Since 1967 considerable impetus has been given to group prayer in the Catholic Church, by the Catholic Pentecostal Movement in North America. This movement began as largely a lay movement of spiritual renewal in Catholic university circles in the U.S.A. It has connexions with the Spanish-born cursillo movement, whose aim is to bring Catholics to a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus (the evangelical terminology is deliberate), but it actually derives from the encounter with interdenominational Pentecostalism. It received massive and sensational publicity, and grew with amazing rapidity, spreading throughout the States, and penetrating into Canada. In 1969 it was cautiously approved by the U.S. hierarchy, and has also been enthusiastically recommended by one or two individual bishops.

Although it is a very variegated phenomenon, running right through it is the insistence that all Christians can and should claim ‘the promise of the Father’ in what they, with other Pentecostals, call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. That is to say, people who are already believers in Christ call down upon themselves or upon each other an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, ‘just as it was in the beginning’ at Pentecost. The usual procedure is for someone who has already had the experience to lay hands on one who is seeking it, with prayer; it is believed that this will result in a sudden or gradual unfolding of the person’s life in Christ into the charismatic manifestations, usually beginning with tongues, followed in due course by prophecy, interpretation, healing, or some such supernatural endowment or ministry.