Sober Intoxication of the Spirit: Filled with the Fullness of God

by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap.

Servant, 2006

176 pages, $12.99

To order: (800) 488-0488

catalog.americancatholic.org

Even if you have no interest in the charismatic movement, and especially if you bear negative impressions of it, you should read this level-headed, deeply spiritual look at the phenomenon. For one thing, its author is the longtime preacher to the papal household. (Pope John Paul II appointed him way back in 1980.) For another, its content can change your way of relating to God — for the better.

Even if you’re not inspired to run off to the nearest charismatic meeting, you will surely come away with a better impression of the movement and, more importantly, with a clearer understanding of the Holy Spirit’s work in the Church and in your life.

Father Cantalamessa dedicates the book to “my brothers and sisters in the Catholic charismatic renewal,” noting that he received his “spiritual baptism” in 1977 in New Jersey. Before this event, he was skeptical about the charismatic movement. As a priest in a religious community walking the centuries-old Franciscan way, he wondered what a group a lay people who had “caught the spirit” could offer him.

He does not explain much about the interior experience of the “outpouring of the Spirit,” but he does describe its effect in his life and in the lives of others. With the prayers of the faithful and the laying on of hands, a person is lifted up in spirit, he explains, and convinced both of his sinfulness and of God’s inexhaustible mercy. His faith deepens, his perspective widens, and he responds with a reformed life and works of charity.

Father Cantalamessa goes so far as to say that the “outpouring” seals, or activates, the grace of the sacrament of baptism, which he calls an “unreleased” sacrament in the lives of most Christians who are baptized in infancy. He is careful to spell out, though, that the “outpouring” is not in itself a sacrament, and that the sacrament of confirmation is the true seal of baptism.

The friar has some strong words for those involved in the charismatic movement, warning against an exclusivity that outsiders often perceive. Yet Father Cantalamessa also says that the institutional Church should not dismiss the charismatic movement, lest it quash the movement of the Holy Spirit. The early Church had an abundance of the Spirit, he notes, and even many Church Fathers wrote more like charismatics than formal theologians as they blazed the trail for the growing Church.

“What matters to God is people, not structures,” he writes. “It is souls that make the Church beautiful, and therefore she must adorn herself with souls. The outpouring of the Spirit, then, is a response by God to the dysfunction in which Christian life now finds itself.”

One drawback is that the book is a collection of nine talks and meditations, some apparently given many years ago. In places it repeats points already made. Then again, some of them bear repeated hearings.

The last chapter, a talk presented to John Paul and his household, is the best in the series. It alone deserves careful, and repeated, readings. Father Cantalamessa asks: “Where is it written that such a ‘radical’ way of living the Gospel and experiencing the Spirit was the exclusive prerogative of the Fathers and of the early days of the Church?” It’s not hard to imagine the late Holy Father nodding in agreement on that line of reasoning.

Read this book with an open heart even if — no, especially if — you’re turned off to the outward manifestations of the charismatic movement (speaking in tongues, waving arms and so on). If you trusted in Pope John Paul II, you’ll trust in his hand-picked preacher.

Maria Caulfield writes from

Wallingford, Connecticut.