Are You a Charismatic Priest? Reflection on the Catholic Church as a Home for All
“Are you a charismatic priest?” she asked me after I had prayed over her. I answered with a question: “Why do you ask?” The woman, joy in her eyes, said, “Because you prayed in the Spirit and I felt the force of your prayer.” I was grateful for her affirmation, but more grateful that she was feeling better at the end of our prayer. The teacher in me wanted to catechize her a bit on the fact that charismatic gifts are given to all the baptized. But I guess her joyful spirit in a wearied body did not need my theology of charism.
My pastoral presence and accompaniment were enough. Still, her question got me thinking about the distinction I regularly hear from my fellow Catholics in Nigeria and across Africa, between “charismatic priests” who run stable ministries of healing and those like me regarded as merely “regular priests” who do not display extraordinary powers, at least in the eyes of some.
There is a quiet revolution underway in African Christianity. I have observed this in both our Catholic churches at home and abroad: a gradual shift from traditional Catholicism toward a more charismatic or Pentecostal expression of the faith. This shift surely faces much resistance from mainstream Catholic leadership in Africa, but it reflects an unresolved tension in how Africans received Christianity in its modern form from European missionaries as a fixed notion of Church with unchanging traditions, set rituals, liturgical formulae, an ordered hierarchy, a centralized authority, devotions like the cult of the saints, and a sacramental economy, among others.
The tension between what can change, what ought to change, and what stays the same. In other words, what is culturally mediated versus the enduring varieties and Church Tradition of Scripture and Magisterium, in recipient cultures, continues apace amid contested modernities and versions of history.
This tension emerged here in Chicago this month. I was struck by the extraordinary ministry conducted here in Chicago by Fr. Ebube Muonso of the Holy Ghost Adoration Ministry, Nigeria. A few Catholics came to me asking why many priests do not celebrate the kind of performative and pneumatic ministry associated with ‘charismatic priests’ like Fr. Ebube Muonso, who ministered to enormous crowds, with long lines of people who consulted with him and received special blessings. His Masses and healing sessions drew Catholics as well as non-Catholics, many professionals from every walk of life and every social stratum in the Midwest region of the U.S—all searching for God. Were this outreach held in a rural Nigerian community, some would have dismissed those who flocked to it as poor, sick, or gullible seekers of miracles. But these were highly educated professionals in secure economic and social settings.
Though I did not personally take part, I fully promoted the event, and in doing so drew pushback from traditional Catholics in our community, one of whom asked, “So, Father, you promote this crazy stuff?” That question brought to mind what my father once said to my late sister, Bibiana, after she attended one of Fr. Ede’s charismatic sessions in the 1990s. Fr. Emmanuel Ede CSSp was a very prominent faith healer in Nigeria in the 90s. Dad advised my sister not to waste her time with “these crazy people,” My father, who ordinarily was tolerant and open-minded, was strongly against the “Pentecostalization of Catholicism” and strongly forbade my sister from continuing to participate in the prayer meeting of the Catholic Charismatics.
My mother, on the other hand, was more sympathetic to Charismatic Catholicism and invited them a couple of times to pray at home, after convincing my dad to host a Charismatic prayer session following many spirited arguments. Somehow, my family learned to hold both together: an openness to the charismatic experience alongside an insistence that traditional Catholic spirituality—daily Mass and rosary, regular confession, and acts of charity—had never failed us as a family.
Reflecting on my family experience, the tension we felt in Chicago, and the question the African-American woman asked me when I visited her in hospital, some truth about the enduring quality of Catholicism began to emerge for me. The beauty of Catholicism as a tradition lies in its capacity to hold multiplicity together without collapsing into uniformity.
Catholicism is not one thing; it is many things in one, a communion capacious enough to contain the silence of a Trappist monastery and the exuberance of an Adoration ground, the intellectual rigor of a Jesuit seminar and charismatic explosion and prayers in tongues of a Catholic Charismatic prayer group. Whenever we try to reduce this richness to a single expression declaring one form the “real” Catholicism and treating all others as suspect deviations, we do the tradition harm.
We create division and fragmentation where the Spirit intends communion and complementarity. The very word “catholic” means universal, whole, according-to-the-whole; a Catholicism that can only recognize itself in one cultural key or one register of piety or spirituality has already betrayed its own name.
The beauty of Catholicism as a tradition lies in its capacity to hold multiplicity together without collapsing into uniformity.”
This, I think, is the beauty of the Christian Gospel itself: its capacity to be all things to all people without dissolving into any one of them. The Gospel does not ask a people to abandon their own history and idiom in order to receive it; it asks instead to be received into that history and idiom, so that the history and idiom themselves become vessels of grace.
