- The Mind and the Institution: An Old and Fruitful Tension
- From American origins to French roots
- The Emmanuel Community and Paray-le-Monial
- What Paul had glimpsed
- A revival in a desert: France in 2026
- Discern, anchor, send: the challenges of a growing movement
- The risk of emotion without roots
- The relationship with the ecclesiastical institution
- Towards a mystique of sending
- ✝ Biblical references
On this Pentecost Sunday in 2026, while nearly 20,000 pilgrims walked from Paris to Chartres under a May sun, another reality, less visible but just as significant, has been at work within the body of the Church in France for several months. The conferences in Paray-le-Monial saw an increase in attendance of 301 people this year. The sessions organized by the Emmanuel Community around the Sacred Heart sanctuary in Saône-et-Loire were also celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. Meanwhile, the figures for adult catechumenate reached their highest levels in twenty years by Easter 2025, with more than 10,000 adults baptized, an increase of 461 people compared to the previous year. It is not chance that brings these data together in a single table: it is the unpredictable breath of the Holy Spirit, which the Charismatic Renewal has always claimed to welcome with open hands.
Whether one is enthusiastic or skeptical about this movement, which began in 1967 on American campuses before reaching France in 1971, one thing is now difficult to deny: something is rising. And this something has a name that the Church, from Saint Paul to Leo XIV, has never ceased to scrutinize with attention and caution: charisma.
The Mind and the Institution: An Old and Fruitful Tension
From American origins to French roots
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal was born on February 17, 1967, at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, during a weekend of prayer where a handful of students experienced what they called the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The phenomenon quickly gained traction at Notre-Dame, then spread across North America. In France, the first charismatic prayer groups appeared in 1971, led in particular by an American Jesuit student, Mike Cawdrey, whose encounter with a young priest from Lyon would prove decisive.
This priest's name was Laurent Fabre. Born in Marseille in 1940, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1961 and in 1972 received what he described as a baptism in the Holy Spirit during a weekend of prayer. From this experience, the Chemin Neuf Community was born in 1973, founded on the slopes of Fourvière Hill in Lyon. Laurent Fabre remained its moderator general for over forty years. What is remarkable about the Chemin Neuf adventure is its resolutely ecumenical character: the community today brings together brothers and sisters from the Catholic Church, the Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed, and Evangelical Churches, present in some thirty countries. The Spirit blows where it wills, and it does not always respect the denominational barriers that humankind has patiently erected.
The Emmanuel Community and Paray-le-Monial
Meanwhile, another figure shaped the charismatic face of the Church in France: Pierre Goursat, founder in 1972 of the Emmanuel Community. It was he who, in 1975, proposed organizing the first gatherings of the Charismatic Renewal prayer groups in Paray-le-Monial. The choice of location was not accidental: Paray-le-Monial is the town where, in the 17th century, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque received apparitions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. There is a profound coherence in this spiritual geography: the Charismatic Renewal emphasizes the personal and emotional experience of grace, a love of God that is perceived, lived, and felt—and not merely believed in an abstract way. Placing this movement under the sign of the Heart of Jesus was to reveal its most intimate intuition.
Today, Father Étienne Kern, a prominent figure in the Emmanuel Community, along with Laurent Fabre, embodies the face of a mature Charismatic Renewal. Far removed from the excesses sometimes associated with its beginnings—spectacular glossolalia, loudly proclaimed healings—the movement, as it is practiced in established French communities, has learned to articulate the fervor of spiritual experience with the rigor of doctrine and the sobriety of sacramental life. This maturity is perhaps one of the keys to its current resurgence.
What Paul had glimpsed
The apostle Paul himself had to regulate the charismatic impulses of the young Corinthian community. His letter left us this formula which resonates through the centuries: «"To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good."» (1 Cor 12:7). This phrase is both an encouragement and a warning. Yes, the Spirit distributes his gifts—the charisma comes from Greek charis, Grace—but these gifts are never private property nor individual achievements. They are given. for the common good, that is to say, for the building up of the whole body. It is precisely on this point that the Charismatic Renewal has sometimes stumbled, and it is also on this point that, when it has worked well, it has produced its most beautiful fruits: living communities, revitalized parishes, numerous vocations.
