Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas J. Csordas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (California, 1994).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement

University of California Press

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal has never had a single identifiable charismatic leader in the Weberian sense, although among the movement elite there exists an informal hierarchy of charismatic renown based on reputation for evangelism, healing, or local community leadership. Neither has the movement had a dramatic history, although there have been apocalyptic moments, periods of internal tension and ideological split, and the occasional intrigue of high Church politics. It is certainly a phenomenon with roots in both Pentecostal and Catholic traditions, as well as a phenomenon with distinct local and global manifestations.1   To begin, then, we will aim for a sense of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as a social and cultural phenomenon, a "movement," with the caveat that by the next chapter it will become necessary to problematize the very concept of movement.

Indeed, from the "indigenous" standpoint, Charismatics themselves have occasionally resisted describing the Renewal as a movement. They have often qualified the notion, sometimes emphasizing that theirs is a movement "of the Spirit" in the sense that it is inspired by and belongs to the deity, at other times insisting that it is a "movement" of the Spirit in the sense that what is moving is the Holy Spirit itself. In this latter sense the Renewal is not really a sociocultural phenomenon at all, but strictly a spiritual one. From the standpoint of anthropological theory, in recent years it has become clear that the standard paradigm for understanding social and religious "movements" faces problems in at least three respects: its conception of movements as discrete entities rather

than as phenomena characteristic or diagnostic of the cultures in which they are spawned; its ability to account for meaning in addition to causality and social dynamics of movements; and its assumption that the categorical subjects of movements are not necessarily only peoples, populations, or social types but indeterminate selves in a process of reorientation and transformation. We will return to these issues in the next chapter, but to sustain that discussion we must first survey the diversity among manifestations of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal first in its country of origin, the United States, then globally.

The United States

The year commonly accepted as the beginning of the movement is 1967. During a retreat at Duquesne University (the "Duquesne Weekend"), a group of students and young faculty members experienced the spiritual awakening of Baptism in the Holy Spirit through the influence of Protestant Pentecostals. They soon shared their experience with like-minded students at Notre Dame and Michigan State universities. Although on occasion one can hear individuals claim that they individually or with a small prayer group prayed in tongues before or independently of this point, the narrative of origin among this relatively young, well-educated, and all-male group is standard. It has consistently been recounted as a kind of just-so story in greater or lesser detail by virtually all social science authors who have addressed the movement (Fichter 1975; Mawn 1975; K. McGuire 1976; M. McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987; Bord and Faulkner 1983; Poloma 1982), while for some among the movement's adherents it has attained the status of an origin myth. The new "Catholic Pentecostals" claimed to offer a unique spiritual experience to individuals and promised a dramatic renewal of Church life based on a born-again spirituality of "personal relationship" with Jesus and direct access to divine power and inspiration through a variety of "spiritual gifts," or "charisms." The movement attracted a strong following among relatively well educated, middle-class suburban Catholics (Mawn 1975; Fichter 1975; McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987; Poloma 1982). Since its inception it has spread throughout the world wherever there are Catholics.

In the United States, development of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal can be roughly divided into stages:

1) Prior to 1967 Catholics who underwent the Pentecostal experience of Baptism in the Holy Spirit often were persuaded by their Protestant mentors that Catholicism and Pentecostalism were incompatible, and frequently left the Catholic church.

2) From 1967 to 1970 Catholic Pentecostalism was a collection of small, personalistic prayer groups emphasizing spontaneity in worship and interpersonal relations, loosely organized via networks of personal contacts, and not fully differentiated from other associations such as the Cursillo movement. Protestant Pentecostals and nondenominational neo-Pentecostals remained a strong influence.

3) From 1970 to 1975 the renamed Catholic Charismatic Renewal underwent rapid institutionalization and consolidation of a lifestyle including collective living in "covenant communities," distinctive forms of ritual, and a specialized language of religious experience. Prayer groups and covenant communities were often composed of both Catholic and Protestant members, though the leadership was predominantly Catholic.

4) From 1975 to the end of the decade the movement entered an apocalyptic phase, based on prophetic revelation that "hard times" were imminent for Christians. Many covenant communities saw their form of life as essential for coping with the coming trials, and a split occurred in the leadership between those who held that the prayer group is a separate type of Charismatic organization with its own role and those who held that it was an initial stage in a necessary development toward a full-scale covenant community.2   In general, leaders attempted both to influence the direction of the Catholic church and to maintain an ecumenical outlook, while the Charismatic Renewal progressively attained international scope.

5) The 1980s brought recognition by movement leaders that its growth in the U.S. had dramatically decreased. They also saw an increasingly clear divergence between Charismatics gathered into tightly structured intentional communities who wanted to preserve the earlier sense of apocalyptic mission and those who remained active in less overtly communitarian parochial prayer groups. A second split occurred, this time among covenant communities themselves, over issues of government and authority, as well as over relations to the larger movement and the Church as a whole. By the mid-1980s both streams of the movement had initiated evangelization efforts directed as much at their less committed or

flagging Charismatic brethren as at the unconverted.3   Also in the 1980s, a new wave of Protestant influence was introduced with the rising popularity of so-called Third Wave Pentecostal evangelists.

6) By the late 1980s and early 1990s some among the communitarians considered themselves a distinct movement. Among the parochially oriented stream, Catholic identity became heightened as fewer groups cultivated combined Protestant and Catholic "ecumenical" memberships and as the Church took a more active supervisory role. Meanwhile, boundaries between Charismatics and conventional Catholics became more ambiguous, as many who no longer attended regular prayer meetings remained active in their parishes and as many Catholics with no other Charismatic involvement became attracted to large public healing services conducted by Charismatics.

From its earliest days the movement began to develop a sophisticated organizational structure to coordinate activities such as regional, national, and international gatherings and to publish books, magazines, and cassette tapes of devotional and instructional material. The twelve-member National Service Committee has coordinated activities in the United States since 1970, based at first in South Bend under the sponsorship of the People of Praise covenant community, then moving in 1990 to a new "Chariscenter" headquarters near Washington, D.C.4   The National Service Committee's work is supplemented by the National Advisory Committee, constituted of well over a hundred members chosen by geographic region. The International Communications Office began in 1975 at Ann Arbor under the sponsorship of The Word of God covenant community, moving eventually to Brussels and then to Rome as the movement sought to establish its presence at the center of the Catholic world.5   Higher education is available at the Charismatic-dominated Franciscan College of Steubenville in Ohio.

Most American Catholic dioceses have appointed an individual, almost always a Charismatic, to serve as liaison to the local bishop, and the liaisons themselves meet periodically. The institution of diocesan liaison is instrumental in preserving cordial relations between the movement and the Church hierarchy, wherein there are perhaps only twenty bishops who affiliate with the movement. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops also has an ad hoc committee on the Charismatic Renewal, with one of its members serving as liaison to the movement. Official joint statements by the bishops comprising the national hierarchies

of various countries, including the United States, have been released periodically. Such statements typically adopt a cautiously supportive tone, urging participants to continue "renewing" Church life while warning them against theological and behavioral "excess."

From the early 1970s the most influential and highest-ranking cleric openly affiliated with the Renewal was the conservative Belgian cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens, who following an incognito reconnaissance visit established relations with The Word of God community and subsequently became Rome's episcopal adviser to the movement.6   With Suenens's retirement and the declining fortunes of The Word of God vis--vis the Church in the 1980s, the most influential cleric became Bishop Paul Cordes, vice president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and Rome's new episcopal adviser to the movement. At the center, Pope Paul VI took note of the movement's existence as early as 1971 and publicly addressed its 1975 international conference in Rome. Pope John Paul II (1992) has continued to be generally supportive, apparently tolerating the movement's relatively radical theology for the sake of encouraging its markedly conservative politics, its militant activism for "traditional" values and against women's rights to contraception and abortion, and its encouragement of individual spirituality and contribution to parish activities and finances.7

The division into covenant communities and parochial prayer groups has been the most evident feature of internal diversity among American Charismatics. By far the majority of active participants are involved in prayer groups whose members assemble weekly for collective prayer but do not maintain intensive commitments to their group and sometimes participate in several groups simultaneously or serially. At the opposite pole are the intensely committed and hierarchically structured intentional communities organized around the provisions of a solemn written agreement, or "covenant."

Several dimensions of variation in group organization are related to this primary one between prayer group and covenant community. The smallest prayer groups may have only a few adult members, whereas until 1990 the largest among covenant communities numbered 1,500 adults and another 1,500 children. An intermediate-size prayer group (from about 40 to 200) will likely include a "core group" of members who want both greater commitment and a greater sense of intimacy and common purpose with others. Such a group is typically led by a "pastoral team" of several members. It also exhibits a division of ritual labor into "ministries" with functions such as leadership, teaching, music,

healing, or provision to participants of movement literature. Leadership in some groups is primarily in the hands of lay people; in others it is deferred to priests and nuns and may be open to both men and women or restricted based on the fundamentalist principle of "male headship."

