With international service group, pope connects Catholic charismatics to broader Church

June 9, 2019 CNA Daily News News Briefs 1 Print

Rome, Italy, Jun 9, 2019 / 08:27 am (CNA).- As several thousand Catholics belonging to the charismatic renewal gathered in Rome this Pentecost weekend, the Vatican officially launched a new international service to aid the ministry in its commitment to communion and service.

Bishop Peter Smith told CNA that with the creation of CHARIS, “the Holy Father is trying to say okay, we’re part of a much bigger thing here, let’s not lose sight of that connection and let’s help one another to build the Kingdom and not just be focused on ourselves.”

“This pope sees [the charismatic renewal] as a much broader thing,” he said.

CHARIS is an abbreviation for Catholic Charismatic Renewal International Service and fulfills a request of the pope that there be one charismatic service organism for all expressions of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

It does not have any legal authority over charismatic communities, but its purpose is communion, formation, and advice. It also has a doctrinal and canonical commission, which can study and give information on things such as baptism in the Holy Spirit, as CHARIS moderator Jean-Luc Moens told CNA.

“We need to be sure that we serve the Church without going into our own ideas,” he said.

Auxiliary bishop of Portland, Oregon, Peter Smith has been in the charismatic renewal since a young adult in the late 1970s. As CHARIS launches under the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, he is serving on the leadership team as one of two representatives for North America.

Smith explained to CNA that the charismatic renewal is not an organized movement in the sense of having a founder or one overarching vision, but that it is very loosely organized.

“The heart of the charismatic movement is a profound encounter with Christ and the Holy Spirit,” he said. “There’s sort of a deeper infusion of the Holy Spirit into our lives that transforms us, and so, people go forth from there.”

“It deepens people’s lives of faith significantly,” he said, explaining that the way most Catholics would encounter the movement is likely through a prayer group at their parish, at conferences and retreats, or communities and ministries.

He said there are an estimated 100 to 112 million active members of the charismatic renewal worldwide, many of whom are in Africa and Asia.

Pope Francis met with around 3,000 or more Catholics of the charismatic renewal on June 8 in the Vatican’s Pope Paul VI hall. He told them that with the start of CHARIS “a new stage begins on this journey.”

“A stage marked by communion among all the members of the charismatic family, in which the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit is manifested for the good of the whole Church,” he continued.

The pope said he expects the movement to share Baptism in the Holy Spirit with everyone in the Church: “it is the grace that you have received. Share it! Do not keep if for yourself!”

He also asked them to serve the unity of the body of Christ and to serve the poor.

“These three things: Baptism in the Holy Spirit, unity of the Body of Christ and service to the poor, are the necessary testimony for the evangelization of the world, to which we are all called for our Baptism,” he said.

Smith described the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the context of Confirmation, which he said, “is a gift of a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit.” And just like any gift one receives, “it is worthless unless you do something.”

“You have to take it, you have to open it, you have to see what it is, you have to make it part of your life,” he noted. “And when you do, that gift comes alive for you. The same thing happens with the gift of faith.” The charismatic renewal helps people to have a “vivified, living faith.”

“God is not just a philosophical reality… God becomes like a close friend in the sense that you experience him,” he said. “This is all fundamentally part of our faith life.”

“I’ve bumped into certain groups of Catholics who say, well [the renewal] is Protestant. My reaction to that is no, that’s been Catholic from the beginning,” Smith argued. While the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has been around for just 52 years, the bishop said what the renewal promotes can be seen even in the writings of the early Church Fathers and in the lives of saints.

For Catholics who would like to have a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit this Pentecost, Smith said there is not a set formula except for simply placing one’s self in God’s presence. If there is some obstacle to communion with God, something one needs to repent of, do that, he said, and then “just ask God to reveal himself more closely to you, to make the Holy Spirit come alive within you.”

“Countless people, myself included, we were good Catholics, always lived the Church’s teaching,” he noted, “but there comes a point where you can say, Lord, I want more.”

Most people, he said, will never have one of “these St. Paul moments” where you are going about your life and “wham, you have this incredible experience.”

For most people, “we begin to pray, you surrender your life to God, you ask the Holy Spirit to be more a part of your life, and you begin to see things happen.”

It can be summed up by thinking about the universal call to live and proclaim the Gospel. “We can’t do that on our own, nobody can. We fall short,” he explained. “So, God in his mercy gives us the Holy Spirit, which makes Christ present in us in a much deeper way and strengthens us with the gifts of the Holy Spirit… so that we can live as he calls us to.”

“That is why people who experience this often have their faith come alive,” he said.

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The remarkable life and papacy of Blessed Pope Pius IX

February 7, 2024 Catholic News Agency 2
When Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary on Dec. 8, 1854, he had a golden crown added to the mosaic of Mary, Virgin Immaculate, in the Chapel of the Choir in St. Peter’s Basilica. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

ACI Prensa Staff, Feb 7, 2024 / 10:30 am (CNA).

