a sudden and overwhelming sense of God's presence in the chapel, spread within weeks to students and chaplains at the University of Notre Dame and at Michigan State.

Why It Grew So Fast

Timing explains much of the speed. The Second Vatican Council had closed in December 1965, and one of its central documents had already said what the renewal wanted to say. Lumen Gentium 12 teaches that the Holy Spirit distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank, fitting them for works that renew and build up the Church, that such gifts are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation, and that judging their genuineness belongs to those who preside in the Church. Pope John XXIII had prayed publicly for the Council to be a new Pentecost. Catholics who found themselves praying in tongues in 1967 could point to a conciliar text rather than to a Pentecostal preacher.

Growth also had a structure. Prayer groups met weekly in parishes, campuses and homes. Covenant communities formed, including the Word of God community in Ann Arbor and the People of Praise in South Bend, where members committed to shared life, teaching and mutual support. The Life in the Spirit Seminars, a course of about seven weekly sessions developed in those communities, gave the movement a repeatable way to introduce newcomers, ending with a session in which the group prayed with each participant.

National and International Structures

The renewal built organs of coordination early. National service committees appeared through the 1970s. An international office in Rome, later known as International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services, received recognition from the Holy See and served as the movement's point of contact with the Roman curia. The Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships was established for the communities themselves. In 2018 Pope Francis merged these bodies into a single service, CHARIS, which is treated in section 8.

Where the Renewal Is Strongest

The Catholic renewal is now most visible outside Europe and North America, where it began. It is deeply established in Brazil, in the Philippines, in India, particularly in Kerala among the Syro-Malabar and Latin faithful, and across sub-Saharan Africa, and in several of these places the weekly charismatic prayer meeting is a normal feature of parish life. The Pew Research Center's 2011 report Global Christianity estimated that Pentecostals and charismatics together made up roughly a quarter of the world's Christians, a category the report calls renewalists and which spans denominations far beyond the Catholic Church.

The proportion cited is from the Pew Research Center report Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population (December 2011). Pew's renewalist category counts Pentecostals, charismatics in historic churches, and independent neo-charismatic groups together, so it is not a count of Catholic charismatics. No reliable global count of Catholic charismatics exists, and figures circulated by advocacy bodies are self-reported.

4. Renewal in the Other Historic Churches

Every major Western church body has had a charismatic current since the 1960s, and each received it differently. Describing them accurately matters, because the movement is often discussed as though the Catholic experience were the whole of it.

Anglican

Anglican charismatic renewal took organised form in England with the Fountain Trust, founded in 1964 by Michael Harper, who had served as a curate at All Souls, Langham Place. The trust ran conferences and published widely until it dissolved in 1980, having judged that the renewal was established enough in the churches to continue without it. Harper himself was later received into the Antiochian Orthodox Church in 1995, which the movement's own historians treat as a significant departure. Anglican charismatic parishes have been influential well beyond their number, and the Alpha course developed at Holy Trinity Brompton in London, with its weekend on the Holy Spirit, carried a mild charismatic expectation into congregations of many traditions. Our guide to Anglicanism and its internal parties sets that church's wider divisions out.

Lutheran

Lutheran charismatic renewal grew from the early 1960s, with Larry Christenson its best-known American figure and Lutheran Renewal in Minnesota its main service body. Lutheran charismatics have generally been careful to frame the experience in terms of the baptismal grace already received, since Lutheran theology puts great weight on baptism as God's completed act. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod have taken different practical approaches, with the Missouri Synod considerably more cautious about practices it judges to sit loose to the means of grace.

Methodist, Presbyterian, Reformed and Baptist

Methodism proved unusually receptive, partly because John Wesley's own teaching on a second work of grace and entire sanctification had already shaped the Holiness movement from which Pentecostalism itself emerged. Presbyterian and Reformed bodies were more divided, since the confessional tradition in those churches, including the Westminster Confession, contains a strong statement that God's revelation in Scripture is complete, which many read as ruling out contemporary prophecy. Among Baptists the renewal was mostly congregational, appearing parish by parish rather than through denominational structures, and it met firm resistance in the more confessional associations.