This is what distinguishes the Gospel’s universality from a mere uniformity. Uniformity flattens difference in the name of order; the Gospel’s universality, by contrast, gathers difference into a deeper unity without erasing it, much as the Body of Christ, in Paul’s image, is one body precisely because it has many members, each retaining its own particular function and character (1 Cor. 12:12–27).
Uniformity flattens difference in the name of order; the Gospel’s universality gathers difference into a deeper unity without erasing it.”
It is worth highlighting a notable historical fact here that struck me in my study of the cultural currents in world Christianity: Christianity is the only major world religion that remains a minority faith in its place of origin. Islam is majority-Muslim where it began in the Arab world; Hinduism and Buddhism remain rooted in the lands of their founding.
But Christianity, born in first-century Judea, took root and flourished not primarily where it began but wherever it traveled: Rome, Byzantium, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia, Ireland, and eventually every continent on earth. This is not incidental to the nature of the Gospel; it is, I would argue, constitutive of it. Christianity does not merely tolerate its own expansion beyond its founding narrative and geography—it requires it. The Gospel is intrinsically missionary, intrinsically outward-moving, intrinsically hospitable to translation into new tongues, new cultures, new forms of life.
Pope Gregory the Great captured something of this dynamic when he wrote that the Word of God grows in and with the reader—Scriptura cum legentibus crescit. The Word is not a fixed deposit that merely sits inert, waiting to be transmitted unchanged from one context to another; it is alive, and it grows in stature and meaning as it encounters new readers, new hearers, new communities of faith.
What Gregory says of Scripture, I want to suggest, can also be said of Catholicism as a living tradition: it grows with its recipients. It does not remain static, frozen at the moment of its arrival in fourth-century Rome or nineteenth-century Ireland or twentieth-century Nigeria; it takes root, adapts, and bears fruit according to the soil into which it is planted, while never ceasing to be itself.
And this is the crucial balance I want to hold on to when thinking about charismatic and non-charismatic priests: Catholicism grows with its recipients while preserving a family resemblance, so that we can recognize something of ourselves in every instance of it, and something of every instance of it in ourselves.
A Nigerian Catholic praying fervently at an all-night vigil, an Irish Catholic murmuring the rosary alone in a parish pew, a Filipino Catholic processing behind the Black Nazarene, a Mexican migrant clutching the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe with tears, a German Catholic engaged in contemplation in a monastery. These are not five different religions wearing the same name. They are five branches of one deep root, five expressions of one family trait, five dialects of the same mother tongue.
To insist that only one of these dialects is legitimate is to mistake a dialect for the language itself. The task of the Church, and especially of her pastors and theologians, is not to flatten this family into a single voice, but to help each of its members recognize the others as kin, different, yes, even strange to one another at times, but never foreign.
To insist that only one of these dialects is legitimate is to mistake a dialect for the language itself.”
I long for a Church that fully lives this heritage of deep roots and diverse branches in spirituality, pastoral life, and community—a Church that is a home to all. How many dioceses and parishes struggle today because a bishop or pastor reduced Catholicism to his own narrow pastoral or spiritual purview, shutting down any lay exercise of charism or any growth of the Spirit’s gifts in a local church? How often have we heard of religious orders suppressing any healing ministry or unique charism and talents among members, in the name of preserving unity of purpose only to end up narrowing the congregation’s own charism to a single, restrictive interpretation by those in authority?
How many priests, religious, and laypeople—men and women alike—have been silenced by this failure to let the Church be fully and truly catholic, by church authorities and leaders who do not grasp the dynamic relationship between charism and authority and thus fail to embrace the beauty and dignity of the flourishing of talents and gifts in the One Church?
Yet charisms are not self-authenticating: they must be discerned through their fidelity to the Gospel, their spiritual fruits, their communion with the Church, and their service to the common good.
For Africa in particular, where faith and church life are in a moment of extraordinary formation and experimentation, our greatest disservice as leaders, teachers, pastoral agents, and theologians would be to foreclose spiritual creativity, pastoral experimentation, and innovation. The Church must build structures that enable the flourishing of the gifts and develop policies flexible enough to allow the charisms to grow. Policing the faith and shutting down people’s gifts run counter to God’s mission in Africa and in any ecclesial community.
The Church must build structures that enable the flourishing of the gifts.”
We are in a time of the Spirit in our churches, and God is visiting our people. Popular piety is growing in Africa for good reason because the faith cannot be contained in a single vessel of spirituality. So, there should be no conflict, rivalry, or tension between the healing and charismatic priests, and priests who mediate the divine through the regular sacramental life of the Church; or between Catholics who love to dance in Church and those who wish to worship God in silence.
God has made a home with the Church, and this Church is capacious enough to embrace the multiplicity and diversities of gifts and cultures and spiritualities, warts and all, that are out there. Because the Catholic Church is a home for all God’s people.
