17 - The religious ferment of the sixties

Summary

On 5 March 1967, twenty-six-year-old Kevin Ranaghan, a devout Roman Catholic, was ‘baptised in the Spirit’. He was attending, during the spring vacation, a religious gathering at Duquesne university, which had appropriately been founded in 1878 as the Pittsburgh College of the Holy Ghost. Ranaghan, who had recently completed his doctoral studies in liturgy at the university of Notre Dame and was newly married, began speaking in tongues. The following year there was a meeting of 150 Catholic Pentecostals (or ‘Catholic charismatics’, as they preferred to be called) at the university of Notre Dame; in 1969, the year Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan published their study Catholic Pentecostals, there were some 500 at a similar gathering. In 1974 at least 30,000 attended a conference at Notre Dame and the following year 10,000 made their way to an international gathering in Rome where they were greeted by Pope Paul VI.

In 1976 the Netherlands-based think tank cum information service, Pro Mundi Vita (PMV), presided over by the Jesuit sociologist Jan Kerkhofs, published a bulletin, reproduced in book form the following year, which examined the phenomenon in detail. PMV suggested a number of factors which had encouraged the birth and growth of the Charismatic movement within Catholicism: increased contact with Protestants, including prayer in common; the fact that Pentecostalism had, at least in the USA, become a phenomenon within the mainline Protestant churches rather than driving Pentecostals into separate churches; the impact of the Cursillo movement of the 1950s which had introduced participants to a more emotional style of Catholicism; theological confusion, liturgical reforms ‘which had awakened spiritual appetites they did not satisfy’, and a renewed theology of the Holy Spirit in the church at large.