Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Kennedy Hall on the Charismatic Movement

See his recent YouTube presentation on the subject. Share it with people you know in or potentially in the Catholic Charismatic Movement. It started with religious liberals, two Catholic lay people,  a husband and wife, he a college professor, attending a Pentecostal prayer group in the 1960’s, during the revolution in both Church and society.  They wrote a book called CATHOLIC PENTECOSTALS, about how, in their opinion, someone can be both a Catholic and Pentecostal. 

Their idea of Catholics engaging in very emotion-based prayer experiences in a group setting, to find healing and peace, caught fire and spread across the US through Catholic colleges.  The spiritual teaching is fundamentally not Catholic, but Protestant, specifically Pentecostal, which began with the Protestant Holiness faith healing movement, rooted in the heresy of the Albigensians of the 13th century who created a ceremony of spiritual blessing akin to a second baptism, as well as Gnosticism which claims special, secret knowledge and spiritual experiences for those initiated into the inner circle.  

With charismatics, you join a prayer group, receive the laying on of hands of lay people neither ordained nor having any authority to do so, and then receive the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.”  This is heresy because there is no second baptism after the sacrament of baptism.  It creates a new, special version of Christianity apart from that established in the Catholic Church founded by Christ.  There are already traditional prayers to the Holy Ghost, and prayers for healing.  The implication is you seriously lack the spirit of Christ and a relationship with Christ unless you become essentially charismatic. This is exactly the attitude Evangelicals often take towards Catholics, themselves heavily influenced by this heretical movement. 

I attended Mass once at charismatic Franciscan University, epicenter of the Catholic Charismatic Movement,  and the behaviors were bizzare.  Another occasion at my local cathedral, a lay woman Italian “mystic healer” led a charismatic healing service from the sanctuary walking around it preaching.  She laid hands on people for healing.  As a young man, I was gullible and stood at the bottom of the sanctuary steps and let her lay hands on me, and like every other person in line, I idiotically let myself fall backward.  It was not an authentic movement of the Holy Ghost.  It was groupthink and mind control. It was a good thing they had people to catch me.