The origins of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the United States: The experience at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend (Indiana), 1967-1975

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal (hereafter, CCR) was founded in 1967 at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when two theology professors were ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’, or rather, had an intense inner involvement of prayer through which their faith was personally experienced. The practice soon spread to the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana), which became the center of the expanding renewal. In fact, at the University of Notre Dame and the city of South Bend were laid the first organizational forms of the movement, such as the National Service Committee and the Charismatic Renewal Services, as well as the earliest forms of promotion, such as the Notre Dame Conferences (1967-1973). The aim of this chapter is to analyse the experiences of the university’s charismatic community, True House (Notre Dame), and the city’s community, People of Praise (South Bend), as examples of the features of the CCR’s North American movement: young, intellectual, ecumenical, and willing to remain within the Roman Catholic Church. The concern of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the university management bodies resulted in initial ostracism, which was later superseded by the legitimacy the movement acquired thanks to the work of theologians, who included the movement’s religious practice in the tradition of the Church, and pope Paul VI’s welcoming at the Grottaferrata conference (Italy) in 1975. The sources used for the writing of this chapter are mainly archival, supplemented by memoirs, as well as historical and theological publications issued in the subsequent decades, and oral testimonies (interviews with leaders and witnesses of those events).