scholarly journals Pentecostalisation. A Catholic Voice in the Debate

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 623
Author(s):  
Przemysław Sawa
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
New Evangelization ◽  
Moral Reality ◽  
Secular World ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Church

Pentecostalisation is one of several contentious issues in the Catholic Church. While charismatic experience is welcome and refreshing, it is also connected with various spiritual and pastoral abuses, which is very concerning. When set in the context of the new evangelization and the charismatic reality, people become open to a new type of ecumenism, namely an ecumenism relying on forms of living the faith, on permeating pious practices, singing, and literature. Some people may ask if this features an exchange of gifts or rather indicates the rise of a new hybrid form of Christianity. An analysis of how Pentecostal spirituality has developed, particularly in the Catholic communities, does not lead to a conclusion that the new shape of spirituality poses a danger. Obviously, the theological and pastoral mistakes that do occur need to be corrected but a growth of the charismatic sphere that is integrated within a correct interpretation of faith and with the Tradition leads to a renewal of the Church and greater evangelization. The good outcomes of the catholic, i.e., universal, Charismatic Renewal cannot go unnoticed. In the increasingly secular world, it is only a return to the fundamental experience of apostolic evangelization and a testimony to a living faith of the baptized that may inspire non-believers to start looking for Jesus Christ. The Church cannot, therefore, be reduced to the hierarchical, sacramental, doctrinal, and moral reality only. It is necessary that the involvement of lay people increases and that they use charismatic gifts in a responsible and confident manner. For all this to happen, people must be open to new inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

scholarly journals Leitourgia: The Missing Link in Evangelii Gaudium

2018 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Peter John McGregor
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Lumen Gentium ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Church ◽  
Missing Element

Some especially insightful and challenging passages in Evangelii Gaudium are those on the importance of a personal encounter with Jesus, the evangelizing power of popular piety, person to person witness, and the need for the power of the Holy Spirit. However, in order to do full justice to the mission of the Church, the document requires more on the priestly aspect of this mission. This element is substantially absent, in part, because of Francis’s veneration of Evangelii Nuntiandi. However, this absent element can be obtained from the missiology of Lumen Gentium, John Paul II, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Based on an analysis of the meaning of leitourgia in the New Testament, this article concludes that this missing element can serve as a link between Pope Francis’s kerygma and diakonia, enabling a harmony which has been missing, to greater or lesser degrees, from the Church’s mission in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-88
Author(s):  
Artur Antoni Kasprzak
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charismatic Renewal ◽  
The Church

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.

scholarly journals Experiencing Uncommon Faithfulness:

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28
Author(s):  
Stephen Nicholson, SJ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Church

The challenges confronting the church in the 21st century, especially that of persistent systemic racism, call for a methodological shift in ecclesiology.  This paper explores the meaning and benefits of Natalia’s Imperatori-Lee’s narrative ecclesiology within the context of race in the United States Catholic Church.  By turning to the story of God’s people, especially the silenced and oppressed, ecclesiology is empowered to challenge false histories and overturn theologies which justify oppression.  Furthermore, the work of the Holy Spirit and the responses of the faithful are made evident in lives of “uncommon faithfulness,” such as those of Black Catholics in the US.  To be guided by narrative ecclesiology today, members of the church must engage in an embodied struggle for liberation and so hear the story of God’s people anew.

scholarly journals The Theology of the Holy Eucharist and the Doctrine of Transubstantiation

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-86
Author(s):  
Francis Appiah-Kubi
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The Body ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
The Third ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Underlying Reality ◽  
The Church

Holy Communion is one of the seven sacraments in the Catholic Church. With Baptism and Confirmation, they constitute the sacraments of Initiation. Similarly, with the Word of God, they constitute the two indispensable pillars upon which the Church is built. It is the “fount and apex of the whole Christian life” (LG 11). It is named Holy Eucharist because it is an action of thanksgiving to God. It recalls God’s work of creation, redemption, and sanctification. The Eucharistic elements, bread and wine become, by the prayer of consecration and the invocation of the Holy Spirit, Christ's Body and Blood through an act appropriately known as transubstantiation. The term emphasizes the conversion of the total substance of bread and wine into the entire substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. When the bread and wine are consecrated at Mass, they are no longer bread and wine; they have become instead the Most Precious Body and Blood of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in accordance with the words of Christ. The empirical appearances and attributes remain the same, but the underlying reality changes. Therefore, the doctrine of transubstantiation teaches without ambiguity that in the Holy Communion, the Body and Blood, together with the soul and divinity, of the Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained. How is this understood and what is its implication theologically? In an attempt to elucidate this problem, this work seeks first to highlight the theology of the Holy Eucharist within the context of the ecclesiology of Communion, and second, through some theological themes: sacred memorial and sacrificial banquet; eschatological meal. The third and final part treats the theme of real presence under the rubrics of Transubstantiation. Keywords: Transubstantiation, Eschatological Meal, Memorial, Real Presence, Communion, Eucharistic conversion.

