I want to congratulate Catholic Charismatic Renewal on their Golden Jubilee.  It is quite something to think that this Renewal of the Holy Spirit came down to us and blew mightily in our Church and world over half a century ago now.   As Renewal’s liaison with the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland it is a pleasure for me to write a few words to reflect the joy and of this Jubilee and the challenge facing Renewal in Scotland in the decades ahead.
 
I first encountered Charismatic Renewal when I was a sixteen year old seminarian with the Salesians in Cheshire. Our English teacher invited a few of us to go along with him to an evening prayer group in someone’s home in Manchester and, having nothing better to do, I said okay.  Arriving a bit late and entering the house after the meeting had already begun I was amazed by the quite ecstatic hymns and bewildered by the speaking in tongues.  Yet the sense of how the Lord was speaking there and then to His people in His Scriptures and guiding us through words uttered aloud by prophet souls in our midst to me made impressively direct parallels with all I was learning about the early Church of the Acts of the Apostles.  It seemed two thousand years had met in one moment and the Church was alive, courageous, full of hope and joy. 
 
Soon Renewal was in our seminary and Our God Reigns was ringing out in praise and casting out cobwebs of somehow routine faith and, at times, apathetic worship.  I wanted to be part of it and often found myself at Hawkstone Hall for Renewal events that were sweeping the Church.
 
It all seems a long time ago and the first wave of freshness and enthusiasm has met with the challenge of ongoing renewal and reform.   Catholic Charismatic renewal has matured.  It has brought the Eucharist and Our Blessed Mother to share the centre with the Holy Spirit and His gifts.  Without losing its prophetic edge it has become perhaps the best and most stout defender of the truths of our Faith in these confusing times.  It has begun to see the wisdom of Saint Paul’s rule that prophecies should be tested by the authority of the institutional Church and, in a time of easy despair at declining numbers in the Church, it remains defiant in hope that the Spirit will renew and grow the Church like a new springtime.  Above all it is this hope, alongside the often heroic commitment of those involved, that makes Renewal a precious gift to the Church of our times.
 
The Church itself has to help and support Renewal. It should understand the need to be a close collaborator with the Renewal movement, and for priests to be good friends and members to keep unity in charity, to lead in love, to be brothers among the brethren and to help authorise those words that truly are from God among the many things that are said at gatherings.
 
The recent Popes of our Church have all thanked God for Renewal as a genuine breathing of the Holy Spirit on the Vatican II Church, even as they have strived to help it find its true home in the Church.  Please God the hope Renewal has brought will continue to bring fresh life and faith to the Catholic Church as it takes up the call of a new evangelisation involving the full participation of all the baptised in the generation that awaits.