Charismatic groups may be based at a parish (though they often attract transparochial participation), a school, or a private home. Group membership may be either predominantly Catholic or "ecumenical," drawn from a variety of mainstream Protestant denominations. Although in general over time the proportion of Protestants appears to have declined somewhat, the degree of ecumenical participation also appears to vary by region, with Charismatics in the Northeast from the beginning having tended to form predominantly Catholic groups and those in the Midwest inclined toward ecumenical participation.8   Denominational religious obligations in ecumenical groups typically take on the character of private devotion separate from community life, whereas predominantly Catholic groups integrate liturgy and sometimes Marian devotion into their ritual life. Nevertheless, the movement as a whole has consistently been in contact with Protestant Pentecostals (e.g., Assemblies of God) and nondenominational neo-Pentecostals, periodically adopting and adapting their ritual practices. Some groups are more charismatic in the sense of the frequency with which participants exercise "spiritual gifts" such as glossolalia, healing, or prophecy, whereas others never incorporate these characteristic features of ritual life.9   Among more highly developed groups, ritual specialization in one or more of these charisms is sometimes found: it is said by some both that each individual is granted a charism to be used for the benefit of collective life and that each community is granted a distinctive charism that will complement the charisms of other communities within the Charismatic "Kingdom of God."

While all Catholic Charismatics share the communitarian ideal, it has been a point of debate within the movement whether everyone can or even should belong to a full-scale community. In such communities, each member must go through an initiation and indoctrination process lasting as long as two years. This "underway" process culminates in a ceremony of formal commitment to the provisions of the covenant. These provisions vary from one community to another and give it greater or lesser claim over the time and resources of the member. The particular focus here on covenant communities is warranted both because they have most fully elaborated the ritual life of the movement and because even among them there is an identifiable range of cultural di-

versity. We begin with brief characterizations of four exemplary communities. All four originated in the movement's early years, 19681969, and not only represent alternative communitarian models but reflect the regional diversity of North American Catholic culture as well. The first two are independent freestanding communities and will be treated only briefly. The next two are the centers of translocal communities or networks of allied communities, and their story is critical to understanding the central role of covenant communities within the movement as a whole.

A Benedictine abbey in Pecos, New Mexico, under Abbot David Geraets, has become a leading center of Charismatic teaching on spiritual growth and ritual healing, a kind of Catholic Charismatic Esalen. The community's influence is quite broad, since in addition to sponsoring popular on-site retreats, it operates one of two Catholic Charismatic publishing houses, Dove Publications. Although permanent membership is only about forty, structure as a conventional religious order allows virtually full-time participation in religious activities. Community structure and discipline are determined by Benedictine principles, except for the innovation of organizing as a "double community" that includes both men and women.10   Community life and ritual healing are self-characterized as a "holistic" synthesis of Benedictine rule, Charismatic spiritual gifts, and depth psychology. The latter influence is prominent in defining the Pecos community in relation to other Catholic Charismatic communities in at least two ways. It defines relations between men and women as a "balancing and heightening of masculine-feminine consciousness" in an approach explicitly derived from Carl Jung. This is in sharp contrast to those covenant communities that promulgate "male headship," the ultimate authority of men over women based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Christian Scripture. The Pecos community also broadens the practice of ritual healing to include a range of elements of eclectic and holistic psychotherapies. This places its style of ritual healing at the "psychological" end of a continuum whose other pole is a "faith" orientation that purports to rely on the direct intervention of divine power.

Saint Patrick's in Providence, Rhode Island, began like many other Charismatic parish prayer groups, but under the founding leadership of Catholic priests John Randall and Raymond Kelley it had by 1974 transformed its base of operations into a "Charismatic parish."11   The two priests were assigned to a decaying inner-city parish, and more than fifty families in the community eventually sold their suburban homes and relocated in the neighborhood surrounding the church. The principal

structural innovations were the sharing of authority among a pastoral team that included lay members, the adoption of collective living in "households," and the transformation of the parochial school into a Charismatic school staffed by community members and requiring all students and their parents to undergo the initiatory Life in the Spirit Seminar. Community members explicitly chose the parish model on the example (and under the guidance) of the Episcopalian Charismatic Church of the Redeemer in Houston, in contrast to the model of lay leadership, multidenominational membership, and independence of parish structure contemporaneously being developed by midwestern Catholic covenant communities. Due in part to the effort of maintaining a parish the membership of which never truly coincided with that of the community itself, as well as to the proportions of the task that included revitalizing a neighborhood and parish already in serious decline, this community had by the middle 1980s declined in vitality and visibility within the movement, though a core of original members maintains an active Charismatic community presence.

The two leading communities of the Midwest developed side by side, and for some time considered themselves to be closely allied sister communities. The People of Praise in South Bend was led by Kevin Ranaghan and Paul DeCelles, and The Word of God in Ann Arbor was headed by Steven Clark and Ralph Martin. All were among the group from Duquesne and Notre Dame that initiated the synthesis of Catholicism and Pentecostalism. All took the opportunity to turn the newly discovered experience and ritual forms into tools for the building of "community." Both groups underwent rapid early growth by recruitment from major universities, and between them they provided many of the resources for institutional development within the movement. The South Bend community remains the headquarters of the Charismatic Renewal Services and publishes the Charismatic magazine New Heaven , New Earth , until 1990 was the headquarters of the National Service Committee and its National Advisory Committee, and has been the force behind the movement's annual national conferences. The Ann Arbor community remains instrumental in publishing the movement magazine New Covenant and in operating the influential Servant Publications for books, founded the movement's International Communications Office, and for years was the leading force in training for national and international movement leaders.

The history of relations between these communities is essential to an understanding of the communitarian ideal among Charismatics. The

critical period was the first half of the 1970s, when covenant communities and the Charismatic Renewal as a whole underwent their most rapid expansion. Movement participation in the United States was estimated at 200,000 in 1972 and 670,000 by 1976 (World Christian Encyclopedia 1982), and in the same period the membership of The Word of God community grew from 213 to 1,243. A symbolic event of critical import to the movement's future course occurred with a decision in 1975 to hold the annual Charismatic conference, until then hosted by the People of Praise on the campus of Notre Dame University, at the center of the Catholic world in Rome. During the conference the pope formally addressed the movement. Charismatic liturgy including prayer in tongues was conducted in Saint Peter's Basilica, and in this symbolically charged setting, "prophecy" was uttered.12

We will examine prophecy as a performative genre of ritual language in chapters 6 and 7. In the present context, I am concerned with the impact of the prophecies delivered at Saint Peter's, which were uttered principally by prophets from The Word of God community. Understood as messages from the deity spoken through a divinely granted charism, they warned of impending times of difficulty and trials for the Church. They stated that God's church and people would be different and that "buildings that are now standing will not be standing. Supports that are there for my people now will not be there." They declared that those who heard this divine word would be prepared by the deity for a "time of darkness coming upon the world," but also for a "time of glory for the church and people of God." An inclination to take these words literally and with urgency was reinforced by the Charismatic delegation from Lebanon, whose country had just entered the throes of its enduring civil war, and where indeed buildings that had been standing were already no longer standing. Members of the Beirut community returned to Ann Arbor and remained affiliated with The Word of God. The immediacy of their plight lent a sense of urgency to continued prophecies in the late 1970s. This sense of urgency was maintained in the 1980s by the affiliation to The Word of God of a community of conservative Nicaraguan Charismatics troubled by Sandinista attempts to create a new society in that country.

Until the Rome conference, prophecy had been understood by Charismatics as utterance intended for the edification of their own groups, or of individuals within the groups. Now for the first time, reinforced by the powerful symbolic setting of their utterance, these words were deemed to be a direct message from God to the public at large. The

"Rome prophecies," as they began to be known, were widely disseminated through New Covenant and widely discussed in Charismatic gatherings and conferences. Charismatics began to see fulfillment of the prophecies in the fuel shortages of the late 1970s, in disastrous mud slides in California, and in the blizzards of 1977 and 1978 in the Northeast. Beyond the signs included in natural disasters and in the perceived moral decline of American society, however, the prophecies were construed to indicate that the Catholic church was in peril. There was not only the long-observed decline in religious vocations, and the perceived retreat of Catholicism before Protestantism in the third world, but also a compromise with secular values and a consequent decline in moral authority that made the Church ill equipped for the coming "hard times." These concerns appeared to be referents of the Rome prophecies' warning, "Supports that are there for my people now will not be there."

While some movement leaders had from the outset in the late 1960s expressed the goal of renewing the entire Church, and thus eventually becoming indistinguishable from the Church itself, the logic of the prophecies appeared to be that the role of the Charismatic Renewal was actually to protect the Church. Thus it was an ideal not only for Catholics to become Charismatic but also for Charismatics to band together into covenant communities and covenant communities into larger networks, for these were thought to be structures in which the faithful could best gird themselves for the impending battle with the forces of darkness. To be sure, not all Charismatics and not all covenant communities adhered to this philosophy, and a formal split between moderates and radical communitarians occurred at the movement's 1977 national conference in Kansas City. The difference was summarized polemically by a female Catholic theologian who was a disaffected early participant in the community at Notre Dame. Shortly after the Rome prophecies she published a book critically distinguishing "Type I" (world-renouncing, authoritarian, and patriarchal) and "Type II" (accommodating, liberal, and egalitarian) charismatics (Ford 1976). Meanwhile, in distinction to the radical vision offered in publications and teaching disseminated by the People of Praise and The Word of God, a more moderated "Type II" voice appeared with the introduction in 1975 of the periodical Catholic Charismatic , based at the freestanding Children of Joy covenant community founded by Fr. Joseph Lange, O.S.F.S., in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Without the compelling centripetal impulse of the prophetic vision, however, both the new publication and the community that supported it were short-lived. In contrast, the most dramatic instance of

community consolidation came in 1977 when more than a hundred members of San Francisco's St. John the Baptist community moved en masse to join the People of Praise in South Bend (see Lane 1978).

