A Complicated ‘Denominator’ of the Beginnings of the History of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church

Abstract

Every story has its beginning. Most stories have their end. An attempt at a synthetic analysis of the history of the beginning of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church turns out to be confronted with a certain initial reality: not only does this history not have a specific beginning, but it also has no end. It is a story that is still open. In celebrating its fiftieth birthday in the Roman Catholic Church recently (2017), a symbolic experience was taken as the original reference date. The receipt of charisms by members of a small group of American students on 18 February 1967, in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in the United States, is a date and place that is in a sense only symbolic. Neither that moment nor that event exhausts the vast and much broader charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which can be seen in various and numerous moments in the history of the Church. This study efforts to explain this singular experience from the perspective of analysing the essential elements of the first structuring of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century. The study is also an attempt at a synthetic look at the history, but also at its authors, including Ralph Martin, Steve Clark, Gerry Rauch, Veronica O'Brien, Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens and Pope Paul VI.