Over the past two months, the members
of the Mirror of Justice have taken turns exploring John Allen's
important new book titled “The Future Church.” For each
of the ten trends in the modern Catholic Church identified by Allen,
one member of the Mirror of Justice has posted a synopsis and
commentary, as the start of a discussion thread. This is another in
that series. [Note that numbers inside parentheses below are
references to pages in the hard-back version of the book.]
Pentecostalism is the tenth trend
identified by John Allen as affecting the Catholic Church in his
book, “The Future Church.” As Allen explains, “‘Pentecostalism’ refers to a movement within Christianity
emphasizing direct personal experience of God through the ‘baptism of
the Holy Spirit,’ which often, though not always, is believed to
produce spiritual gifts such as healings, visions, and speaking in
tongues” (377). As Allen writes, “the motor force of the
movement is the conviction that the eruption of the Holy Spirit
associated with the Feast of Pentecost in the New Testament did not
stop with the close of the biblical era” (380).
Allen reports the rapid global growth
of Pentecostalism. “When future histories of Christianity are
written,” Allen predicts, “the late twentieth century
will probably be known as the era of the ‘Pentecostal Explosion.’
From less than 6 percent in the mid-1970s, Pentecostals finished the
century representing almost 20 percent of world Christianity . . . .”
(378).
In many parts of the world, and Latin
American in particular, “the Pentecostal wave” has
resulted in losses of millions from the Catholic Church (386). “On
the other hand,” Allen writes, “the news is not all bad
for the Catholic Church. While Pentecostalism eats away at the raw
numbers of Catholics, sometimes it can be an index of religious
ferment that, in the long run, may also benefit Catholicism”
(387). As Allen describes the thinking of Dominican Father Edward
Cleary, in the wake of Pentecostalism, “Catholicism is also
becoming more dynamic in Latin America, generating higher levels of
commitment among those who remain” (387).
Among the members of the Mirror of
Justice, I may be one of the better suited to offer some personal
comments on this particular trend. Converted to Pentecostalism in
college, I was an active member of the movement for nearly a decade,
including being married to my wife in an Assembly of God church. I
fondly remember those years as involving some of the most powerful
spiritual experiences of my life, many having a more enthusiastic
emotional impact than what I have experienced during what is now a
similar number of years as a Catholic. Both the kind of person I
have become and the Christian faith that I possess owe much to my
Pentecostal years. But where Pentecostalism spoke to and stirred my
heart, the teachings, history, traditions, liturgy, and centuries of
public engagement and natural law reasoning found in the Catholic
Church spoke to and stimulated my mind.
While little can compete with a
Pentecostal worship service for arousing the soul and bringing a
sense of a deep personal connection to Jesus, the Catholic Church
has no true competitor for conveying the majesty of God and the
beauty of the Kingdom of Heaven. While a daily walk with Jesus may
come more easily with a Pentecostal soul, the Catholic Church with
the Deposit of the Faith left to the Apostles and the intellectual
tradition cultivated by the Doctors of the Church have no
parallel in equipping the believer with a fuller understanding of
both the substance of our Faith and the manner in which a Christian
should live in the world.
In sum, the Catholic Church needs
Pentecostalism to play the heart strings and enhance a personal
spiritual life, but Pentecostalism needs the Catholic Church to
provide a direct line to the Apostolic tradition, to provide
doctrinal structure, to draw upon a centuries-old tradition of
inspired and wise Christian teaching, and to give Christians an
intellectual grounding for the use of God-given reason in conjunction with a
well-formed conscience.
As do other former Pentecostals (and I
think many former Evangelicals as well) who have converted to the
Catholic Church, I sometimes find the emphasis on a personal
relationship with Jesus to be missing in Catholic parish life. While
knowing Jesus as a personal Savior is integral to Catholic doctrine
and manifested in the Sacraments, especially the Sacrament of
Reconciliation, the one-on-one relationship with our Lord is not
always well conveyed in the Catholic Church. I know that many of us
from Pentecostal or Evangelical backgrounds worry that the deep and
individual spiritual connection ― the personal sense of
walking with Jesus ― may not be fully experienced by our
children, at least those who find themselves in the sometimes stale
or routine style of worship found in too many Catholic parishes.
In the “Future of the Church,”
John Allen paraphrases India’s Father Paul Parathazham as saying that
too many Catholics have never had a “God experience,”
“meaning something that got the heart pumping and put them into
direct contact with the supernatural realm” (393). As the
Latin American bishops acknowledged in 2007, the Catholic Church has
in some ways been put to sleep, “leaving it content with the
formal externals of religion but often failing to impart any real
sense of personal faith” (403).