In this charged atmosphere, the radical formulation of the Rome prophecies marked the years between 1975 and 1980 as a phase that was the closest the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has been to a position of apocalyptic millennialism. Even prior to these developments, however, The Word of God and the People of Praise had for some time taken the lead in plans to formalize ties among covenant communities. The principle was that, just as in a single community each member is thought to be granted a spiritual gift or charism that contributes to the collective life of the community as a "body" or a "people," so each community had a particular gift or mission. Taken together, they could thus form a "community of communities," a divinely constituted "people" ultimately combining to build the Kingdom of God. The Rome prophecies increased the urgency of this plan, and in 1976 the Association of Communities was formed.

By 19801981, however, the two leading communities themselves acknowledged irreconcilable differences. A three-way split occurred in the network, with some communities following The Word of God, some following the People of Praise, and yet others following the Community of God's Delight from Dallas and their close allies in Emmanuel Covenant Community of Brisbane, Australia. The original association had included seven communities at the "council" or oversight level, and another thirty were involved to lesser degrees. Following their parting of ways, The Word of God founded the Federation of Communities, the People of Praise went on to develop the Fellowship of Communities, and the Community of God's Delight went on with Emmanuel to develop the International Brotherhood of Communities.13   Under the leadership of The Word of God, the federation in 1982 became a single supercommunity, renaming itself the Sword of the Spirit. By 1988 the Sword of the Spirit included forty-five branches and associated communities, twenty-two of which were in the United States.14   The six main communities within the fellowship, all in the United States, eventually came to consider themselves branches of the People of Praise but maintained a semiautonomous confederal relationship.15   The even more loosely structured brotherhood increasingly cultivated its Catholic identity and relation to the Church. In 1990 the ecumenical brotherhood was succeeded by the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships, with three founding communities from the United States, six from Australia and New Zealand, and four from

other countries. In 1994, four more communities were advanced from underway to full membership in the fraternity. For the most part the three networks parted ways and remained essentially out of contact throughout the 1980s. Crudely speaking, the Sword of the Spirit went increasingly its own way, the People of Praise consolidated its links to the larger Charismatic Renewal, and the brotherhood communities consolidated their relationships with their local bishops.16

At about this time The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit had applied for canonical recognition of the geographically dispersed Catholics among its multidenominational membership as an international association of Catholics. Given the political organization of the Church, this would have required either that the local branches of the community be under more direct control of local bishops or that Steven Clark, the community's paramount leader, be granted a status similar to the head of a religious order, equivalent to a bishop. The application was not approved. Now in the wake of the split among communities, the Vatican apparently decided to take a more active role in supervising the movement. The pope assigned Bishop Cordes, the episcopal adviser to the movement who replaced The Word of God's now retired ally Cardinal Suenens, to visit and assess the range of groups, communities, and structures within the Charismatic Renewal. After visits in two consecutive years in the mid-1980s, he invited the brotherhood communities to apply for canonical recognition. Reorganized as a fraternity excluding Protestant communities and individuals who had been members of the brotherhood, this network was granted status by the pope as a "private association of the Christian faithful of pontifical right." Following exclusion of the Sword of the Spirit from a status its leaders appeared to regard as essential to their role as vanguard of Church renewal, this ecclesiastical recognition was an explicit statement of Vatican preference for one of several extant models of covenant community networks.

Let us dwell for a moment on the differences among these communities with respect to structure, "vision" or goals, and practice. This will serve the purpose of summarizing the nuances of covenant community values, as well as the kind of issues that led to the historical split among the groups. In thus setting the stage for the later extended discussion of The Word of God, we will also guard against representing that one community as in all ways typical of the movement as a whole.

We will do well to begin by noting a demographic difference among the communities. That The Word of God was centered around the public University of Michigan reinforced its tendency toward an ecumeni-

cal or multidenominational membership, whereas the People of Praise connection with Notre Dame University reinforced the predominance of Catholics. In comparison to both, the Community of God's Delight was not closely affiliated with a university. From the beginning its members were somewhat older than those in the two leading communitiesindeed, one of the personal dramas of the movement is that Bobbie Cavnar, head coordinator of the Dallas community, is the father of James Cavnar, one of the four founders of The Word of Godand its membership remained relatively stable from the early 1970s. While the Community of God's Delight also originally cultivated multidenominational membership (a community leader estimated that originally Catholics comprised 50 to 70 percent of the membership), with its increasing push toward a Catholic identity many Protestants moved away from the covenant community and back to local congregations. At the end of the 1980s membership in the Community of God's Delight was 95 to 98 percent Catholic, the People of Praise was 92 percent Catholic, and The Word of God was 65 percent Catholic.

Much of the difference that led to the split, however, has to do with the exercise of authority a) among related communities, b) in relation to the Church, c) among individuals within communities, and d) by means of prophecy. The Word of God's idea was that the association would be a single supercommunity under a single translocal government. This became the case in the Sword of the Spirit, where, for example, community leaders can be assigned to move from one branch to another to oversee or train members. The People of Praise preferred a confederation of semiautonomous communities, though as noted their constituent groups have come to regard themselves also as a single community. The Community of God's Delight and its brotherhood rejected any translocal authority, emphasizing that each member community "submit to the authority of" or "be in communion with" its local Catholic bishop. These differences in turn directly affect relations with the Catholic church. Indeed, that the Sword of the Spirit has a translocal government and that in principle this government is multidenominational rather than strictly Catholic has been one source of tension between it and the Church.

The leading covenant communities are all hierarchically structured under elders, or "coordinators." Decisions are made by consensus among coordinators as they jointly "listen for what the Lord might be saying in a particular area." Final judgments are made by an overall coordinator or head coordinator, but there is variation among communities as to

whether this role is one of ultimate authority or one of "tiebreaker" in the absence of consensus. In the model originated by The Word of God and the People of Praise, the general membership traditionally had input by solicitation from the coordinators in a "community consultation" about a specific major issue, but coordinators were not obliged to take these opinions into account. Coordinators were appointed by other coordinators, with the founders of each community remaining in authority insofar as they were the original coordinators. In the period following their divergence, the People of Praise instituted a modified form of election for its coordinators, described as midway between the community consultation and simple election. Nominations are solicited from full or "covenanted" members within each community subdivision. These members pick three people, from whom one is selected by the overall coordinator. The Word of God retained the older system of coordinator self-selection, adhering to the commonly heard dictum that "the Kingdom of God is not a democracy," or in the words attributed to Overall Coordinator Steven Clark, "Democracy is not a scriptural concept." In these communities the job of coordinator is a highly demanding full-time position. In the Community of God's Delight, by contrast, coordinators have jobs outside the community, which itself maintains only two full-time employees.

The exercise of prophecy is another key difference in the organization of authority among the communities. While all Charismatics recognize prophecy as one of the spiritual gifts or charisms, there is a significant difference both in the formal recognition of gifted individuals and in prophecy's authoritative role as directly inspired divine utterance. For some people, prophecy is an occasional and momentary gift; others are individually recognized as being gifted on a regular basis; some communities have an organized "word gifts" group composed of confirmed prophets who together "listen to the Lord" in order to "discern his word for the group." The Word of God developed prophecy into an institution, with the formal office of Prophet held by a man consecrated by the community as a specially gifted channel of divine communication to the community. He oversees not only a word gifts group within the community but also a translocal "prophet's guild" that originated in the early 1980s. The People of Praise has a word gifts group but no formal office of community prophet. The Community of God's Delight has no organized word gifts group, and the community elder who oversees this aspect of ritual life is charged not with prophesying but with "discerning" the prophecies of others who wish to share them in group settings.

All of the communities take prophecy quite seriously in that their leaders consider the meaning of prophetic messages in their deliberations concerning group life and publish certain of them in community newsletters. The structural differences, however, highlight the different degrees to which prophecy penetrates the various aspects of collective life as a medium of charismatic authority. Whether prophecies can be prepared in advance or are required to be spontaneous, whether there is a regular flow of prophetic inspiration from members to coordinators, whether prophecy is a feature of interpersonal as well as collective discourse, are related differences in practice deeply embedded in the habitus of each community. Again, we can here only point to these differences in preparation for a more thorough examination of one community, and again note that the institutionalization of prophecy as direct and authoritative communication from the deity is another dimension of tension between the Sword of the Spirit and those covenant communities intent on demonstrating their submission to the sole authority of the Catholic church.

I will briefly touch on four more specific differences in the organization of authority among the leading communities, including denominational structure, education of children, pastoral supervision of adults, and gender role prescriptions. First, The Word of God in 1979 created four "fellowships" internal to the community, partially collapsing denominational distinctions while maintaining differentiation among Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Free Church members.17   Meanwhile, all members oft he People of Praise and the Community of God's Delight remained simultaneously members of local parishes, in effect limiting the pastoral authority of their communities.

