In the 1980s, when David Martin began his pioneering research on the explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America, the Catholic Archbishop of Santiago de Chile told his entourage about a bad dream he had had. The archbishop dreamed that he was arriving to say mass in his cathedral. Upon entering the large sanctuary he found that it had been completely taken over by a huge crowd of charismatic worshippers praying and singing loudly, arms upraised, to the accompaniment of electronic guitars, many speaking in tongues and laying on hands miraculous healing. The archbishop was squeezed into a corner as he tried to do his job as a Catholic priest. This was a good many years ago. I suspect that today this nightmare would disturb the sleep of many more Catholic hierarchs in Chile and other countries in the Global South.
There are two religious periodicals I read regularly, The Tablet, which is a reliable source on developments in the Catholic world, and the The Christian Century, which does the same for mainline Protestantism. In their respective issues of January 25, 2014, and February 5, 2014, both publications contain thoughtful releflections about the growth of Pentecostalism. In the Tablet story Paul Graham, a parish priest in London who is also the provincial of the Augustinian order in England and Scotland, reflects about what he calls “the Pentecostal drift”—the growing tendency of Catholic immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean to move out of their original parishes and instead worship in Pentecostal or charismatic churches in which people of their ethnicity form the majority and determine the religious flavor of what goes on. What is particularly interesting here is that this “drift” does not seem to be limited to ethnic immigrants, but also includes individuals of monochrome white English/British origins. In other words, it seems, you don’t have to come from Trinidad to favor a Caribbean beat in the Catholic liturgy. A good many Anglicans seem to follow the same pattern.
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