The Catholic Charismatic Renewal and Pope Francis between Pastoral Openness and Ecclesiastical Centralization

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal (hereafter, CCR), which officially started at Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) in 1967 when two Catholics claimed to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, spread rapidly around the world, and today has more than 120 million followers. The attitude of the Catholic hierarchy towards the CCR has not always been the same: at first, it distanced itself from this movement, later it moved toward its legitimization, which was achieved due to the work of Cardinal Léon Joseph Suenens’s mediation, and eventually for its Roman centralization, which was pursued by the efforts of Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes and the Pontifical Council for the Laity. The election of Pope Francis has recently opened a new chapter in relations between Catholic charismatics and the Vatican. If Francis seems no longer to perceive the CCR as a phenomenon to be integrated more for its strategic value than for its spiritual richness and to accept it in its uniqueness and heterogeneity, then his ecclesiastical plan to create an all-inclusive organizational identity such as CHARIS resembles a previous Vatican attitude toward the movement. The aim of this paper is to investigate the most recent history of the CCR by analyzing Francis’s viewpoints and his interactions with Catholic charismatics in a global perspective.