Martin Luther’s Protestant Opponents

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
External Source ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

A variety of dissident movements within the church appeared and disappeared throughout the medieval period. Each sought to reform the church along various millenarian, moralistic, biblicistic, and anticlerical lines. In the wake of Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) public calls for reform, groups of these kinds reappeared in Europe. Most of them referred to Luther as an inspiration, and they often associated themselves with Luther and his reforms. In order to distance himself from these groups, Luther used the pejorative German word, Schwärmerei to describe and critique what he saw as their most fundamental error: that they would establish their respective churches on a foundation other than what he called, in the Smalcald Articles (1538), the “First and Chief Article” of the Christian faith: Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and God’s Word alone. Moreover, because these opponents also represented forms of 16th-century protest against the Roman Catholic Church, they would cite him as a source of their teaching. His use of Schwärmerei, then, separates his reform proposal from the ideas and the implications of these groups. As a metaphor, Schwärmerei also vilifies Luther’s Protestant opponents as “swarms” of bees or locusts. The term not only links Luther’s opponents together, it also identifies their presence as unpredictable and hazardous. This usage clearly reflected the polemical discourse common in this historical period and contributed to the generally harsh persecutions of the groups in principalities ruled by Lutherans. In a variety of ways, Luther’s Protestant opponents taught that believers were capable of knowing God directly (e.g., through spiritual experience or reason). Such knowledge was deemed necessary for a truly faithful and transformed life. Luther’s Protestant opponents, then, maintained that full membership in the church depended on their internal experience of the Holy Spirit, an experience that was to be shared ritually with the community as public witness to the Spirit’s work. Both the experience itself and the subsequent life of discipleship were deemed necessary by these groups in order for one to be a true follower of Christ. For Luther, however, saving knowledge of God comes only through God’s chosen means of self-revelation: the Word and the sacraments. The gospel of the forgiveness of sins, therefore, is always mediated to believers from an external source—through preaching the Word of God and through the means of grace (i.e., baptism and the Lord’s Supper). In addition, these groups’ overemphasis on subjectivity left them vulnerable to abuse by their leaders. They could claim authority, based on their internal experiences, to dominate their followers with cult-like power. Luther believed this to be the dynamic at work in the disastrous “Kingdom of God” at Münster (1535), the Peasants’ War (1525), and the Wittenberg disturbances (1522). For Luther, the Word alone, as God’s law and God’s gospel, provides the basis for the one, holy, Christian, and apostolic church. His opponents disagreed that such a foundation was sufficient for the church to be the church. Indeed, by the end of his career, the Reformer would describe nearly all of his opponents as Schwärmer—eventually even including the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church among their ranks.

Guidance from the gaps: the Holy Spirit, ecclesial authority, and the principle of juxtaposition

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-158
Author(s):  
Steffen Lösel
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Divine Freedom ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church

Recent ecumenical dialogues have focused on the question of ecclesiastical offices. At the heart of this debate lies the question of how to relate the Holy Spirit's guidance of the church to its structures. Two alternative visions frame the debate. The Roman Catholic Church insists on the authority of the church's teaching office, as the channel through which the Holy Spirit guides the church. In contrast, Protestant churches emphasize the self-sufficiency of scripture, the normative function of the Gospel vis-à-vis the church, and the freedom of the Holy Spirit in, with, and over against all ecclesiastical structures. My essay engages this ecumenical debate through fundamental ecclesiological reflections on the relation between the Holy Spirit on the one hand, and the scriptural witness and ecclesial authority on the other. I argue that no ecclesial structure must be identified undialectically with the voice of the Holy Spirit, but that the church must discern the guidance of the Spirit in the context of the Christian assembly, as it emerges ever anew from the “gaps” left open in the assembly's juxtapositions of texts, bath, and shared meal. In order to develop my thesis, I first retrieve Karl Barth's christological foundation of ecclesiology, his definition of divine freedom over against the church, and his introduction of scripture as the critical principle for the church's permanently needed self-reform. Second, I discuss Walter Kasper's insistence on the incarnational and sacramental nature of the church and his threefold understanding of the church's apostolicity in terms of succession, tradition, and communion. Finally, I develop Gordon Lathrop's reading of the Christian assembly of worship in terms of liturgical juxtapositions for my ecclesiastical purposes.