Second, all three communities have schools for their children, with differences reflecting the degree of world renunciation cultivated in community life. In both The Word of God and the People of Praise, classes are segregated by sex; during the 1980s students at The Word of God school were also required to walk on opposite sides of a yellow line that extended the length of the corridors. Both are oriented toward Charismatic Christian education, though they differ in the importance they place on inculcation of Charismatic values at an early age: The Word of God school includes grades 4 through 9 while the People of Praise teach grades 7 through 12. In addition, The Word of God school restricts enrollment to children of community members, whereas the People of Praise school is also open to noncommunity children. Likewise, The Word of God curriculum was relatively more "scripture oriented," whereas

the People of Praise included the thought of "worldly" thinkers such as Socrates, Mortimer Adler, and Jacques Maritain. The Community of God's Delight's preschool adopted the Montessori method, and its classes through grade 12 are run by a Catholic religious order, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.

Third, all three communities formalized the practice of headship or pastoral leadership, in which individual members are supervised in their daily lives by a person regarded as more "spiritually mature." From the perspective of most observers, this is one of the most controversial aspects of covenant community practice, for it has to do with the critical theme of relinquishing personal control ("submission to authority") as a requirement of commitment to a covenant. I will discuss headship at greater length in a subsequent chapter, and here note only that the People of Praise have appeared interested in portraying themselves as somewhat less authoritarian in this regard than their counterparts in The Word of God. Yet the difference between the two communities appears exceedingly subtle and was indeed described by them as similar to the difference between regional accents by speakers of the same language.18   The Community of God's Delight originally followed The Word of God model of headship but later instituted a substantial revision at the level of community coordinator. Concluding that authority over community activities should be distinct from authority over personal lives, a second coordinator was appointed for each geographic district within the community. One has responsibility for community activities such as "sharing groups," "service ministries," and collective gatherings; the other is devoted to pastoral care, with a reformulation of headship using the teachings of the Church on Catholic "spiritual direction."

Fourth, in all three communities the highest office that can be held by a woman is "handmaid," the responsibilities of which are to "teach women on womanly affairs, give advice, help in troubled situations," and lead specialized women's activities. The chief handmaid was always under the authority of a male coordinator in The Word of God; in the Community of God's Delight the handmaids meet with the group of coordinators once a month. Practices defining "men's and women's roles" in "scriptural" terms were of concern to both The Word of God and the People of Praise, though the latter regarded themselves as taking a more "flexible" position.19   Both communities hold that a man not only is head of the household but must also be the "spiritual head" or "pastoral leader" of his wife, while his own "head" is another man. Domestic division of labor along culturally "traditional" lines was explicitly

held to be an essential part of Christian life.20   The Community of God's Delight in principle professes more moderation, with male headship in the family residing in the role of tiebreaker in decisions between two otherwise equal spouses. Again, both The Word of God and the People of Praise prescribed gender-appropriate dress, prohibiting "androgyny" in clothing. Within The Word of God this principle led, for example, to public disapproval of community handmaids wearing slacks instead of dresses. Leaders of the People of Praise, on hearing of this practice in the mid-1980s, decided that their former partners were being overly rigid. Finally, the People of Praise claimed to encourage female higher education and employment, whereas The Word of God remained some-what ambivalent about these issues.

Although many of these differences among communities appear quite nuanced and even trivial, they are precise inscriptions in practice of what I will describe below as a rhetorical involution that determines the incremental radicalization of charisma and ritualization of life. The qualitative dimension of their differences in "vision" and "mission" can be summarized as a greater pessimism on the part of The Word of God about developments in the contemporary world, the Catholic church, and the Charismatic Renewal. The Word of God saw the Charismatic Renewal as ideally evolving into a tightly knit network of communities that could protect the weakened Church against impending hard times, basing their approach directly on Christian Scripture and literal interpretation of prophecies such as the Rome prophecies. On opting out of this vision, the People of Praise reformulated its approach to the surrounding world as a "Christian humanism" grounded in the Second Vatican Council's "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." In the words of one of their coordinators, they decided that the motivation for what they wanted to do had to be "love of God and neighbor" rather than the call to "gather the wagons in a circle." Whereas The Word of God mobilized to "stem the tide of evil" they discerned to be flowing over the earth, their former partners concluded that this was an "exaggeration."21

By the late 1980s, many adherents of the Rome prophecies in the Charismatic Renewal regarded most of its elements as already fulfilled, save for an impending "wave of evangelism such as the world has never known." Anticipating this wave of evangelism, some began to reconceive the threat to the Church not so much as from the outside as from inside: they warned of the possibility of collapse when, in its perceived weakened condition, the Church was flooded with the expected rush of

new converts. This retrenched position was not only less dramatic but also offered a wide range of potential explanations should the predicted wave of evangelism fail to materialize. For many it also made reintegration into Catholicism easier. Meanwhile, The Word of God and the Sword of the Spirit network of communities itself underwent schism, moving increasingly away from the center of the movement and, according to some critics, increasingly distant from the Catholic church. We will take up the story of this third split in the movement in Part Two.

The International Scene

Ethnographic and social science literature on the international expansion of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is sparse. In general, the literature on the movement in North America (see the preface above) tends to emphasize issues of community and personal religious experience, that on the movement in Latin America is slanted toward its role as a conservative political force in opposition to liberation theology, and that on Europe, Africa, and Asia highlights practices of ritual healing within the movement. What follows is a tour of those locales for which some documentation on the movement is available, beginning with distinct national and ethnic communities within the United States.

North America and Europe

In the United States, by 1992 the movement's National Service Committee included "ethnic representatives" for Filipino, Korean,22   and Portuguese Catholic Charismatics. Semiautonomous service committees had also been created for Hispanic and Haitian Charismatics. Here I will elaborate briefly only Hispanic participation in movement events, which was reported beginning in 1976 with the continental conference that included Spanish rsums and one Spanish-language workshop. Hispanic leaders in the United States met for the first time in 1977. In 1982 the movement's National Service Committee added a Hispanic member and allocated funds to support Missiones Hispanas, an arm of The Word of God community active both in Latin America and among domestic Hispanic groups. In 1988 Hispanic Charismatics from the United States were officially represented for the first time at the eleventh conference of Catholic Charismatic leaders from through-

out Latin America, and in 1991 a separate Hispanic National Service Committee was established with a structure parallel to the already extant committee.

Although the movement is developed among Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Hispanics, I will mention only the Puerto Rican case based on research I conducted in New England during the late 1980s.23   The movement was introduced to the island in 1971 by Redemptorist missionaries from the mainland, then reintroduced to the mainland by members of their community invited to stage a retreat at a Puerto Rican parish in Boston. One intent of my interviews was to elicit leaders' perceptions of differences between Puerto Rican and Anglo-American Charismatics with respect to healing (see Csordas 1994a). Two issues emerged. First, Charismatic leaders suggested that healing was more "liberating" for Puerto Ricans. This was in part because they reportedly experienced "deeper hurts" with respect to poor self-image as a result of colonial exploitation. They were also prone to exaggerated guilt and remordamiento (remorse) arising from intense moralism and to harboring emotional pain that turns to hatred when it is left unexpressed out of respect for parents. Finally, they were felt to bear an ingrained fear of the dark, of curses, and of spirits. Second, Puerto Rican Charismatics appeared to place greater emphasis on family and interpersonal relations. This was said to be evident in the practice of home visits by the healing team, in which neighbors and relatives were expressly included. It was also evident in the practice of "deliverance" from evil spirits insofar as the common afflicting spirits appeared to reflect cultural differences (for Anglos, spirits with an ego locus such as Depression, Bitterness, Resentment, Fear, Self-Destruction; for Puerto Ricans, spirits with an interpersonal locus such as Hatred, Disobedience, Envy, Respect, Slander, Criticism, Robbery, Violence, Rejection of God, Impurities, Masturbation, and Homosexuality). There also appeared to be a difference in the cultural understanding of why people are vulnerable to affliction by evil spirits: for Anglos, emotional trauma is often regarded as the developmental occasion in which the demon gains entre; for Puerto Ricans, trauma was acknowledged but not typically connected with evil spirits.

The latter difference may be accounted for by the fact that for Puerto Rican Charismatics the most prominent source of evil spirits is the competing religious practice of Espiritismo (see Garrison 1977; Harwood 1977; Koss-Chioino 1992). When Hispanic Charismatics say that the Renewal is "very effective against spirits," they tend to have in mind the spirits of the deceased encountered in spiritism, African spirits, curses,

and the evil eye. (Similarly, Haitian Charismatics often reinterpret the deities of voudou as demonic spirits.) My interviews suggested two general points: (1) Espiritismo is condemned as demonic deception insofar as an evil spirit is thought to be imitating the voice of a dead person, in that spiritist writings use Christian Scripture but admix folk belief and pagan ritual, and in that the devil has the power to heal as part of his repertoire of deceptive tactics; (2) Espiritismo is said to be characterized by negativity and is "not liberating" because it deals only with hate and revenge while also deceiving people and taking their money.