Orthodox

Charismatic renewal has made comparatively little headway in the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the reason is theological rather than accidental. Orthodox spirituality already carries a strong doctrine of the direct experience of God, developed in the hesychast tradition and in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas, and Orthodox writers have generally judged that a second Pentecostal experience is unnecessary where chrismation and the ascetic tradition are taken seriously. Individual Orthodox clergy have promoted charismatic prayer, and no Orthodox Church has adopted the movement as such. For the tradition itself see our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church, and note that the Oriental Orthodox Churches are a separate communion.

5. Baptism in the Holy Spirit

Baptism in the Holy Spirit is the phrase charismatics use for a conscious personal experience of the Holy Spirit that leaves a person newly aware of God, drawn to Scripture, prayer and the sacraments, and open to the spiritual gifts. The phrase is scriptural. John the Baptist says of Christ that he will baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Matthew 3:11, Luke 3:16), and the risen Christ tells the apostles they will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now (Acts 1:5). The disagreement is over what the phrase describes in the life of a Christian who is already baptised with water.

The Classical Pentecostal Reading

Classical Pentecostal theology treats baptism in the Holy Spirit as a second work of grace, distinct from and subsequent to conversion, and most classical Pentecostal denominations have taught that speaking in tongues is its initial physical evidence. The scriptural case rests on a set of passages in Acts where the gift of the Spirit is described as arriving separately from belief or water baptism: the Samaritans who had believed and been baptised but received the Spirit only when Peter and John laid hands on them (Acts 8:14-17), Cornelius and his household on whom the Spirit fell while Peter was still speaking (Acts 10:44-48), and the disciples at Ephesus who had known only John's baptism (Acts 19:1-7).

The Catholic Reading

Catholic theology of the renewal reads the same experience differently. Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and one of the moderators of the Second Vatican Council, argued in the first of the Malines Documents in 1974 that what Catholics experience is the release into conscious awareness of the Holy Spirit already given in baptism and confirmation. The grace is present sacramentally from the beginning, and it can lie dormant in a person who has never appropriated it. The renewal's own doctrinal commission restated this position, and Catholic writers have used various terms for it, including release of the Spirit and actualisation of the sacraments of initiation.

Three consequences follow from that reading, and each of them matters. Baptism in the Holy Spirit is never a new sacrament. It is never a second baptism, since the Church holds one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, as the Creed says. It never creates two grades of Catholic, since the grace being spoken of is the grace every baptised person has already received. Our guides to baptism and confirmation set out what those sacraments actually give.

What the Experience Is Reported to Be

Descriptions vary a great deal, and honest accounts of the renewal say so. Some people report a sudden emotional intensity, warmth or tears. Others report nothing at the time and notice changes over the following weeks: a new appetite for Scripture, an easier and longer prayer, courage in speaking about faith, freedom from a habit they had fought for years. Catholic writers on the renewal have consistently warned against treating strong feeling as the measure, on the ordinary Catholic principle that consolation is a gift and its absence proves nothing about the state of a soul. The test the tradition applies is the one Christ gives, that a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16-20), and the fruit Paul names is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

6. The Gifts: Tongues, Prophecy, Healing

The gifts the movement seeks are the ones Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 12:7-11: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Paul makes two points about them that charismatic practice takes seriously and that critics often assume it ignores. The gifts are given for the common good of the body rather than as a personal possession, and the Spirit distributes them to each one individually as he wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), so no one can demand a particular gift.

Speaking in Tongues

Speaking in tongues is the practice outsiders notice first, and it is regularly misunderstood. Charismatics distinguish two things Paul appears to distinguish. One is a personal prayer language, unintelligible speech used in private or quietly within a group, which Paul describes as speaking to God rather than to people and as building up the one who speaks (1 Corinthians 14:2, 14:4). The other is a public utterance addressed to the assembly, which Paul allows only in limited numbers and only when someone interprets, and which he otherwise tells the speaker to keep silent about in church (1 Corinthians 14:27-28).

Paul's own ranking is unambiguous and it is the opposite of the popular impression. He wants the Corinthians to prophesy more than to speak in tongues, because prophecy builds up the church and unintelligible speech does not, and he says he would rather speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in a tongue (1 Corinthians 14:5, 14:19). He also asks, in a series of rhetorical questions that expect the answer no, whether all speak in tongues (1 Corinthians 12:30). A Catholic charismatic who has never prayed in tongues is therefore in a position Paul explicitly describes as normal.

