A History of Christian Doctrine #3 - Online Christian Library

The Charismatic Movement
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal
In 1967 the Charismatic Renewal swept into the
Roman Catholic Church, beginning at Duquesne
University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Some students
there heard about the Holy Spirit through The Cross and
the Switchblade, They Speak with Other Tongues, and
testimonies of Pentecostals. They began praying for the
Holy Spirit and received the experience in February
1967.
From there, the movement spread to Notre Dame
University in South Bend, Indiana. Leaders who received
the Pentecostal experience at Notre Dame were Kevin
Ranaghan (born 1940), his wife, Dorothy (born 1942),
and Edward O’Connor, a priest.
The movement went on to Michigan State University
in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These three universities became
great centers of the Catholic Charismatic movement, and
through them it spread throughout Roman Catholicism.
For a time, Catholic Charismatics held annual
national meetings at Notre Dame, but later they began to
hold regional meetings. In 1976, 30,000 Catholic
Charismatics gathered at Notre Dame. The next year, a
regional meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, had an
attendance of 37,000. 284
Some Charismatics formed spiritual communities in
the Catholic tradition. In some of them, all the members
lived in the same community; in others, members lived in
separate residences but made a covenant to meet together
and submit to one another. These communities became
powerful vehicles for teaching and evangelism, helping to
spread the Charismatic movement throughout Catholicism.
The most prominent of them were the Word of God
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