How the Renewal Shaped My Catholic Life
There was a song I used to sing with others when I was living at home as a young adult. I can remember the refrain vividly, “Come go with me to that land…”
That land, of course, was heaven. And the irony was always there, unspoken but understood: the only way to reach that shining country was by dying. It felt almost dishonest — showing happiness about leaving this world when most of us were still gripping it tightly.
It was an old African-American spiritual—what the old songbooks used to call a Negro spiritual. Picture it: a choir in long, flowing robes, swaying like wheat in the wind, voices rising and falling like a river current. It was alive.
I can still see our own little version of that choir during prayer meetings in the 70s. We were in our home or in a church basement. I’d be strumming the guitar, trying to keep the rhythm steady. My dad, smiling and joyful, would grab his battered tambourine and shake it into life. We sang with real joy.
The verses were simple, almost like stepping-stones to that promised place:
Singin’ and dancin’ in that land …
Gonna meet Jesus in that land…
There’ll be freedom in that land …
For Catholics like us, it was a cultural jolt. Catholic life back then was… restrained. Faith was there, like wallpaper — you didn’t notice it until someone pointed it out. Yes, you went to Mass and sang hymns. Knelt, sat and stood. No one was swaying or clapping at a prayer meeting or anywhere else. One of my college chums once summed it up with a grin: “Pray, pay, and obey.”
When the Wind Shifted
But the charismatic movement was different. It blew into the Catholic Church like a fresh wind through a stuffy room, bringing with it energy, music, and a rediscovery of joy. The old wooden pews suddenly echoed with guitars, tambourines, and hands raised high.
Not everyone approved. The hierarchy and sophisticated Catholics often looked at the movement with polite suspicion. Still, there we were, week after week, driving to prayer meetings as far as a half an hour away.
An annual charismatic meeting was held at Notre Dame, just a few hours away. I remember a story told at one of the early conferences: a delegation of charismatic leaders had gone to Rome seeking approval. When they returned, they were optimistic. “We’re in the mainstream of the Church,” they announced, “not the fringes.” It was their way of telling us that we weren’t outsiders or naïve emotionalists. We were, they insisted, right at the heart of what the Church was all about.
For me, the charismatic movement was a thin thread of connection to the Catholic Church. As a 20-year-old, there was no outreach to young Catholics in the parish at that time in my experience. My three closest friends who were raised Catholic all left the Church for what seemed to them like greener pastures within the Protestant fold.
For six years I wavered in my faith, drawn at first to an early re-conversion to the Catholic Church that carried a distinctly Protestant evangelical flavor. Only later, with no small amount of grace, did I make the deeper dive into a full-hearted conversion as a Catholic.
Echoes After Fifty Years
At that time I didn’t have the academic drive that led many prominent non-Catholics into the Church. I needed something more. And that was the devotion and encouragement of my family, as well as that of other Catholics at those meetings.
And what happened to the charismatic movement now that fifty years have passed? I don’t hear much about them any more. Except that of Ralph Martin, one of the early leaders of the movement. Dr. Martin founded Renewal Ministries, and has kept the fire burning for decades with his quiet and yet intense evangelism.
And now that Martin and two other professors have been abruptly fired from their jobs at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary by Archbishop Weisenburger, has the wind been taken out of the sails of Catholic evangelization today? There has been a storm of controversy over the newly-appointed bishop’s actions. But I’m thinking that Dr. Martin would say that the Holy Spirit will not be hindered in his work.
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