Introduction

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church makes some pretty exalted claims for itself. Over the centuries, the Church has described itself variously as the “Mystical Body” of Jesus Christ, the “Spotless Bride” of the Son of God, and the “Temple of the Holy Spirit,” the only path to...

Taming the Spirit

Pneuma ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-244
Author(s):  
Paul G. Tyson
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article explores connections between the decline of prophecy and the evolution of a monarchic mono-episcopate ecclesiological structure in the early Catholic Church. Of particularly interest in this evolution is the attempt to institutionalize the Holy Spirit within the post-apostolic ecclesial structure. This article argues that the Spirit of God is not governed by institutional necessity. Indeed, the freedom and resulting dynamism of the Spirit seems to require a light institutional structure and a radical power inverted vision of church such as seen in the Pauline churches. Hence this article argues that something like a Pauline ecclesiology is needed if the church is to practice an apostolic pneumatology.

scholarly journals Verdades urgentes para uma renovação eclesial

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (289) ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Mário De França Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Espírito Santo ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Espirito Santo ◽  
The Church ◽  
Present Life

Diante das transformações socioculturais dos nossos dias e dos novos desafios a serem enfrentados pela Igreja, o texto aborda três temas fundamentais e urgentes. O primeiro trata do Espírito Santo enquanto atua na constituição da própria instituição eclesial. O segundo tema procura chamar a atenção para algumas características importantes da fé cristã vivida por nossos contemporâneos, os quais deveriam poder expressá-la na complexidade da vida atual, mediatizando, assim, para a Igreja, uma linguagem adequada para nossos dias. Finalmente, o texto aborda o importante tema do testemunho cristão, que deveria ser mais valorizado numa época inflacionada de palavras e discursos. Três verdades um tanto esquecidas e que podem ajudar-nos neste momento crítico.Abstract: In view of the sociocultural transformations of our times and of new challenges to be confronted by the Church, the text addresses three fundamental and urgent issues. The first deals with the Holy Spirit insofar as it deals with the constitution of the very ecclesial institution. The second seeks to draw attention to some important features of the Christian faith as experienced by our contemporaries who should be able to express that faith in the complexity of present life thus, transmitting, on behalf of the Church, a language that is suitable for our times. Finally, the paper addresses the important issue of the Christian testimony, which should be more valued in an era inflated with words and speeches. Three truths somewhat forgotten that can help us at this critical moment.Keywords: Present-day Society. Catholic Church. Holy Spirit. Faith. Adult Laity. Christian testimony.

scholarly journals Towards a Pneumatological-Ecclesiology: Outside the “Two Lungs of the Church”

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-229
Author(s):  
Timothy Lim T.N.
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
The Body ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Protestant Denominations ◽  
The Church

Abstract This paper critiques the framing of the pneumatological underpinning of ecclesiology as an Orthodox-Catholic conversation. The context for the Joint Commission for Orthodox-Catholic dialogue warrants the use of the metaphor “two lungs of the church” by official church leaders, ecclesiologists and theologians to speak of the Spirit’s work in and between both communions. However, I want to call attention to the pneumatological and ecclesiological problems in the use of the image “two lungs of the church.” If the Holy Spirit breathes upon and through the Body of Christ, reading the Spirit’s operation in the church (pneumatological-ecclesiology) cannot ignore, and much less dismiss or absorb (either explicitly or implicitly), the charismas outside of the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. Protestant denominations, such as Baptists, Brethren, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Charismatics are also contexts for studying the Spirit’s work in the churches. The paper concludes by proffering a mapping of recent pneumatological contributions of other Christian denominations and churches to invite theologians to assist in reframing or reconceptualizing a more appropriate anatomic metaphor for the Spirit’s work in and among the churches together.

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