“Los Aleluyas”
Alternately intriguing and distressing article in today's New York Times on the rise of Hispanic Pentecostalism. The article states: One in ten New Yorkers is now a Pentecostal, one in three New York Pentecostals are Hispanic. NYC Pentecostalism has grown 45% in the last decade.
The accompanying picture is of a former Catholic who was impressed by "the unity and passion" that she witnessed at a relative's wake. " . . .she said, she practiced the sort of once-a-week Catholicism that was more habit than conviction. 'You can sit next to me, and when the service is over you don’t even know my name,” she said. “You don’t ask, ‘How are you?’ It’s foom, and you’re out.'"
She joined a tiny Pentecostal storefront. The pastor and lay leaders would have understood because they are all lapsed Catholics too.
"Here, in cramped storefronts like Ark of Salvation, people whose lives are as marginal as their neighborhoods discover a joyful intimacy often lacking in big churches. They find help — with the rent, child care or finding a job. As immigrants, they find their own language and music, as well as the acceptance and recognition that often elude them on the outside.
They find the discipline and drive to make a hard life livable.
To spend a year with this congregation is to see a teenage single mother and party girl discover the strength to go to college, marry in the church and land a job. It is to see a former political radical and brawler pray over alcoholics in the park."Be sure and take a look at the multi-media that accompanies the article on the left, including an interesting map showing the distribution of Pentecostals from state to state.
posted by Sherry W @ 10:22 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
This is distressing as regards the effectiveness of the Church (though I suspect the key is not primarily the interpersonal intimacy emphasized in the article).
However, I find it encouraging that so many people, marked with the sign of faith at baptism, find later in life such a powerful pull toward intimacy with God that they seek it until they find it.
Think what the Catholic Church will look like when Jesus has renewed it -- genuine sacramental life coupled with genuine experience of the presence of God!
Roz:
You have raised a really interesting point. Fr. Michael Sweeney used to speculate that the character received at baptism was a sort of spiritual "itch" that made lapsed Catholics especially responsive to direct proclamation of Christ by anyone.
He wondered if that was the reason that mega-churches that focus on the unchurched are filled with a disproportionate number of Catholics. They had an "itch" they couldn't scratch. Evangelicals tap into that itch.
Of course, this sounds like what Fr. Cantalamessa is referring to when he write:
"But it seems that God was concerned about this situation even before the Church was, and raised up here and there in the Church movements aimed at renewing Christian initiation in adults—It's effectiveness in reactivating baptism consists in this: finally man contributes his part—namely, he makes a choice of faith, prepared in repentance that allows the work of God to set itself free and to emanate all its strength. It is as if the plug is pulled and the light is switched on. The gift of God is finally "untied" and the Spirit is allowed to flow like a fragrance in the Christian life."
We found another really intriguing clue in an article in the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia.
The article noted that, in the absence of proper disposition (personal faith and repentance) on the part of an adult receiving baptism, who nevertheless intended to receive the sacrament, the baptism character or spiritual mark which is a kind of legal right to baptismal grace, could be given *without the grace.*
The article on justification from the Council of Trent outlines an extensive inward spiritual journey through which an adult arrives at "fides formata" or faith imbued with hope and love, which is the pre-requisite for justification.
In the presence of a mere "fides informis" - or a merely intellectual or even dogmatic faith without hope and love - justification doesn't happen if one is beyond the “age of reason”.
The sacraments are not magic. An older child or adult *must* contribute their part – personal faith and repentance. Cantalamessa seems to be saying that it can happen later when the sacramental graces are "untied" by personal faith.
So in many cases, we may be providing the baptism and the evangelicals/Pentecostals are providing the awakening of personal faith and repentance.
I wrote a long article about the new "independent" Christian movement last winter. One of the things that *really* startled me was this:
The discovery that 60% of Reformation heritage Christians in the world today are charismatic in their understanding of how the Holy Spirit works in the world and the lives of people. David Barrett estimates that 30,000 Christians become "renewalists" (or charismatic/Pentecostals) every day.
Sixty percent! From 0 to 60 In a single century - and most of it happened in our lifetime. In 1970, only 16% of non-Catholic, non-Orthodox Christians were charismatic in spirituality. Thirty years later, it was 60%.
The majority live in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where the majority of Christians now live. Europe has the fewest. The US is the western country with the greatest number (31% which includes charismatics in non-charismatic Churches like the Catholic church).
This gap in experience between the charismatic and the non-charismatic is rapidly becoming the new global divide between Protestant and non-Protestant Christians.
As I wrote in my article:
"Most importantly for us, and for the future of ecumenical relations, it is opening a nearly unbridgeable chasm of experience and imagination between traditional western Catholics and their pentecostalized, third world (actually two thirds!), Reformation-heritage brothers and sisters."
The Ark is just one tiny manifestation of this world-wide trend.
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