Prophecy

Prophecy in the charismatic sense means a message believed to be prompted by the Holy Spirit for the encouragement, strengthening or comfort of those present (1 Corinthians 14:3). Responsible charismatic teaching, Catholic and Protestant alike, insists on three limits. Such a message adds nothing to public revelation, which the Church holds to be complete in Christ and closed with the death of the apostles (CCC 66-67). It is subject to testing by the assembly and by the Church's pastors, as Paul requires when he tells the others to weigh what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29). It carries no obligation on anyone's conscience. The Catechism treats private revelations in the same way, saying that they do not belong to the deposit of faith and that their role is to help people live more fully by it in a certain period of history.

The abuses here are real and the movement's own literature names them. Prophecy has been used to direct other people's marriages, careers and finances, to settle disputes in a community, and to shield a leader from correction. A Catholic who is told that God has revealed something about the course of his life should treat the claim exactly as the Church treats a claimed private revelation, with the presumption resting on the ordinary means of guidance: Scripture, the Church's teaching, prudent counsel and a confessor.

Healing

Prayer for healing is a normal Christian practice with a long pedigree, and the Church has its own sacrament of the sick (James 5:14-15). Charismatic healing services raised enough practical questions that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an Instruction on Prayers for Healing on 14 September 2000. Its provisions are worth knowing, because they are the actual Catholic rule. Prayer for healing is legitimate and praiseworthy. Non-liturgical prayer meetings for healing are permitted under the local bishop's oversight. Liturgical healing services must follow the approved rites and require the bishop's authorisation. Anything resembling hysteria, theatricality or sensationalism is to be avoided, and healing prayer must never be introduced into the celebration of the Eucharist in a way that displaces it.

Two things ought to be said plainly about healing claims. Recoveries that follow prayer are real events in people's lives and are received with gratitude. The Church itself, when it examines an alleged miracle in a canonisation cause, applies a standard of documentary and medical evidence far stricter than any healing meeting can supply, which is why claims made from a platform carry no probative weight on their own. Our guide to miracles and how the Church investigates them sets out the standard used.

7. What a Charismatic Meeting Looks Like

A Catholic charismatic prayer meeting is a lay gathering, usually weekly, usually in a parish hall or a home, and it follows a loose shape rather than a fixed rite. Someone leads. There is sung worship, often with guitars and often repetitive by design, since repetition is meant to quiet the mind. There is a period of open prayer in which people pray aloud as they wish, sometimes with quiet praying in tongues underneath. There is Scripture, a teaching, and often a time when people ask the group to pray with them.

What It Is Not

A prayer meeting is not the Mass and does not replace it. Catholic charismatic teaching has been firm on this from the beginning, and the point is doctrinal: the Eucharist is the source and summit of the whole Christian life, and no devotional gathering stands beside it. Our guide to the Mass explains why. A prayer meeting is also not a parallel church. Groups that begin taking their doctrine from a favourite speaker rather than from the Church, or that discourage members from bringing questions to their pastor, have crossed a line the renewal's own leadership has repeatedly warned about.

Covenant Communities

Covenant communities are a more demanding form: groups of families and single people who make a commitment to shared life, common prayer, teaching and financial support, while continuing in their parishes and jobs. Several have flourished for decades and have produced schools, publishing houses and missionary work. Several have also had serious problems with authoritarian governance, and the history here should be stated honestly rather than smoothed over. The Word of God community in Ann Arbor went through a painful reckoning in the 1990s over the practice of personal headship, in which members submitted detailed decisions to a designated leader, and the practice was substantially dismantled after external review. Any community that asks for obedience in matters that belong to a person's own conscience, family or state of life is asking for something the Church does not permit it to ask.

Questions to Ask Before You Join One

Ask who the group answers to, and expect the answer to name a parish priest or a diocesan office. Ask whether members are free to leave, and watch how the question is received. Ask whether the group's teaching sends people to the Catechism and the sacraments or to a circle of its own literature. Ask whether prophecy has ever been used in the group to direct a member's marriage, money or vocation. Ask whether anyone in the group speaks of Catholics outside it as second-class.