The movement has also in a limited way penetrated indigenous peoples such as the Navajo, where it began in the early 1970s in the Fort Defiance area and in the 1980s spread to the community of Tohatchi. One Charismatic healer, a Navajo nun, exemplifes the heteroglossia that renders notions such as syncretism obsolete in the postmodern condition of culture (see chapter 2 below). She regards herself as equally at home in traditional Navajo ritual, the practices of the Native American Church with its sacramental peyote, and in Christianity. Indeed, she planned to use the honorarium she received from our project to help finance a traditional Blessingway ceremony for herself, since her limited stipend as a religious sister made it difficult for her to afford the services of a medicine man. She identified fundamentalist Christian, Charismatic Christian, and New Age spiritualities as among those she could relate to. She was formally trained as a Catholic spiritual director at Loyola University and underwent a nine-month course in San Francisco related to the recovery movement and healing the inner child. She refers to traditional and Native American Church observance as part of her "prayer life," a term common among Charismatics. She also uses the same term, "prayer meetings," for both Native American Church and Charismatic services and defines the former as a spiritual way of life instead of as a church, so that like her Charismatic participation it does not conflict with her membership in the Catholic church.

Her account of becoming a healer is virtually identical to that of other Charismatics I have heard, with one symbolic and one ethnopsychological twist. She says that at a Charismatic conference three people asked her for healing prayer, which she politely obliged but which made her uncomfortable, so that she "disappeared." The next year at the conference seven people asked for prayer, and again she obliged but "disappeared" afterward. Then at another event she asked for a blessing from a Catholic Indian known for presenting an eagle feather to the pope. He

not only blessed her but also presented her with an eagle feather, which she at first protested she had not earned, but accepted as a responsibility on his insistence. At the next summer's conference she prayed for people who came steadily from ten o'clock in the evening until two o'clock in the morning. She now feels challenged to live a life of purification. Briefly, the ethnopsychological twist is the description of demurral from the calling as "disappearing," evocative of the Navajo tendency to self-effacement in certain social situations. The symbolic twist is the eagle feather as emblem of a Charismatic healing ministry. For this healer, the idea of "picking up the feather" leads to analogy between priest or healer and those traditional ceremonial clowns who in their capacity as protectors of ritual dancers must have a familiarity with evil, which she notes extends among the neighboring Pueblos to the point of acting out the perversities of the people.

Three studies document the movement in Quebec based on material from the 1970s (Reny and Rouleau 1978; Chagnon 1979; Zylberberg and Montminy 1980). They agree in dating the movement's advent to 1971, when one Father Regimbal returned from a Charismatic experience in Arizona to stage a retreat in the provincial town of Granby. Paul Reny and Jean Paul Rouleau (1978: 131132) observe a rapid growth from its inception to fifty prayer groups in 1973, four hundred by 1974, and seven hundred (with an estimated membership of 60,000) by 1977 (cf. the more conservative estimate of 301 prayer groups in 1975 and 550 by 1979 by Zylberberg and Montminy [1980]). Participants were predominantly middle-class women of "mature age," but notably in comparison with the United States nearly 25 percent of members were men and women in religious orders, especially nuns; Jacques Zylberberg and Jean-Paul Montminy (1980: 139) concur that there are two "hard-core" elements of adherents, one composed of lower-middle-class, middle-aged provincial women and another composed of clerics shifting from a sacerdotal to a prophetic mode of attaining ecclesiastical prestige.

Zylberberg and Montminy (1980) attempt to place the movement in macrosocial context in relation to the dynamic of state, capital, and religion in Quebec. In a society historically characterized by clerical domination and a provincial state, they identify the movement as an ostensibly apolitical attempt to break the stalemate between future-oriented Catholic social activists and tradition-oriented Catholic conservatives. While 70 percent of Charismatics voted in elections, only 12.4 percent

chose the nationalist Parti Quebecois , and only six percent reported participation in any overtly political group. The authors interpret the nationalists as representing a state nationalism and organizational modernism that are not merely rejected but are symbolically opaque for Charismatics, with an emphasis on French monolingualism symbolically contradicted by the universal spiritual language of speaking in tongues. This is the case even though within the movement itself certain frustrations experienced by francophone participants in a bilingual Canadian Charismatic conference in 1973 led them to stage a separate francophone conference the following year (Reny and Rouleau 1978: 131). Support for the Liberal political party is by default and habit, resulting in adherence to the status quo. The priest/anthropologist Roland Chagnon (1979: 101, 140) likewise understands the movement's social impact as a reinforcement and enlargement of the base of the social status quo in the face of both the broad cultural malaise of the 1960s and the specific social conditions of Catholicism in Quebec. These conditions include the erosion of the traditional view of life with its emphasis on religion and the clergy, rural life, and the importance of a simple communitarian life, all said to have resulted in a crisis of identity for many individuals.

Following Charles Glock and Rodney Stark (1965), Chagnon distinguishes among religious experience that is confirmative of the existence of God, that which is correlative insofar as it is a reciprocal sense of divine presence and divine attention to the person, that which is ecstatic and combines the preceding two types with enhanced intensity, and that which is revelational or mystical insofar as the deity makes the person a confidant in an atmosphere of emotional serenity. Sixteen of twenty cases Chagnon documents are of the correlative type, none is confirmative, one is ecstatic, and three are mystical, and he concludes that what is characteristic of Charismatic experience is an "affective encounter with God" (1979: 82), a displacement of the sacred from the figure of a severe and distant God to that of a "God of love" (1979: 84), and in contrast to an emphasis on world transformation a distinct penchant "to remake the self, to reconstitute it in profundity" (1979: 91).24   Finally, Chagnon summarizes Charismatic spirituality as characterized by the cultivation of the senses of interior peace and divine presence, affective encounter with both God and others, and participation in divine power through abandonment of the self to God (1979: 171178). The other commentators draw the consequences of this kind of spirituality: given both an experiential interior and a social interior constituted by the

prayer group and its relations to the ecclesiastical community, there is an attitude toward external society characterized by the goal of "enlargement of interiority until it encompasses the exterior" (Reny and Rouleau 1978: 130), or in which "the exterior world has to be absorbed by the interior world" (Zylberberg and Montminy 1980: 143).

All three accounts take pains to account for the movement's significance with the sociopolitical and culture historical specificity of Catholicism in Quebec, warning against too close homology with the movement in the United States. It may be that the role of the clergy and of middle-aged women (more likely only the former) has been greater in Quebec, and that the movement in Quebec was co-opted by the hierarchy and declining in rate of growth somewhat sooner than in the United States. Nevertheless, Reny and Rouleau's (1978) comparison of the Charismatics with Catholic left-wing social activists ("les socio-politiques") corresponds closely with McGuire's (1974) similar comparison in the United States. The apolitical orientation and the cultivation of an interiority that presumes social transformation will occur as a consequence of self-transformation are also similar to those observed in the United States (Fichter 1975; McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987).

Catholic Charismatics in France acknowledge borrowing the movement from the United States. At the same time they point out the anomaly that for the first time in history a movement within Catholicism has come to them from across the Atlantic, and suggest that to the extent that French Charismatics find their identity to be national and ecclesial, American influence declines (Hbrard 1987: 245). The date of origin can be traced to 1971 when two Catholics among two hundred Protestants attended the first interconfessional Charismatic convention sponsored by a Charismatic element of the Reformed Church, L'Union de Prire de Charmes. By the third such event in 1973 there were two hundred Catholics alongside two hundred Protestants, and after that Catholics became dominant, with a movement and momentum of their own. By 1974 covenant communities had formed at Lyons, Grenoble, Montpellier, Cordes (mostly university towns), and Paris and began sponsoring their own assemblies (Hbrard 1987: 283).

The diversity among French covenant communities parallels that in the United States, and I will mention only two of the most prominent. Emmanuel community began in 1972 among a group associated with a Catholic school of oratory in Paris, when a young couple just returned from the United States gave a powerful testimony about their experience with the Charismatic Renewal. In a year the group had grown from

five to five hundred and took Emmanuel as its name, and the first collective household began in 1974. In 1976 thirty members visited covenant communities in the United States and in 1977, formally became a covenant community themselves. In 1986 Emmanuel had three thousand members distributed throughout Paris and the provinces, six other European countries, and four African countries. The orienting theme of community activities is evangelization: at the core of their organization is the Fraternity of Jesus, a missionary group comprising both lay and religious, and to which one must be initiated in order to take a leadership position in the community. Their outreach extends to multiple segments of the population, and like The Word of God in the United States they are a media force, publishing the periodicals Il Est Vivant and Psychologie et Foi and operating a book and tape distribution service. As of 1986, a community-based foundation for international spiritual, social, and economic aid (FIDESCO) was functioning in seventeen dioceses in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (Hbrard 1987: 5770). As a conservative force favored by the Church hierarchy Emmanuel was recognized in 1986 as a Private Association of the Faithful by the French Cardinal Lustiger. In 1990 it became a foundation member, along with the Community of God's Delight of Dallas, U.S.A., and the Emmanuel Covenant Community of Brisbane, Australia, of the new Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. In 1992 Emmanuel community was recognized as a Universal Association of the Faithful of the Pontifical Rite by the Vatican.