A revival in a desert: France in 2026
The French paradox
France is both one of the most secularized countries in Western Europe and, for some years now, the scene of a discreet but documented spiritual revival. In 2025, more than 17,800 catechumens were baptized at Easter, including more than 10,000 adults—a record in twenty years. Among them, 18- to 25-year-olds represent a considerable proportion, and three out of five baptized are women. These figures directly contradict the prevailing narrative of a French Church in irremediable decline.
How can we explain this paradox? Several factors converge. The 2020 lockdown, by shattering the certainties of a life ordered by performance and constant distraction, led many people to ask existential questions that consumer society was unable to address. The Notre-Dame de Paris fire in 2019, experienced as a national trauma, revealed to many French people that something sacred still resided within their inner landscape, even if they no longer consciously considered it. And in this context of searching, charismatic communities—with their joyful style, warm welcome, and offer of a concrete spiritual experience—were often the first face of the Church encountered by those seeking meaning.
Leo XIV and the inner life: a prophetic resonance
This is where the most recent events take on a striking theological dimension. In his apostolic letter Disegnare new map of the light In his book, "Drawing New Maps of Hope," published on October 28, 2025, Pope Leo XIV identified three new priorities for Catholic schools in a "complex, fragmented, and digitalized" world. The first of these priorities is precisely the development of the inner life of young people. This papal emphasis on the interior life is not a nostalgic evocation of devotional practices from another century. It is a direct response to the diagnosis that Leo XIV makes of our era: the digital attention economy produces individuals externalized, whose consciousness is constantly solicited by the outside world and who lose the ability to inhabit themselves.
Yet the Charismatic Renewal, in its finest tradition, has always offered precisely this: a reappropriation of interiority, not through cold and solitary asceticism, but through the communal experience of prayer, adoring silence, and openness to the Paraclete. Leo XIV himself also invited Catholics present in digital spaces to "nourish social networks with Christian hope," not to showcase themselves, but to "serve the interior lives of others." This statement could have come from the mouth of a leader of a charismatic prayer group.
The geography of an awakening
It is significant that Paray-le-Monial—this small Burgundian town whose Romanesque basilica overlooks the Bourgne River—has become a spiritual barometer for the Church in France. The 301% increase in attendance recorded in 2025 is not an abstract figure: it represents thousands of people, often young, who made the effort to travel, to leave their screens and their daily routines, to expose themselves to something greater than themselves. It is a fundamental act of trust in an era that has learned to distrust everything. The Paray summer sessions, organized by the Emmanuel Community, celebrate their fiftieth anniversary in 2025. Fifty years: the age of maturity, the age at which a movement can begin to measure the gap between its promises and its achievements, and make an informed choice to continue.
Burgundy is not the only region experiencing this revival. Lyon, where the Chemin Neuf Community was founded on the Fourvière hill, remains a major charismatic center. Paris, with its many vibrant parishes, is also seeing a growth in prayer groups and praise gatherings. The Diocese of Paris itself highlighted a significant increase in adult (+311 per 30 years) and adolescent (+501 per 30 years) baptisms in 2025. This is not merely a church statistic; it is a sign that something of the Spirit is at work.
Discern, anchor, send: the challenges of a growing movement
The risk of emotion without roots
The growth of a spiritual movement is always ambivalent. It can signify a work of God; it can also signify a response to a psychological or social need, lacking theological depth. The Church has learned this the hard way with several French charismatic communities which, after years of rapid growth, experienced painful collapses: Théophanie, Pain de Vie, and Sainte-Croix declined or were dissolved. These tragic stories have left wounds in families and dioceses. They serve as a stark reminder that spiritual enthusiasm is not, in itself, a guarantee of holiness.