8. How Rome Responded

Rome received the charismatic renewal, gave it advisers and structures, and set it under the discernment of bishops. That reception was neither instant nor uncritical, and it is the fact that most distinguishes the Catholic story from the Protestant ones, where charismatic renewal often split congregations and produced new denominations. The papal documents and Roman structures summarised here are set out in detail on our page for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

The Conciliar Basis

The Second Vatican Council had already settled the underlying question. Lumen Gentium 12 teaches that the Holy Spirit distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank, that these gifts are to be received with thanksgiving, that extraordinary gifts are not to be sought rashly, and that judging their genuineness and their proper use belongs to those who preside over the Church. Every subsequent Roman statement on the renewal has worked from that paragraph. The Council's decree on the lay apostolate, Apostolicam Actuositatem 3, says the same in the context of lay mission.

Suenens and the Malines Documents

Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens supplied the renewal's Catholic theological interpretation. Paul VI gave him the role of episcopal adviser to the movement, and from 1974 Suenens produced a series known as the Malines Documents, named for his see. They addressed the theology of baptism in the Holy Spirit, the relationship between the renewal and the local church, the dangers of an ecumenism that dissolved Catholic identity, the risks of a preoccupation with the demonic, and the link between charismatic prayer and social justice. The last of these was written with Dom Helder Camara. Taken together the documents did the essential job of translating a Pentecostal vocabulary into Catholic theology.

Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI

Paul VI addressed the renewal's international leaders' conference in Rome in May 1975, on the Monday of Pentecost week, and welcomed the movement as an opportunity for the Church and for the world while setting conditions on it: fidelity to authentic doctrine, priority given to the gifts that build up the body over the spectacular ones, and integration into the pastoral life of the Church. John Paul II met the renewal repeatedly and encouraged it as one of the ecclesial movements he saw as fruits of the Council, while pressing the same requirement that the movements find their place inside dioceses and parishes. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, wrote appreciatively about the movements while insisting that a charism proves itself by obedience to the Church's pastors and by the ordinary virtues.

Iuvenescit Ecclesia, 2016

The Roman document that addresses the question most directly is the letter Iuvenescit Ecclesia, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 15 May 2016 and addressed to the bishops on the relationship between hierarchical and charismatic gifts in the life and mission of the Church. Its argument is that both kinds of gift come from the same Spirit, that they are not in competition, and that charismatic gifts are genuinely constitutive of the Church rather than optional extras. It then lists criteria for discerning them, which are worth summarising because they apply to any group claiming the Spirit's action: the primacy of the vocation to holiness, commitment to spreading the Gospel, confession of the Catholic faith in full, communion with the whole Church including the pope and the local bishop, recognition of and esteem for other charisms, acceptance of trials and purification, presence of the spiritual fruits, and a social dimension of evangelisation.

Francis and CHARIS

Pope Francis, who had been sceptical of the renewal as a young Jesuit provincial in Argentina and said so publicly, became one of its most visible supporters as pope. He marked the movement's fiftieth anniversary with a vigil at the Circus Maximus in Rome at Pentecost 2017. He then reorganised its international structures: the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life approved the statutes of CHARIS, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal International Service, with effect from 8 December 2018, and the new body began work at Pentecost 2019, replacing the two previous international organisations. CHARIS is a single service for the whole current, without membership of its own, and its existence places the renewal squarely inside the Church's governing structures.

9. Charismatic and Pentecostal Compared

Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians share an expectation of the Spirit's gifts and differ on church membership, on what Spirit baptism is, and on whether tongues is required. The comparison below states classical Pentecostal positions as the classical Pentecostal denominations state them, then the Catholic charismatic position. Neither column describes every individual, and Pentecostalism in particular is a large and internally varied family, treated on its own page.

The Pentecostal column summarises positions held across classical Pentecostal denominations and reflects no single body's statement of faith. Pentecostal groups differ among themselves, including on tongues as initial evidence, which some Pentecostal bodies do not require. See our page on Pentecostalism for the denominations themselves.

The Practical Difference on a Sunday

A Catholic charismatic goes to Mass. The prayer meeting is additional, and the sacramental life is the centre. A classical Pentecostal attends a service in which the sermon and extended sung worship carry the weight, with the Lord's Supper celebrated periodically. Someone who has attended both will notice that the charismatic material in a Catholic setting sits within a liturgical frame that limits it, since the rite is fixed and the prayer meeting happens elsewhere.

10. The Third Wave and the 1990s Revivals

The Third Wave is the name given to a current that appeared among evangelicals in the early 1980s and sought the same gifts without the Pentecostal framework of a second experience. The missiologist C. Peter Wagner popularised the term at Fuller Theological Seminary, counting Pentecostalism as the first wave and the charismatic movement as the second. Its best-known figure was John Wimber, whose Vineyard churches taught that signs and wonders accompany the preaching of the kingdom and should be expected in ordinary evangelism. Wimber's people generally declined the phrase baptism in the Holy Spirit for a post-conversion experience, holding instead that every Christian has the Spirit and can be filled repeatedly.

