Feeling the Spirit : 2,000 Charismatic Catholics Gather to Seek Prayer’s Healing Power

They praised God with the unintelligible sounds known as speaking in tongues and heard three women convey the Almighty’s blessings on the largest-ever gathering of charismatic Catholics in the San Fernando Valley.

“This day I have sent forth my spirit to descend on each one of you,” said one of the women, speaking as if she were relaying a message from God to the 1,400 worshipers packed into St. Catherine of Siena Church in Reseda on Monday night. Another 600 late arrivals attended a simultaneous Mass in the social hall.

“Listen, my children, for you are no longer children,” continued the woman. “I have made you prophets and healers.”

Worshipers placed their hands on neighbors in the pews who believed prayer would heal their physical, mental or spiritual problems, listed successively by Father Charles Lueras, a parish priest from Silver Lake who led that portion of the service.

The term charismatic has generally been applied to mainstream Christians, Protestant and Catholic, who adopted Pentecostal beliefs of being filled by the Holy Spirit and receiving supernatural gifts such as speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy and spiritual wisdom.

No claim of miraculous healing emerged in Reseda, but the size of the crowd demonstrated that the charismatic movement, now 25 years old in the Los Angeles archdiocese, remains an energizing spiritual force in local parishes while enjoying continued approval by the Catholic hierarchy.

Not that U.S. bishops are comfortable with every aspect of the movement, especially flamboyant displays of “spiritual gifts”--such as speaking in tongues and laying on hands to heal--sometimes seen in Pentecostal churches, according to one longtime member of the Catholic charismatic movement.

“Most of the bishops’ statements tend to praise the charismatic renewal for all the safe things--the effects on prayer life, new interest in Bible study--and back off when it comes to prophecy and healing,” said Gabriel Meyer, associate editor of the National Catholic Register, published in Encino.

“Of course, the very thing that attracts people to the renewal is praying in tongues, healing and prophecy,” said Meyer, who in 1972 founded the Southern California Renewal Communities (SCRC), an independent Catholic charismatic organization with offices in Redondo Beach.

There are 14 parish-based charismatic prayer groups in the Valley and Glendale.

“This was the first time that most of them jointly organized and publicized a healing service,” said Ken Elsey of Sylmar, the Valley coordinator for SCRC, referring to the Reseda service.

“The feedback I’ve had is, ‘When can we do this again?’ ” Elsey said.

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The SCRC operates the largest annual Catholic charismatic convention in North America, complete with workshops and healing services.

More than 13,000 Catholics are expected to attend the 24th annual SCRC Catholic Renewal Convention, to be held Sept. 1-3 in Anaheim, said Dominic Berardino, SCRC president. Indicative of the archdiocese’s open but cautious backing, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles will preside at the closing Mass in the Anaheim Convention Center.

“We grew rapidly in attendance from between 6,000 and 8,000 in the 1980s to a peak of 15,000 in 1992,” Berardino said. After attendance slipped during the last two years, the conference’s preregistration figure is higher this year, he said. “People come from other states and even other countries,” he said.

Worldwide, at least 25 million Catholics are estimated to have been involved in the charismatic movement at some time, the biggest growth occurring in Third World countries, Berardino said.

The charismatic movement is usually dated from 1959 when the rector and some lay members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys declared they were exercising Pentecostal spiritual gifts, stirring disputes over whether these were authentic Christian phenomena. Other charismatic believers began to surface in Presbyterian, Lutheran and Methodist churches, often leading to resignations and church splits.

The Catholic charismatic movement first appeared in Midwestern cities in the late 1960s. Catholic charismatic prayer groups got rolling in the Los Angeles archdiocese on the Loyola University campus in 1970.

Then-Archbishop Timothy Manning of Los Angeles raised questions about the activity. But, according to SCRC founder Meyer, Manning was assured that the movement would stay within the boundaries of Catholicism when a trusted Jesuit friend, Father Ralph Tichenor, led the movement from the Loyola campus gatherings into individual parishes.

“At that time,” Meyer said, “the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, Melodyland Christian Center [in Anaheim] and [faith healer] Kathryn Kuhlman were siphoning off a lot of Catholics. So, there was a concern to put the Catholic charismatic movement under local pastors.”

The Catholic charismatic movement got a clear sign of legitimacy in 1975 when Pope Paul VI addressed an international Catholic charismatic meeting in Rome, Meyer said.

“Studies have shown that a large number of Catholics have been touched by the charismatic renewal, but also that for many it is a revolving door,” Meyer said. “People get out of it what they need and move on, often to other forms of service to the church.”

Some charismatic prayer groups have lost members when someone else said to have the spiritual gift of prophecy appears to be imposing his or her own views of what the group should do.

“It’s one thing when someone in a prayer group is exercising prophecy and says that God loves you, but another thing when God is giving new directions for the group,” Meyer said. “That can prove destructive because people then doubt the validity of the phenomenon itself.”

Precautions against that were taken at the large healing service this week in Reseda.

Father Ron Young of San Fernando, who preached during the Mass, asked the assemblage to pray for those who were about to relay divine exhortations and blessings. Young cautioned that it was not an invitation to “just anyone, but [to] those who are experienced with that gift.”

Elsey, the Valley’s SCRC coordinator, said that the three women who went to the microphone with the godly messages were among five people pre-selected to speak.

“We didn’t want some person who might cause a disruption,” Elsey said.

Likewise, prayers for healing led by Father Lueras did not place attention on the priest so much as on the people in the pews. Lueras asked them to place their hands on fellow worshipers who wanted to be healed of specific ailments.

“Thank you, Jesus. . . . We are continuing to experience the healing power of the Lord,” Lueras said softly, occasionally speaking in tongues as he focused in turn on head, internal organ, leg and feet problems.

The priest closed with prayers for psychological problems and, lastly--”the most important healing”--for spiritual shortcomings.

At the end of the service, Lueras asked how many people had experienced healing. About 20 to 30 raised their hands briefly among the 1,400 who attended the main service.

Agnes Roxas of North Hills, who had raised her hand, told an interviewer afterward that a headache and fluttering heartbeat she had felt early in the evening had gone away during the healing prayers.

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Cindy, a Reseda resident using a walker, said that her hips felt better during part of the service. But, as she was about to get into a car outside the church, she said that she was feeling about the same as when she arrived.

Lueras said in an interview that about 10% of worshipers at a large service have “some kind of manifestation of healing, usually interior.”

Lueras, 49, first got interested in the charismatic movement in 1970 when he was a professional musician and heard about the prayer meetings at Loyola University.

“It was instrumental in my going to seminary and becoming a priest,” said Lueras, an associate pastor at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Silver Lake.

Regardless of what Catholics ultimately decide about prayers for healing, Lueras said that he sees countless examples of people becoming involved in lay ministries--lectors, readers and Eucharistic ministers--because they have been involved to some degree in the charismatic movement.