‘Today it is not the Great Saint who is Thundering Forth’: the Laity and Catholic Charismatic Renewal in England

Maiden, John (2023). ‘Today it is not the Great Saint who is Thundering Forth’: the Laity and Catholic Charismatic Renewal in England. In: Power, Maria and Bush, Jonathan eds. Lay Catholic Societies in Twentieth Century Britain. Cardiff: Catholic Record Society (In Press).

Abstract

Catholic charismatic renewal, or ‘Catholic pentecostalism’ as it was often known in the United States in the early 1970s, has been understood primarily as a lay movement. This article explores how in its origins, organisation, leadership, and characteristics, the charismatic renewal in England - which before now has not been the subject of archive-based historic study - had important lay dimensions. As Stephen Bullivant has shown, from the mid-century English Catholic piety became increasingly ‘verbal and cerebral’ – a pattern which we shall see fitted well with the extemporizing prayers of charismatic worship. At the same time, as Alana Harris’s work on Lourdes has shown, mid-century cultural trends had increasingly shifted towards the therapeutic. Just as Lourdes was, after the Second War, increasingly reimagined ‘within a cultural framework that embraced a widely popularised psychological awareness and the desire for an experiential spirituality’, so charismatic renewal would operated within this a context of increased emphasis on self-actualisation. In seeking to understand the significance of charismatic renewal for the laity, the analysis of this chapter necessarily looks closely at middle-class Catholicism, and the relationship between changing forms of devotion and wider cultural developments.

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