The Vatican is creating a new office to serve the Catholic charismatic renewal movement. The new body aims to fulfill Pope Francis' desire to promote greater unity throughout the movement and strengthen its key role in the Church's evangelical and ecumenical outreach.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has been calling for a single service dedicated to Catholic charismatic renewal organizations since 2015 — a vision that is now becoming a reality with the creation of CHARIS (Catholic Charismatic Renewal International Service), which will be formally instituted Dec. 8. This new body within the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life will replace the two existing services known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Service and the Catholic Fraternity. For the 50th anniversary of the Catholic Charismatic Movement in June 2017, Pope Francis has already asked the two bodies to come together to hold the celebration at Rome’s Circus Maximus. On that occasion, the pope quoted the late Belgian Cardinal Leo Suenens, the movement’s most powerful episcopal promoter in its early days, who called it “ a current of grace, a renewed breath of the Spirit for all the members of the Church.”
The international service will consist of 18 members, as well as a moderator and an ecclesiastical assistant - Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the Pontifical Household and long-time supporter of the charismatic movement. The leaders of the service will take up their full duties on June 9, 2019, the Solemnity of Pentecost. “ Creating unity in service involves creating synergies, but even more so generating communion, fraternity and cooperation,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. According to the cardinal, this papal desire to serve the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in a more effective way can be seen, among other things, as a desire to help “ deepen and promote the grace of baptism in the Holy Spirit throughout the Church, promote the exercise of charisms not only in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal but also throughout the Church and encourage commitment to evangelization, especially through the New Evangelization and the evangelization of culture.”
As a mere service, CHARIS does not intend to play a leading role towards the various charismatic institutions, which will all remain under the jurisdiction of their own ecclesiastical authority. “ I hope that CHARIS can offer a valid service for the multiple and varied expressions of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that the Holy Spirit has already inspired, and for those that are yet to come, for the good of all the faithful,” Cardinal Farrell said. The ecumenical dimension, the unity, that Pope Francis seeks through this new body is also intended to promote greater communion within Christianity in general, as the canonical status of the service claims. Indeed, as Paolo Maino, president of the Italian Via Pacis community and CHARIS member for Europe, points out, “ The ecumenical dimension is part of the DNA of the charismatic renewal.”
Maino hopes that CHARIS can be an instrument of mediation and even a means of reconciliation with some entities that remained on the margins of the Charismatic Renewal in the past, and thus ease some accumulated tensions. “ Now, every entity of the Charismatic Renewal can sit at a table with the same dignity and say to themselves: ‘We all work for the same Father; we all work for Jesus Christ; we share the same goal.’” A similar idea was expressed by South African-born Auxiliary Bishop Peter Smith of the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, and the CHARIS representative for North America and the Caribbean, who emphasized the increasingly ecumenical dimension of the movement. Indeed, if dialogue between charismatics of different Christian denominations was quite sporadic at the beginning of the movement, they now tend to see each other “ more and more as brothers and sisters,” he said. Recalling a meeting he had with Pope Francis two years ago, Bishop Smith revealed the image the Pope chose to illustrate the best way to begin a relational ecumenism: First, the Holy Father said, “ Go get an ice cream and go for a walk.” It was an image that implicitly evokes the need for all Christians to cordially share whatever they can, even if it is just the beginning of a relationship.
Moreover, Bishop Smith praised the movement’s great “re-evangelizing” power. With its presence in more than 200 countries, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is indeed an emblematic case of the globalization of religion. The international movement was born in the United States in 1967, after a Bible study group at Duquesne University received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Since then, the movement has continued to grow around the world, and now includes about 122 million people. According to Bishop Smith, one of the strengths of the movement is that it began in the West and quickly moved elsewhere. It now has a very strong and growing presence in the Third World, thanks to some missionaries who experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the United States and then returned to their countries. Long-standing papal commitment Pope Francis’ commitment to advancing the charismatic movement is not unique. In fact, all popes since Saint Paul VI have received Charismatic Renewal groups on the day of Pentecost.
Fondacio Movement President François Prouteau, who will represent charismatic associations with Holy See recognition within CHARIS, said the new initiative represents a concrete response to the prayers of popes since the Second Vatican Council for the gift of a “new Pentecost” – a vital breath that would give the Church new impetus and new dynamics, just as it has done in all previous periods of Church history. Stressing that the mission assigned by the pontiff to each member of the service is “ communion above all,” Prouteau hopes that the latter will continue to “ nurture in them the hope… that he generated with the creation of CHARIS.”
“I think CHARIS has enormous potential to spread the culture of Pentecost more broadly throughout the Church,” agreed Mary Healy, professor of sacred scripture at Greater Sacred Heart in Detroit and chair of the Doctrinal Commission of Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services International in Rome. “ Many Catholics have no idea of the breadth and diversity of the Catholic charismatic renewal. It includes prayer groups, lay communities, religious orders, schools of evangelization, healing and deliverance ministries and a wide variety of other entities.” Among the various specific benefits of the new body, Healy noted, “ the fact that CHARIS will be a ‘public legal person’ under canon law means the renewal will have greater visibility than in the past. “It will be better positioned to serve the local Church, and especially to bring the dynamism and creativity of the charismatic renewal to evangelization.” Register correspondent Solène Tadie writes from Rome.
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