The Lion of Judah and Sacrificial Lamb was founded at the tourist town of Cordes-sur-Ciel and exemplifies the postmodern melding of cultural genres. It is based at a monastery but in a tourist town, its members pursue professional careers but adopt a contemplative Carmelite spirituality, it emphasizes chastity while including married couples and their children, and it was founded by Protestants but is now thoroughly Catholicwith the addition of Hebrew Sabbath observances. Like the French Emmanuel community and the American Sword of the Spirit, it has spread its branches well beyond its origin, into twenty-five French dioceses and seventeen foreign countries. In 1991 the community changed its name to Community of the Beatitudes on the grounds that the Lion of Judah was an unacceptable symbol in some of the countries in which its members have moved. The community is particularly renowned for its healing ministry, based at its Chteau Saint Luc staffed by sixteen residents, its clinic staffed by physicians and

psychologists who "discern" as well as diagnose their patients, a group charged with visiting the sick, and the group Mre de Misricorde that takes in women who have had or who have contemplated having abortions (see Csordas 1996). Their yearly gatherings held since 1983 produce videotapes of notable healings, and in 1987 the community organized a widely popular pilgrimage to Lourdes. At Saturday public healing services during retreats, participants regularly "rest in the spirit" (Hbrard 1987: 7191).

The core of healing practice is "psychospiritual accompaniment," in effect two weeks of around-the-clock attention that allows, claim its practitioners, such innovations as decreasing a patient's dosage of neuroleptic medication to a minimum. Giordana Charuty (1987) has produced a vivid description of Charismatic healing in France and Italy that conforms in most respects to its practice in the United States (see Csordas 1983, 1988, 1990b, 1994a; McGuire 1982, 1983, 1988). She identifies the "healing of memories" as the guarantor of transformation in psychospiritual accompaniment. Community healers and therapists for whom Carl Rogers and Carl Jung are de rigueur also practice the revelatory charisms of prophecy, discernment, and word of knowledge, all the while condemning practices such as yoga and transcendental meditation as demonic. Charuty quite rightly identifies the therapeutic of a triple anamnesis: psychological through review of biographical memory, initiative through recovery of the emotional fundamentals of early religious experiences, and mythic through directing the person into the imaginal realm of early Christianity. In language directly relevant to what I will refer to below as religions of the self, she points to the centrality of"symbolic manipulations put in place to produce an acculturation to Christianity anchored in exaltation and the socialization of individual unhappiness" ( 1987: 463).25

The Charismatic Renewal was introduced to Italy by foreigners in 1971. Here as in France, growth of the movement was reported to be dramatic following its first international conference in Rome in 1975. By the time of the first national leaders' conference in 1977, the movement had an estimated active membership of seven thousand throughout the country. The second national conference was held in 1979 at Rimini, as a challenge to present "Christian witness in an almost entirely Marxist environment" (ICO Newsletter , MayJune 1979). The pope addressed gatherings of an estimated fifteen thousand Italian Charismatics in 1980 and again in 1986, and by 1988 the eleventh national conference at Rimini drew an estimated forty thousand participants. Enzo

Pace (1978) describes the movement in the region of Veneto as having two distinct manifestations: the Rinnovamento nello Spirito, or Spiritual Renewal, affiliated with the international Charismatic Renewal, which was initiated locally at Padua in 1972 and which is composed of both prayer groups and communities; and the Charismatic movement founded in Italy in 1967 by Franca Cornado, which was introduced into Veneto in the 1970s and whose adherents are primarily conservative elderly and middle-aged persons oriented toward the experience and documentation of manifestations of spiritual charisms. The latter is more explicitly politically conservative and pre-Vatican in its Catholic orientation; the former distinguishes itself from the political sphere by emphasizing the spiritual values of quotidian life, personal relations, and community, rejecting the close link between the "personal" and the "political" favored by left-leaning social activists.26

Discussion of the movement in Europe would not be complete without reference to what was perhaps the most prominent religious event of the last two decades, the apparition in 1981 of the Virgin Mary to several children in the Croatian village of Medjugorje. Quickly approaching the stature of Fatima, Lourdes, and Guadalupe, Medjugorje attracted an estimated ten million Catholic pilgrims by 1986 (Bax 1987: 29). Although the role of the Franciscans has been noted in transforming Medjugorje into a prominent site of pilgrimage and spiritual tourism (Bax 1990; Vukonic 1992)to the point where some cynics reportedly began to refer to the apparition as "Our Lady of Foreign Currency"the importance of Charismatics is less well known. During my research in the 1980s one prominent New England healer suspended her ministry to lead groups of pilgrims to the site. Worldwide pilgrimage coordination was based at the Franciscan College of Steubenville in Ohio, which is the Charismatic institution of higher learning under the presidency of Fr. Michael Scanlon, a prominent movement leader. It is probably safe to say that had the Charismatics not been primed for an episode of world reenchantment of this sort, the global phenomenon at Medjugorje would likely not have blossomed.

South America, Africa, and Asia

Evidence suggests that the typical pattern for the movement's introduction in a third world region is as follows: a missionary priest visits the United States, is exposed to Baptism of the Holy Spirit, organizes a prayer group on his return, and subsequently calls on out-

side help for doctrinal instruction, healing services, or administration of the Life in the Spirit Seminar (a widespread initiation rite that provides both indoctrination and a controlled setting for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit). In some cases, such as that documented by Johannes Fabian (1991) in Zaire, there may be a preexisting network of non-Charismatic prayer groups that is subsequently co-opted into the international movement. Perhaps a dozen major figures regularly make excursions to movement outposts (non-Catholic evangelists are sometimes called on). There is an apparent tendency for groups to maintain relations with the individual or group responsible for initial instruction and organizational assistance. Such relations of moral dependency may be more than superficially analogous to those in the political-economic sphere between a "metropole" in a dominant region and specific locales in a dependent "periphery." However, regional integration on a continental basis has been ongoing for some time, in Latin America since the early 1970s through the Encuentros Carismatico Catolico Latino Americano (ECCLA), in Asia beginning with the 1980 Asian Leaders' Conference that attracted representatives from fifteen countries, and in Africa with the Pan-African Congress first held at the end of the 1980s and planned to take place every four years since 1992.

In Mexico the initiation of Catholic Pentecostalism is attributed to the American Missionaries of the Holy Spirit. In 1971 Mexico City had one prayer group of forty members; by 1975 it was estimated that more than ten thousand Mexicans had become involved in the movement. As described by a Charismatic priest (Talavera 1976), a Mexico City group based at the Archdiocesan Social Secretariat began the first move to incorporate the "very poor" in Ciudad del Lago, a squatter settlement adjacent to the city's airport. Population growth in this area had been extremely rapid: from 1960 to 1970 the municipality directly east of the airport grew from sixty thousand to six hundred thousand (Cornelius 1973). The Social Secretariat group established a satellite prayer group at Ciudad del Lago in 1972, two years after the settlement appeared, with a resident factory worker as leader.

The Pentecostal experience was credited with significant motivational change in members of both parent and satellite groups. The middle-class organizers began to conceive their task as "conversion to Christ" instead of as "concern for the poor." By the priest's account, squatters began to abandon an individualistic materialism that emulates the middle class for an increasing communitarianism and pride of status. The new group developed communal patterns of authority and decision

making and established patterns of labor exchange. A women's group began to knit and sell clothing as the basis for a common fund for emergencies, loans to needy members, and wholesale group food purchasing. Families took turns preparing a communal Sunday meal.

In addition to their emphasis on conversion, the middle-class group provided legal advice, architectural planning, and financing, which assisted the squatters in gaining legal title to land in Ciudad del Lago. They proposed to build individual family dwellings but decided against individual ownership of lots. The combination of religious motivation and middle-class patronage also affected the squatters' attitudes toward civil authority. Whenever police came to search for illegal building materials, or lawyers came talking of eviction, the people began to greet them with hospitality instead of anger and fear. Whereas their communications with authorities had been characterized by submission and flattery, they began to demand recognition as rights-beating citizens. The prayer group successfully resisted a government resettlement plan that would have separated its members in different quarters of the city (Talavera 1976).

A similar situation arose among squatters near the municipal dump in the border city of Juarez, which by 1969 had a total of thirty-eight squatter settlements (Ugalde 1974). Several local social workers were converted to Catholic Pentecostalism and in 1972 established liaisons with a middle-class Catholic Pentecostal group across the border in El Paso, Texas, which was interested in helping "the poorest people they knew." Working together, they facilitated reconciliation between two factions of peperiadores (scavengers) at the dump, who subsequently organized their trash industry into a profit-sharing cooperative. Following a 1975 crisis in which the dump manager refused to pay for sorted and collected trash, the governor ceded the dump's management and income to its residents. Critical to this enterprise was assistance from middle-class Charismatics in the form of administrative work, identification of markets, and research on importation procedures (Talavera 1976).

In Chile, Catholic Pentecostalism was introduced in 1972 by Maryknoll and Holy Cross missionaries from the United States. Movement sources report that middle-class groups account for about a third of the total number of prayer groups and two-thirds of the groups are located in poor neighborhoods. Although specific data are not available, it may be surmised that similar liaisons have developed between Charismatics across class lines. A movement leader (Aldunate 1975) describes a

Charismatic retreat among the Mapuche Indians of Chile that was organized on the analogy of the traditional Mapuche fertility rite, or nillatun (Faron 1964). The retreat included participation of the female ritual specialist, or machi , whose traditional function includes dispersion of evil spirits, healing, and the utterance of unintelligible inspired messages, functions that directly correspond to Pentecostal deliverance, faith healing, and prophecy in tongues. Indeed, Protestant Pentecostal congregations in this region feature female prophets who speak in tongues and healers (Lalive d'Epinay 1969: 200203), but within a ritual organization that is separate and exclusive while remaining formally analogous to the indigenous model. Catholic Pentecostalism in this instance assimilates the indigenous model directly, converting Mapuche culture as well as Mapuches themselves and thus creating a single ritual totality, a single horizon of possibilities for sacred reality (see Csordas 1980b).

