A year ago, on the initiative of Pope Francis, CHARIS, the international service of Catholic charismatic renewal, was created. CHARIS marks, according to Pope Francis, a new stage for the entire charismatic family placed under the sign of communion within it and the manifestation of the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit for the good of the whole Church. In the Church, the Presence of the Holy Spirit places everyone on an equal footing, "because each and all are born of the same Spirit; great and small, rich in years and newborn, engaged at the universal or rather local level, form the whole, which is greater than the part." (Pope Francis, June 8, 2019).
Inspired by the intuition of Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens, Pope Francis defined the Charismatic Renewal as a "current of grace", "called to warm the whole Church so that all the baptized may be renewed in the Holy Spirit" (Cardinal Farrell). This current of grace promotes the spiritual life and the proclamation of the Gospel, the ecumenical dimension, service to the poor and social action, with at its heart baptism in the Holy Spirit and praise to God;
"If the Holy Father has repeatedly asked the members of the Renewal - and especially CHARIS - to spread baptism in the Holy Spirit throughout the Church, it is precisely because he is convinced that baptism in the Holy Spirit is a grace that every baptized person can live and should live. It is a personal experience of Pentecost, an irruption of the Holy Spirit in the life of the baptized person that is accompanied by an experience of conversion and an encounter with the living Jesus. All this should be part of the normal life of every baptized person, called to holiness," Cardinal Farrell stressed last January in his speech to the Brazilian bishops in Recife.
Praise is the movement of the heart turned towards God, but this is not self-evident in difficult times. In his message for Pentecost 2020, the ecclesiastical assistant of CHARIS, Father Raneiro Cantalamessa, emphasizes that we do not “praise God for the evil that brings all humanity to its knees; we praise him because we are sure that he will know how to draw good even from this evil, for us and for the world.” We see God in Jesus on the Cross. Father Raneiro also tries to identify the goods already received in this situation: thwarting the illusion that one saves oneself by oneself, the feeling of solidarity between human beings, the awakening of religious feeling and the need for prayer. “The extraordinary attention to the gestures and words of Pope Francis, even outside the Catholic world, is a sign of this.” The Pope said on Good Friday: “we want to respond to the virus pandemic with the universality of prayer, compassion, tenderness.”
By François PROUTEAU
NB /
You can participate in the Pentecost Vigil on Saturday, May 30 at 22:00 (Rome time - UTC + 1) hosted by CHARIS online
Now, subscribe to the CHARIS Youtube channel which will broadcast the event: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCMdhi9sRVPgjhHfV9H98GA.
You will be kept informed on the CHARIS website of the concrete means that will be used: http://www.charis.international/
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