Toronto and Pensacola

Two episodes in the 1990s shaped public perception of the whole movement. From January 1994 a church near Toronto airport, then part of the Vineyard association, became the site of prolonged meetings marked by uncontrolled laughter, falling, shaking and animal noises, which drew visitors from many countries and became known as the Toronto Blessing. The Vineyard association removed the church from its membership at the end of 1994 over disagreement about how those phenomena were being handled, which is itself evidence that charismatic bodies do exercise discipline. From June 1995 a similar and longer revival ran at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, with a heavier emphasis on repentance.

What a Catholic Should Take From This

The Catholic tradition has a settled way of thinking about unusual bodily phenomena in prayer, and it is neither credulous nor dismissive. Spiritual writers from John of the Cross onward treat such phenomena as at best secondary and at worst a distraction, warn that they may have natural causes including suggestion and crowd effect, and direct the person to the ordinary path of prayer, sacraments and charity. John of the Cross is blunt about the danger of attachment to extraordinary experiences in the Ascent of Mount Carmel. The judgment that matters is the one Paul and Christ both give: what happened to this person's love, honesty, patience and duties six months later. Our guide to spiritual warfare covers the related question of deliverance ministry, which the Church restricts far more tightly than popular practice assumes.

11. The Objections, Answered

Serious objections to the charismatic movement come from three directions, and each deserves a straight answer. Cessationists say the gifts ended with the apostles. Traditional Catholics say the movement imports Protestant practice and unsettles the liturgy. Sceptics say the phenomena have natural explanations.

Cessationism: Did the Gifts End?

Cessationism is the position that the miraculous gifts were given to authenticate the apostles and the writing of Scripture and ceased once that work was complete. It is held mainly in the Reformed tradition, and its classic modern statement is B. B. Warfield's Counterfeit Miracles of 1918. The exegetical case rests largely on 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, where Paul says prophecies will cease and tongues be stilled when perfection comes, read as the completion of the canon of Scripture. Cessationists add a historical argument, that reports of the gifts thin out sharply after the first few centuries.

The Catholic Church does not hold cessationism, and it never has. The reason is not sentiment about the charismatic movement. The Church canonises saints on the strength of miracles worked in every century including this one, it maintains a formal process for investigating them, and it keeps the sacrament of anointing with its prayer for healing. On the exegesis, the Catholic reading takes the perfection of 1 Corinthians 13:10 as the beatific vision, since Paul's next line is that we now see in a mirror dimly and then face to face, and knowing fully as we are fully known is not a description of owning a complete Bible. The historical argument also proves less than it claims, since accounts of healings and prophecy run continuously through hagiography and monastic literature.

The Traditional Catholic Objection

The traditional objection is worth stating in its strongest form. Catholics of a traditional cast argue that the movement borrowed a devotional idiom from Protestantism at exactly the moment Catholic identity was under strain, that its music and spontaneity crept into the liturgy where they do not belong, that its emphasis on felt experience trains people to judge prayer by feeling, and that it can function as a private circle inside the parish. Those charges have all been true somewhere, and the renewal's own leaders have said so.

The answers are also specific. The remedy for liturgical abuse is the liturgical law, which stands independently and binds the renewal like anyone else. The remedy for a spirituality of feeling is Catholic ascetical teaching on consolation and dryness, which every charismatic Catholic ought to be taught. The remedy for a parallel circle is the requirement of Iuvenescit Ecclesia that a charism prove itself by communion with the local bishop. And the doctrinal core of the movement, that the Holy Spirit distributes charisms to the faithful of every rank in the Church today, is conciliar teaching in Lumen Gentium 12 and is in the Catechism at 799 to 801, so it cannot be dismissed as an import.

The Sceptical Objection

The sceptical case is that glossolalia is a learnable vocal behaviour, that crowd settings produce suggestibility, and that many reported healings involve conditions that fluctuate on their own. Some of this is simply correct, and Catholic discernment has assumed it for centuries: the Church's own investigative procedures for alleged miracles exist precisely because natural explanations are the default and must be excluded first. A Catholic can hold that a great deal of what happens in charismatic settings is ordinary human psychology, that some of it is genuine grace, and that telling them apart is a job for careful judgment over time rather than for enthusiasm in the moment. That is what the tradition means by discernment of spirits, and Paul names it as a gift in its own right (1 Corinthians 12:10).

