Most people are unaware that charismania exists within the Roman Catholic Church. But it does. The movement is growing and for good reason. Bud Ahlheim informs us that because the RCC was losing millions of adherents to what they deem apostate Protestantism the church’s hierarchy took the advice of Brazilian Catholic priest Marcelo Rossi who urged them to incorporate some of the features of evangelical churches into a more “modernized, spiritualized, and experientially emphatic Roman Catholic church. The primary feature Rossi mimicked was the charismatic element.”
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) will be celebrating fifty years of the movement this month, which is “not cause for celebration, but for lamenting,” says Ahlheim. In the following blog post over at Pulpit & Pen, he takes a look at the CCR:
According to a recent story in Religion News Service, “This month marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the most important Catholic lay movement of the past century.”
That lay movement is called the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. And, just like its Pentecostalism forebear, the movement was birthed in the U.S.A. Though adherents and proponents of it also claim a lineage to the days of the first-century church, charismania of any flavor is a recent phenomenon. Its lineage doesn’t nearly go back two millennia. Barely a century old, charismania was birthed in America in 1900 in Topeka, Kansas. (For more on it, you could read THIS.)
