By definition, charisms are expressions of the freedom of the Holy Spirit, and Catholic ecclesiology requires the Catholic Church to freely welcome, receive, and nurture both personal charisms and foundational charisms that arise. At face value, the Church has done just that by welcoming several largely lay-led ecclesial movements that express a foundational charism and encourage openness to personal charisms. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is one such movement, and it provides an important case study in terms of freedom as an ecclesiological category. On the one hand, the institutional Catholic Church has maintained an open stance to the charisms of the Pentecostal movement, and this Catholic reception has proven to be one of the most fascinating “success stories” in the emergence of Pentecostalism. Even today, the movement enjoys Papal endorsement. Moreover, charismatic "staying power" is quite evident in reporting on the Catholic response to the 2023 Asbury Revival, and reporting on the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress—an event that was at least "softly" charismatic. On the other hand, Catholic Charismatic communities are increasingly reckoning with spiritual and sexual abuse scandals. Given this, one may ask whether there are limits to the freedom of charism. In this case, this question is bound up in one of the most exciting (and dangerous) sources of pneumatological reflection since the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is explicitly pneumatological in its origins and self-understanding. That is to say: how one evaluates the “reading” of what the Spirit said during the emergence of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has a direct bearing on our ability to authentically develop Christian pneumatology.
To be sure, in Catholic ecclesiology, all charisms are ultimately submitted to the charisms that are proper to the episcopate for purposes of verification. But there are theological resources and emerging paradigms that can be fruitfully brought to bear on the question of the freedom of charism, and interestingly, they imply that the world outside the church must ultimately verify a charism. Thus, the aim of this paper is to gather resources that can contribute to a longitudinal understanding of charism, so as to ensure a robust engagement with the authentic good present in an ecclesial movement while also providing space for the necessary scrutiny of historical conditions, distortions, and oversights. Given this aim, this paper proposes to draw on the shared emphases on historicity and authenticity in the thought of Bernard Lonergan and in the magisterium of Pope Francis. Both authors provide critical resources for perceiving the necessity of historical analysis, especially as it pertains to a spiritual movement. Likewise, these two figures offer resources for a framework that can differentiate between authenticity and inauthenticity in a given tradition. In the case of Lonergan, it is his bedrock commitment that human knowing and doing can only be authentic—and therefore is only authenticated—insofar as it contributes to the concrete human good in a dynamic process of development, or at least of a reversal of decline.
In the case of Pope Francis, there are two elements to note: first is his longstanding commitment to the “theology of the people” (teología del pueblo), and second is Francis’s magisterial development of the discernment of supernatural phenomena. In the case of the former, Francis suggests that the concept of the people is “a mythical and historical category,” meaning that the people (of a nation, of a religion) “are part of a process, created with commitment, with view to an objective or a shared project. History is built from this slow process over successive generations” (Hope 169). Because peoplehood is historical, it is necessary to link a people’s culture with the working of God’s grace, for “grace supposes culture, and God’s gift becomes flesh in the culture of those who receive it” (Evangelii Gaudium 115). Also relevant are the recently promulgated Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena. These norms state that the goal is to listen to the Holy Spirit “who works in the faithful people of God,” and therefore to identify the Holy Spirit’s working “in the midst of” events pertaining to a supernatural phenomena. Finally, it is notable that the recognition is framed as a nihil obstat rather than a true endorsement. Indeed, the norm for a nihil obstat ruling includes recognition of the need for “certain clarifications or purifications. It may happen that the Holy Spirit’s action in a specific situation—which can be rightly appreciated—might appear to be mixed with purely human elements… or with ‘some error of a natural order, not due to bad intentions, but to the subjective perception of the phenomenon'” (Norms for Proceeding). Thus, one may sift through the work of the Holy Spirit among a historical people while also foregrounding the possibility or necessity of purification according to the operative understanding of history.
As a case study, this paper engages scholarship and reporting about two prominent covenant communities: the Word of God community analyzed by anthropologist Thomas Csordas, and the Mother of God community, which the Washington Post covered in a 1997 investigative series titled “The Believers Next Door.” In both cases, the origin and development of these communities reflect the challenge of discerning the Holy Spirit “in the midst” of a cultural phenomenon. These communities were seen as exemplars of the “new evangelization,” and sociologically they fostered the “reenchantment” of American suburban life (Csordas). But they also contributed to a “bulwark” mentality (Csordas) and manifested exploitative cult-like behavior in their evangelization strategies (“The Believers Next Door”). By adopting a framework that incorporates Lonergan’s thought and that of Pope Francis, one can interpret more acutely the extent to which charism is authentically expressed, and one can also elucidate why—and to what end—purification may be needed. Moreover, both Lonergan and Francis point to a subtle source of verification: the surrounding world. If charism does not serve the common good of all, it is not a charism. Thus, the world outside the church must be understood as a dialogue partner in verifying a charism's authenticity. A charism's freedom, then, is co-determined by church and world.
The emergence of controversies and cases of sexual or spiritual abuse in Catholic Charismatic residential covenant communities raises critical questions about the freedom accorded to charism in Catholic ecclesiology. To refine the theology of charism, this paper proposes to draw on the resources of historicity and authenticity as they appear in the work of Bernard Lonergan and in the magisterium of Pope Francis. From both Jesuit thinkers, one can derive key criteria for a longitudinal evaluation of charism: first, one must more fully explore the historical conditions of a charism’s emergence with an eye towards distinguishing the perception of the good in a charism’s cultural context. Second, one must make a distinction about how the Holy Spirit works “in the midst of” a phenomenon. As a result, the authenticity of a charism (and the freedom it should enjoy) is co-determined by the church and the world in dialogue.