The Prosperity Problem

One associated error deserves naming separately, since it travels with parts of the wider charismatic world and is condemned by Catholic teaching. The prosperity gospel teaches that God guarantees wealth and health to those with sufficient faith, which makes poverty and illness into evidence of spiritual failure and contradicts the Gospel's beatitude on the poor and the entire theology of the Cross. It is not part of Catholic charismatic teaching, and Catholics encountering it in charismatic media should recognise it for what it is. Our guide to the prosperity gospel works through the texts it misuses, and our guide to the Christian meaning of suffering gives the alternative.

12. Rules of Discernment for a Catholic

A Catholic considering a charismatic prayer group needs practical criteria, and the Church has supplied them. The list below draws on Lumen Gentium 12, the criteria in Iuvenescit Ecclesia, the 2000 Instruction on Prayers for Healing, and the ordinary tradition of discernment of spirits. A longer version of the same test, written for Catholic groups specifically, sits in our guide to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

Signs a Group Is Sound

Sound groups send people back to the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and confession, and speak of them as the centre rather than as background. They are known to the parish priest and welcome his presence. They teach from Scripture and the Catechism. They pray for people without promising them outcomes. They are unremarkable about the gifts, treating tongues and prophecy as ordinary rather than as credentials. They produce people who are easier to live with: more patient at home, more diligent at work, more generous with money. They can be left without drama.

Signs to Walk Away

Walk away from a group that treats an experience as the dividing line between real Christians and the rest. Walk away where prophecy is used to direct your marriage, your money or your vocation, or to protect a leader from criticism. Walk away where healing is promised and failure is blamed on the sick person's faith. Walk away where the group's teacher is quoted more often than Scripture or the Church. Walk away where questions are treated as disloyalty, where leaving is described as dangerous, or where you are discouraged from raising anything with your parish priest. Walk away where money is solicited with spiritual pressure. None of these is a charismatic distinctive, and all of them are marks the Church has long used to identify a group going wrong; our guide to the difference between a cult and a church covers the pattern, and wolves in sheep's clothing treats Christ's own warning about leaders.

The Ordinary Path Is Still the Path

Whatever a Catholic decides about charismatic prayer, the means of holiness stay what they have always been. The Eucharist, confession, Scripture, the Church's daily prayer, works of mercy, honesty about sin and perseverance in duty. Charisms are given for the good of others and are ordered to charity, which is why Paul puts chapter 13 in the middle of his discussion of the gifts. A Catholic with no extraordinary experience whatever who loves God and his neighbour and keeps the commandments is on the road the Church has always described, and our guides to prayer and the Holy Spirit set out that road.

13. Where the Movement Stands Now

The charismatic movement is past its founding generation and has settled into the ordinary life of the churches it entered. In Europe and North America the weekly prayer meeting is less prominent than it was in the 1970s, and the movement's influence has spread out into things people no longer label charismatic: contemporary worship music in parishes, parish missions and retreats built around a personal encounter with Christ, evangelisation courses, lay-led small groups, and the widespread expectation that a Catholic should be able to speak about faith in the first person.

The Growth Is Elsewhere

The centre of gravity has moved to Latin America, Africa and Asia. In Brazil, in the Philippines, in Kerala, in Nigeria and across east Africa, charismatic prayer is a normal part of Catholic parish life, and much of the Catholic Church's response to the rapid growth of Pentecostal churches in those regions has come from Catholics who pray this way. Our guides to Christianity in Africa and African-initiated churches cover that landscape.

The Open Questions

Three questions stay open and are argued inside the renewal itself. The first is the relationship between charismatic practice and the liturgy, where the boundary is set by liturgical law and is regularly tested. The second is ecumenical: charismatic Catholics often have warm relationships with Pentecostal Christians, and a shared experience is not a shared faith, so the Malines documents' warning against an ecumenism that blurs Catholic identity remains live. The Catholic approach to Christian unity is set out in our guide to ecumenism. The third is governance, the question of how lay movements are supervised, which CHARIS and Iuvenescit Ecclesia address without exhausting.

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