In sum, the Catholic Church needs to be
touched and inspired by the Pentecostal movement. While the
evangelical turn in the Catholic Church, discussed elsewhere in John
Allen’s book, together with a fervent and personally dedicated new
generation of priests and lay-leaders inspired by John Paul II has
started the necessary spiritual renewal in the Church, the
Pentecostal spark may keep the spiritual fires burning.
At the same time, the Pentecostal
movement is incomplete apart from the Catholic Church. Allen refers
to the writings of Kathleen Galvas, a convert to the Catholic Church
from the Assemblies of God, in which she well explains
that “Catholicism’s capacity to root faith in both sentiment
and reason is ultimately a more satisfactory bulwark” against
those “moments of spiritual aridity or doubt” that
afflict all Christians (399). Allen further cites Galvas as
questioning “claims by Pentecostals to do away with the need
for clergy intermediaries by insisting that each believer can be
directly illuminated by Scripture turns out to be hollow”
(399). In fact, Pentecostal worship groups and communities tend to
revolve around certain charismatic (pun intended) leaders whose
teachings may become nearly infallible, in practice if not in theory.
Because no cohesive community that
hopes to share a coherent message can continue by allowing full rein
to each person’s own independent visions, the danger of spiritual
chaos will be averted, if at all, by accepting the superior
understanding and mature spiritual connection of elders in the faith.
Claims of revelation must always be tested against the experience
and traditions of the community, which in the case of the Catholic
Church have been passed down through the Deposit of the Faith from
the early days of the Church. In the end, there is no substitute, in
terms of both practical necessity and the confirmation of Christ’s
own example, to the Apostolic Succession.
Another downside to the growth of
Pentecostalism articulated by John Allen raises the question of its
staying power in the lives of its converts. “While public
fascination surrounds the spectacular number of entries into
Pentecostalism,” Allen warns, “there hasn't been as much
attention to what some experts say is an equally remarkable number of
exits” (380). “For a significant percentage of new
converts, Pentecostalism may be a way station between nominal
membership in a traditional church and a complete lack of religious
affiliation . . . .” (380).
The very things that make
Pentecostalism as a separate denomination so attractive at first ― a deeply personal experience, an informal worship setting, and the
apparent lack of strong traditions and a clear leadership structure ―
also limit its ability to remain vibrant when members move
beyond the initial emotional experience and seek continuing
nourishment, for the mind as well as the heart. By wedding the
Pentecostal experience to the venerable traditions and Petrine
structure of the Catholic Church, the Christian is fed both
emotionally and intellectually.
Although “hostility to
Catholicism is a real current in some Pentecostal thought”
(382), the compatibility of the Charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit
and the traditions and teachings of the Catholic Church are becoming
more apparent to those both inside and outside the formal Church.
The essence of the Pentecostal message should be at home in the
Catholic Church.
In fact, as Allen observes, Charismatic
Catholics may now constitute 11 percent of the Church’s faithful
(384). In the United States, “with Hispanic Catholics nearly
five times more likely to take part in charismatic activities,”
Allen quotes a national Hispanic Christian leader as saying that, in
America, “'[t]here are more Catholic Pentecostals than
Pentecostal Pentecostals'” (384). Allen notes that “[m]any
Catholic leaders have supported the Charismatic movement in the
Church, seeing in it a means to promote deeper faith and practice”
(385). And well they should. At the same time, Catholic leaders
properly insist that charismatic activities must not supplant the
Sacraments (386).
As another point of vital importance to
the future of any people of faith, Allen emphasizes that “[o]ne
of the great strengths of Pentecostalism is its capacity to form a
sense of community” (407). With the decline of ethnic
neighborhoods and geographically-centered parishes, the Catholic
Church must foster stronger communities of deeply shared Catholic
meaning and spiritual experience, such as sub-groups within a parish
that come together for Bible study and to share one another’s
burdens. We must find ways, both within and outside the parish, in
which to build community and demonstrate our concern for the welfare
of each brother and sister in Christ.
In this respect, there is a crucial
role for Catholic legal education, in building true communities of
faculties and students with a shared mission. In addition to
equipping our students with a superior legal education and affirming
their integration of faith and profession, we should serve as
continuing support centers for graduates, students, and friends, a
place where they can always return for further nourishment and for
strength when they are weary.
Greg Sisk