In Brazil, Catholic Pentecostalism is described by Pedro A. Ribeiro de Oliveira (1978) as found almost exclusively among the middle and upper middle classes, "gens des couches aises." Certainly the topography of religious participation in Brazil is complicated by the diversity of options, including Afro-Brazilian and spiritualist groups. If Ribeiro de Oliveira's report is correct, however, Brazilian Charismatics come from a generally higher-class background, with greater prior involvement in Catholic organizations. To a degree much greater even than in the United States, they may be wary of the "lower-class" associations of faith healing practices and threatened by the powerful presence of Protestant Pentecostalism as a religious option. Such insularity appears atypical in Latin America, and it is likely that the survey method overlooked the kind of liaisons with the disenfranchised undertaken by the Brazilian Catholic Pentecostal community Esperana e Vida in the rehabilitation of drug addicts (ICCRO 1987). By 1992 the movement's international office reported two million Catholic Charismatics in Brazil (for additional discussion of the movement in Latin America, see Csordas 1980, 1992).

The origin and context of Charismatic Christianity in Nigeria is discussed by Matthews A. Ojo (1988), who observes that the movement originated in the early 1970s among college students and university graduates of various denominations. As in many third world settings a primary emphasis is divine healing, but in addition there is much attention to restitution "for one's past sins, mistakes, and every sort of unchristian act" (1988: 184), reflecting aspects of the traditional Yoruba concern for purification. Restitution often takes the form of returning

stolen articles, which Ojo interprets as a reaction against the quest for material wealth following the Nigerian oil boom of the 1970s, and which is being duplicated during the mid-1990s among students at American Christian colleges in a wave of public confessionals quite likely in reaction against the quest for wealth during the "yuppie me generation" of the 1980s (Associated Press 1995). Restitution applied to marriage assumes the greed of a polygynous man who makes amends by divorcing all but his first wife (Ojo 1988: 184185).

Among Catholics, by 1976 the movement's first national leadership conference in Benin City attracted 110 participants with official support from the local bishop. In 1983 the National Advisory Council was formed to oversee movement activities. Francis MacNutt, the first and most widely known among American Catholic Charismatic healers, recounts a Charismatic retreat in Nigeria in which traditional deities were cast out or "delivered" as occult spirits, including the following case of a man in Benin City:

An outstanding Catholic Layman, he was a convert who had been brought up in the old religion. He discovered as a child that after certain practices of dedication his toes were affected by a divining spirit. If the day of his plans were to be propitious, one toe would pinch him; if they were to be unlucky, a different toe would pinch. Consequently, he came to plan his life around these omens, which he said always came true, even if he tried to disregard them. When he desired to pray out loud at our retreat, however, his unpropitious toe began to act up; at this point, he decided that these strange manifestations must be from an evil spirit and had to be renounced. (MacNutt 1975: 9)

This incident is a variant of the time-honored Catholic strategy of ritual incorporation of indigenous practices based on acceptance of their existential reality but negation of their spiritual value, condemning them as inspired by the demonic forces of Satan.

This pattern recurs in especially vivid form in Zambia. Here the movement had two beginnings: one in the early 1970s led by Irish missionary priests (ter Haar 1987) and one in 1976 led by Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Lusaka, who in that year established a relationship with The Word of God community and founded his own Divine Providence community, after having quite independently begun to practice faith healing in 1973 (Milingo 1984). In 1979 the archbishop was a prominent participant in a Charismatic pilgrimage to Lourdes. By the early 1980s there was irreconcilable tension between the missionary-led and Milingo wings of the movement, with the latter prevailing and the archbishop being recalled to Rome in 1983.

The archbishop's case is remarkable for two reasons. First, it shows a simultaneous "indigenization" of Charismatic ritual healing and a "Charismatization" of a distinctly African form of Christian healing. As described in his own writings, Milingo's (1984) services included typical elements of Charismatic ritual such as resting in the Spirit, speaking in tongues, naming evil spirits after problematic emotions or behaviors, calling out evil spirits to identify them, recognizing problems caused by ancestral spirits, calling on angels and saints for spiritual protection, anointing of supplicants by lay assistants, and in general a distinction among three types of healing termed physical healing, inner healing, and deliverance. However, within his cultural context God took on material as well as paternal features, and Jesus was reinterpreted as an intercessor of a kind similar to traditional ancestors except in that rather than an ancestor for a single family he was a universal ancestor for all. Moreover, Milingo distinctly recognized and addressed his practice to mashawe , a form of spirit affliction recognized in the traditional cultures of Zambia. He made a critical distinction between orderly, intentional liturgical dances appealing to ancestral spirits for protection and disorderly, spirit-controlled dances in what he called the satanically inspired "Church of the Spirits" (Milingo 1984: 3233). As in traditional culture, but also like many other Catholic Charismatics, he acknowledged that family ancestors could cause affliction, but he also recognized evil spirits that sometimes "take noble names, such as those of famous men. . . . Thus they want to be honored" (1984:119). Finally, he distinguished between witches, figures from traditional culture who he defined as having given themselves over completely to Satan, and the possessed, who retain sufficient free will to seek help for their condition. To date, this sketchy outline is as far as ethnological scholarship can go in documenting the adaptation and transformation of the Charismatic healing system to a culture different from the Euro-American one in which it originated.

The second remarkable feature of Milingo's case is that within a decade his healing ministry had created such controversy that he was recalled to Rome.27   There he was detained and interrogated. In a deal with the Vatican, he eventually relinquished his ecclesiastical post, in return for which he was granted an appointment as special delegate to the Pontifical Commission for Migration and Tourism, with the freedom to travel (except to Zambia), and was reassured by the pope that his healing ministry would be "safeguarded" (Milingo 1984: 137). Gerrie ter Haar (1987) plausibly suggests that three lines of political cleavage

converged to determine this event. First was the cleavage between Milingo and Rome over the extent and legitimacy of the Africanization of Catholicism. Second was that between Milingo as a popular and charismatic figure and the other Zambian bishops as a bloc representing the ecclesiastical status quo. Third was the cleavage between the missionaryled wing of the Zambian Charismatic Renewal whose approach revolved around prayer groups and cultivation of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and Milingo's version of the Renewal oriented toward healing in large events, personal encounters, or communal settings. Ironically, given that the overt goal of his recall was in part to protect Zambian Catholics from what must have appeared to Church officials as a kind of neopaganism, Milingo has subsequently become immensely popular as a healer among Italian Charismatics (Rev. Kenneth Metz, pers. comm.). With established followings in ten Italian cities, and already a figure on national television, in 1987 he moved his public healing service from the church of Argentini of Rome to a large room in the Ergife Hotel. Once again in 1989 his controversial ministry was temporarily suspended by the Church and later renewed outside Rome in Velletri (Lanternari 1994). He moved to a new diocese yet again in the early 1990s, and in 1994 the bishop's conference in Tuscany issued a pastoral note on demonology and witchcraft quite likely targeted at Milingo's ministry.

Vittorio Lanternari has written on the Italian adventure of Milingo since 1983. He describes the effect as a "religious short-circuit" between Africa and Europe, and in a surprisingly postmodern image, as the replacement of metaphysical mythology by science fiction mythology (1987, 1994). Lanternari is intent, however, on demonstrating the African provenance of many of Milingo's ideas on witchcraft and sorcery and its homology with folk Italian notions about witchcraft, sorcery, evil eye, and occult powers (see also Charuty 1987: 454), rather than the way it articulates with the Charismatic Renewal. He also makes the observation that devotees in both Rome and Lusaka share the same behavioral manifestations of demonic crisis but attributes this directly to what he describes as Milingo's techniques of instigating then calming these crises by evoking emotional contagion and dependency. Even if relevant, such contagion is no more unique to African Charismatic prophets than to American Protestant Charismatic healers from Derek Prince and Don Basham in the 1960s to John Wimber in the 1980s. (At the same time Lanternari appears to acknowledge that some of the similarity may be due to social milieus that in either the Italian or the African setting

create "the sense of bewilderment and impotence in confrontations with common disorder.") Again, what Lanternari refers to as the indiscriminate intertwining of exorcistic and medical-charismatic models of healing may be no more than recognition of the Catholic Charismatic genres of deliverance and physical healing (Csordas 1994a). A generally negative attitude is revealed in the author's accusation that patients in crisis are mocked with such statements as "These are not human beings," which a more generous critic might interpret as referring to the afflicting demons rather than the afflicted persons. However, what in the end Lanternari describes as most typically African is perhaps also most typically postmodern: linking illness not with the more (or biological) but with the domain of impurity, danger, contamination, and pollution. For in then looping back to link illness and evil through multiple entities like Satan, witches, malign spirits, vices, and disgraceful behavior, Archbishop Milingo contributes to a decentering of meaning that cannot but take place in a global movement whose key symbol is, after all, the verbal multiplicity of speaking in tongues.

