WRONG PLACES

You're looking for love
In all the wrong places
You're looking for love
In all the wrong places
You better keep on looking now!

The "Catholic Charismatic Renewal" began with the emergence of the modernist mindset and naturally the outcome has been more of the same. We are now reaping the rewards of this reckless ecumenist experiment; the liturgical experimentations that began in the sixties may have altered the Catholic Church forever. We all have been told that “God was not Catholic”. But what we seemed to forget that the Church Jesus left in the hands of His Apostles was Catholic. To allow less is an affront against Christ’s Passion or the many Christian martyrs since then.

Charismatics are undiscriminating ecumenists. They get corrupted with the first ‘anointing’ with the flow of religious euphoria. It makes little or no difference where they get this and wherever they can get it is A OK! I remember going around with the prayer group looking for prayer meetings in Protestant churches. We used to go en masse to an Evangelical Lutheran “Holy Spirit Conference” until they moved it out of town. One Pentecostal group rented a small hall next to a pub on the hill. It reeked of beer, but we went anyway. It didn’t matter what crazy message we heard, all we wanted was praise music and prophecy. There we were; 12-15 of us, all ages, three or four men, but mostly women. The mark of a good prayer meeting was how good the songs were. If the songs were not the right ones, we would get annoyed, because the feelings didn’t come. I remember the condescending tone of that pastor and how we tried to minimize our Catholic-ness to fit in with them. We should have been proud of our glorious history and the treasures we had at our fingertips and yet we were embarrassed about it. These are the realities of ecumenism on the grass roots level. Tone it down, accommodate and be like the rest. But it didn’t really matter, we were always on the lookout for the next thrill.