On Feb. 7, the Catholic Church remembers Blessed Pius IX, “Pius Nono,” the 255th pope. His pontificate is the second longest in history — a total of 31 years, seven months, and 22 days (June 16, 1846–Feb. 7, 1878). He was beatified together with Pope John XXIII (now canonized) on Sept. 3, 2000, by Pope John Paul II.

The future Pope Pius IX was born Giovanni Maria Battista Pellegrino Isidoro Mastai Ferretti in Senigallia, Italy — then part of the Papal States — on May 13, 1792. His parents were Don Gerolamo Mastai Ferretti, a member of a local noble and prestigious family, and Donna Caterina Solazzi, who had him baptized on the same day of his birth. 

In 1809 he traveled to Rome to continue the studies he had begun in his native city. Even without a clear orientation toward the priesthood, he lived in an exemplary way, evidenced by some resolutions made in 1810 after a spiritual retreat when he spoke of his spiritual commitment “to fight against sin, to avoid any dangerous occasion, to study not for the ambition of knowledge but for the good of others, to abandon himself into the hands of God.” 

The future pope stopped his studies in 1812 because of an illness and was exempted from military service. In 1815 he was accepted into the Pontifical Noble Guard but had to abandon the idea because of health problems. Ferretti suffered from epilepsy from a young age — a condition that eventually subsided and then completely disappeared, according to Ferretti himself, which he credited to the intercession of Our Lady of Loreto.

At the service of God and the Church

Ferretti began studies for the priesthood in 1816 and received minor orders in 1817, the subdiaconate in 1818, and the diaconate in 1819. That same year he was ordained a priest. He celebrated his first Mass in the Church of St. Anne of the Carpenters, of the Tata Giovanni Institute, of which he was appointed rector — a position he held until 1823. 

Pius VII, who supported Ferretti’s early career, at first required him to have a concelebrant because of his epilepsy, but the requirement was lifted as his health improved. 

Ferretti had already left clear evidence of his personality: a man of constant prayer, consecrated to the ministry of the Word and the sacrament of reconciliation, always close to the most humble and needy. He knew how to combine admirably both the active and contemplative life. Very dedicated to pastoral and social work, he was also recollected and had an intense devotion to the Eucharist and to the Virgin Mary. 

In 1823 he left the Tata Giovanni Institute and traveled to Chile, accompanying the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Giovanni Muzi. He remained there until 1825.

On his return to Italy that same year, he was appointed director of the St. Michael Home, an important ecclesial work in Rome at the service of the community, which he reformed in an effective manner. At the age of 35 he was appointed archbishop of Spoleto. This was a very hard stage of his life given his youth and inexperience, and the immense responsibility that was placed on his shoulders. During his brief time, he also contended with an abortive political revolution, using his influence to secure a pardon for the misguided revolutionaries.

In 1832, Ferretti was transferred to another diocese — this time to Imola, where he continued to be revered for his preaching, his care of his diocesan priests, clergy, and seminarians, his support of education in the diocese, and his pastoral visits to prisoners. In 1840, at the age of 48, he was named a cardinal.

Under the sign of the cross

On the afternoon of June 16, 1846, Cardinal Ferretti was elected pope and took the name Pius IX.

During his pontificate, due to the political circumstances caused by the unification of Italy — the Risorgimento — and the loss of the Papal States, his task became extremely difficult. He is said to have faced the hard times with great wisdom and prudence. For this very reason, Pope Pius IX is recognized as one of the greatest pontiffs, forced to play a political role in times of open anticlericalism encouraged by “modernist” currents. 

Pius IX’s doctrinal work involved a programmatic vision aimed at addressing the main problems and threats to both the Church and Western Christian civilization: He condemned secret societies such as Freemasonry as well as fashionable ideologies like liberalism and socialism, among others. Pius IX published the “Syllabus Errorum” (“Catalogue of Errors”), in which he warned about the errors and dangers of modernism.

This made him the initiator of the development of the social doctrine of the Church. His century was marked by the Industrial Revolution and the struggle of the working class for better conditions — issues the Church would begin to address, most notably under his successor, Pope Leo XIII.

Among the most outstanding pastoral actions or measures of Pius IX’s papacy are the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England, Holland, and Scotland; the solemn definition, on Dec. 8, 1854, of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; the sending of missionaries to the Nordic zones of America and Europe as well as to India, Burma, China, and Japan; and the celebration of the 80th centenary of the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul.

Pius IX convened the First Vatican Ecumenical Council, which began in 1869 and was suspended in October 1870 after Rome fell to the forces of Italian unification. During this council, the dogma of papal infallibility was defined. That same year Pope Pius IX declared St. Joseph patron of the Church.

Back home

After the fall of Rome and the subsequent end of the “temporal power of the pope,” Pius IX locked himself in the Vatican, declaring himself a “prisoner.” His action became an example of dignity and detachment from the temporal order for his exercise of religious freedom and firmness in the face of secular power.    

Upon his death on Feb. 7, 1878, Pope Pius IX’s impressive pontificate came to an end.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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