For Zaire, Fabian (1991, 1994) has discussed the Charismatic Renewal's existence in an urban milieu alongside the Catholic Jamaa movement, the African Bapostolo movement, and traditional African mediumship. On Fabian's account, prayer groups in Lubumbashi appear to have been founded by several local women around 1973. These women in turn cultivated the involvement of several indigenous Catholic clergymen in the role of healer. Only subsequently, largely through the policy of the local archbishop, did these groups come under the influence of the international movement represented by several Jesuit missionary priests and by visits from internationally known figures including ( probably in the mid-1970s) Archbishop Milingo from Zambia.

Roughly similar to the distinction noted above for Italy and Zambia, Fabian observes two loosely related types of groups, designating them as charismatiques and renouveau . The former draw membership from both the middle class and the working poor and are organized into prayer groups based on exercise of the Pentecostal charisms by a core group assembled around a principal leader, with a wider circle of participants who seek to benefit from the charisms around them. The latter consist largely of young, educated adults, are not organized around a single leader, and tend to deemphasize use of the charisms while making group prayer their principal activity. Healers typically take seriously traditional problems caused by sorcery (fetichisme ), the use of magical

objects for protection (dawa , or bwanga ), and spirit affliction (bulozi ), though preoccupation with spirit possession and witchcraft appears to be greatest in groups with only indirect connections to the international movement. Occasionally politically powerful individuals resort to the Charismatics to escape the escalating necessity of invoking increasingly powerful and dangerous traditional means of spiritual protection. In spirit affliction, the causal agents often appear not to be demonic spirits but those of persons, living or dead and frequently relatives of the afflicted, who are identified and name themselves through the voice of the patient.

Fabian notes several intriguing links between the Jamaa and the Charismatic Renewal. Like Milingo later in Zambia, the Belgian founder of the Jamaa, Fr. Placide Tempels, was recalled from Africa in part for his indigenizing moves, but quite notably had as a protector the Belgian Cardinal Suenens who later emerged as the highest-ranking Church official within the Charismatic Renewal. However, Tempels consistently suppressed Pentecostal manifestations such as glossolalia that probably occurred under the influence of the contemporaneous Protestant Pentecostal Bapostolo movement. Nevertheless, by the 1970s the new Charismatic groups were drawing their leaders and followers from among the ranks of the Jamaa, resulting in the melding of Jamaa ideas and modes of discursive practice with those of the Charismatics. Fabian contrasts the optimism, humanism, and universalism of the early Jamaa with the inward-looking ritualization of personal problems and interpersonal relations characteristic of Charismatics. Along with this, he draws a contrast between the language-centeredness of Jamaa with respect to its oral initiatory practices and the Zairean Charismatics' emphasis on inspired reading of Scripture and their relatively elaborated ritualization of practice. As a note for comparative research, language-centeredness was also characteristic of Catholic Charismatics in the United States at least through the 1970s (Csordas 1987, 1996), but with relatively less emphasis on teaching than on prophecy, a genre of ritual language that from Fabian's account appears to be little elaborated among contemporary Charismatics in Zaire.

Fabian suggests that a feature of social differentiation between the two movements may be that whereas the Jamaa promotes and even requires that its members be married couples, Charismatic groups do not prohibit participation by unmarried youth, adolescents, and divorced people. A second feature is that whereas the followers of Placide Tempels

were predominantly workers, the Charismatic Renewal strongly appeals to the growing professional class. This is in part related to what Fabian sees as a general embourgeoisement of Zairean society, but must be seen in the context of the postmodern condition in its Zairean manifestation. For what finally strikes one in Fabian's account is the current state of diversification within Jamaa, the overall proliferation of religious alternatives in the cultural milieu, and the dispersal of charismatic (in the Weberian sense) authority through society. Moreover, access to power is enacted in terms of ingesting and incorporating powerful substances rather than by occupying a territory or imposing order, such that "power is here tied to concrete embodiments rather than to abstract structures" (Fabian 1994: 271). Fabian suggests that this "expresses a cultural preference for a kind of anarchy . . . that encourage[s] the ardent pursuit of power, as well as the proliferation of its embodiments" (1994: 272). In line with the analysis I am developing here, this preexisting local cultural preference takes on particular significance as it is highlighted or comes to the fore in the context of the global hypertrophy of semiosis characteristic of the postmodern condition.

Crossing now to Asia, the Charismatic movement was introduced to Indonesia by Protestants. Indeed, an inspirational book popular among American Catholic Charismatics in the early 1970s was Like a Mighty Wind by the Indonesian Protestant neo-Pentecostal Mel Tari. As of 1976 it was still reported that Jakarta prayer groups tended to be half Catholic, an ecumenical mix common in the Midwest of North America but apparently in few other regions. It was said that the movement had made such an impact among Christians in Indonesia that the principal distinction was no longer between Protestants and Catholics but between "those who clap in Church and those who don't," referring to the ebullient style of Charismatic worship (Shelly Errington, pers. comm.).

According to S. E. Ackerman (1981), in neighboring Malaysia the Renewal began in the early 1970s through the activities of a French missionary priest who had become involved in the movement and began to exercise charismatic healing in conjunction with his official status as a diocesan exorcist in Kuala Lumpur. His lay assistant exorcists were active in establishing other Charismatic groups and stimulating growth of the Renewal in the area. Ackerman describes Catholic Pentecostalism in Malaysia as an idiom of spiritual power that replaces those used by traditional mediums and folk healers as a means for dealing with evil spirits

and other supernatural forces while at the same time being "derived from concepts of power embedded in popular supernaturalism" (1981: 94). Ackerman describes the experience of an individual who, following episodes of hallucination and uncontrollable violence that he attributed to the effects of sorcery, sought treatment from a bomoh (shaman). Having experienced a cure the man began a process of initiation as a shaman himself, only to reject the opportunity in exchange for a parallel role in the "deliverance ministry" among Catholic Charismatics on the grounds that as a traditional practitioner he would be feared and loathed while as a Charismatic healer he would be respected. Ackerman describes spirit possession cases as exceedingly frequent among Malaysian Charismatics, requiring a great deal of lay assistance that innovatively provides opportunities for lay leadership, thus redefining the relationship between laity and clergy. However, there are indications in Ackcrman's account that the surge of popularity of deliverance declined somewhat when ministers backed off from an overwhelming demand, and it would be worth investigating whether this corresponds to the surge and decline of deliverance in the United States at roughly the same period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1992 the movement's national convention, with the local archbishop in attendance, attracted over two thousand participants from Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore, and a covenant community called Light of God was active in the Malaysian city of Taiping.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in Japan in 1972 when Canadian missionaries at a Tokyo parish began a prayer group following a Holy Spirit Seminar conducted by a visiting ecumenical team from Canada and the United States. Members of this group played a large role in spreading the movement. In 1975 the first national leadership conference was held, with roughly half of the participants missionaries from French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking countries. By 1995 there were some seventy-five prayer groups from Hokkaido to Okinawa with a total participation of approximately one thousand (Mathy 1992). Ikegami Yoshimasa (1993), writing on a Protestant Charismatic church in Okinawa, emphasizes both the continuity and competition between them and traditional yuta (shamans) with respect to exorcism of demonic spirits. He suggests that although in comparison to the rationalizing and promodern "new religions" of the 1950s and 1960s the Charismatics count among the magical-spiritualistic "new new religions" that participate in the reenchantment of the world, in comparison to

traditional shamanism they favor an individualism compatible with modern society rather than the yuta's fatalistic orientation toward life. Further research could examine whether this relation holds among Catholic Charismatics in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan.

Conclusion

Our global survey of the Charismatic Renewal is only a glimpse at the scope and diversity of the movement. Certainly the phenomenon offers a rare opportunity for ethnological analysis, for although there have been attempts to compare different religious movements or different forms of ritual healing, there has never been a comparison of cultural variants of what is ostensibly the same movement or form of healing on a scale more manageable than that, say, of a comparison between "European Catholicism" and "African Catholicism." In this respect the current chapter stands as the barest of outlines and an exhortation to comparative research.

The survey also allows us, or more accurately requires us, to identify multiple dimensions of social analysis relevant to the course of the movement's development across different national and cultural contexts. Within the movement these dimensions sketch the analytic space between radical and moderate visions of community, between parochial and covenant community standpoints, between emphasis on mass manifestations of healing charisms and on collective prayer and worship, between the routinization of charisma and the continued impetus for charismatic renewal. Within the Catholic church they sketch the space between Charismatics and movements espousing social activism, between laity and clergy, between movement and hierarchy. In society at large they outline interaction between the movement as an element of Christian neoconservatism and trends of secular society and culture, between microsocial and macrosocial analysis with respect to interpersonal interaction and institutional constraint, between personal and political with respect to issues of power and experience, between local and global with respect to cultural process and relations of dependency, between premodern and postmodern with respect to the structure of meaning and authority.

Certainly the tensions, dynamics, and consequences within each of

these dimensions could be drawn out in greater detail and analyzed as symptomatic of the contemporary condition of culture. For economy of argument, however, I will collapse these issues into a single question. In this respect the global survey will constitute the backdrop against which, in the next chapter, we will consider the empirical and theoretical consequences of what it means to characterize the Charismatic Renewal in its local and global manifestations as a "movement" in the postmodern condition of culture.

Excerpted from Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement by Thomas J. Csordas Copyright 1997 by Thomas J. Csordas. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.