Catholic tradition possesses an invaluable resource on this point: the theology of discernment. Ignatius of Loyola, whose spiritual son Laurent Fabre is himself as a Jesuit, codified in his Spiritual exercises a grammar of discernment of spirits which remains of burning relevance. The ultimate criterion is not the intensity of the experience, nor the warmth of the community, nor even the multiplication of spectacular conversions: it is the persistence of the fruits over time — charity, humility, availability to the service of the other, obedience to the Church.
The prophet Ezekiel, in a vision of strange and striking beauty, described the action of the Spirit in God's people in this way: «I will put my spirit within you, and you will live.» (Ezekiel 37:14). This divine promise is unconditional, but it presupposes an anthropological condition: that the dry bones consent to receive the breath. The Charismatic Renewal, at its best, is precisely this openness—a collective consent to receive what one can neither produce nor control.
The relationship with the ecclesiastical institution
One of the most notable developments of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in France since the 1980s has been its gradual integration into the ordinary life of the Church. Communities like Emmanuel and Chemin Neuf do not operate on the margins of dioceses; they are integrated, recognized, and sometimes entrusted with significant pastoral responsibilities. This integration has not always been easy. Tensions with bishops concerned with maintaining the unity of their dioceses, and cultural misunderstandings between the charismatic style and the more reserved sensibilities of traditional French Catholicism, have marked the last fifty years.
But the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, had warned against an ecclesiology that would reduce the Church to its purely institutional dimension. For him, the Church is constituted by the fruitful tension between the Petrine principle — the institution, continuity, authority — and the Marian principle — availability, fruitfulness, contemplative love. In this interpretation, charismatic movements are not competitors of the institution: they are its soul-enriching complement, the Marian dimension that prevents the Petrine principle to calcify into bureaucracy.
Towards a mystique of sending
The temptation of charismatic movements is sometimes what one might call the’the intimacy of grace To gather together to pray, praise, experience the Spirit, and gradually forget that Pentecost did not end in the Upper Room. The Acts of the Apostles is clear: after the gift of the Spirit, the disciples did not remain shut up singing hymns. They went out and spoke to the crowds in all languages, and were understood by all—and three thousand people were baptized that day (Acts 2:41). Charism is ordered to mission; mission gives charism its true measure.
This is perhaps the most urgent challenge that the French Charismatic Renewal must face today: to move from a culture of experience to a mystique of sending. To welcome baptism in the Spirit not as an arrival, but as a departure. To let the joy of Paray-le-Monial permeate working-class neighborhoods, de-Christianized suburbs, and university campuses where thousands of young French people are searching, often unknowingly, for what the Renewal has to offer. The spectacular resurgence of adult catechumens in 2025 shows that this thirst exists. The question is whether charismatic communities will have the courage and creativity to step out of their comfort zones and reach out to this thirst.
By asking Catholics to "place the person before the algorithm" and to "serve the inner life of others," including in the digital realm, Leo XIV gave direction to this mission for our time. Young people who have discovered Chemin Neuf or Emmanuel are not merely the beneficiaries of a spiritual awakening; they are its potential agents, provided they consent to this profound shift from grace received to grace transmitted. «"You have received freely: give freely."» (Mt 10, 8). This saying of Jesus, addressed to the Twelve before their first sending out on mission, remains the truest compass for a movement that believes in the free gift of the Spirit.
✝ Biblical references
4 passages · 4 books
If I do not have love, I am nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
Unity of the Church, ethical problems and a hymn to charity for the Corinthian community.
→ Explore the Codex 1 Corinthians- Belgrade, crossroads of souls: Cardinal Nemet and the long patience of dialogue between Rome and Moscow
- The tree and its fruits: how Yaoundé became the cradle of an African ethic of artificial intelligence
- «Let us entrust them to Mary»: the Regina Caeli as an act of resistance for Eastern Christians
- Praying in a tent on Pentecost: Manipur, an open wound of the universal Church
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you… you will be my witnesses. (Acts 1:8)
The birth and expansion of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome under the action of the Spirit.
→ Explore the Codex Acts of the Apostles- God has made him Lord and Christ (Acts 2:14a, 36-41)
- It was not possible for death to hold him in its power (Acts 2:14, 22b-33)
- All the believers were together and had everything in common (Acts 2:42-47)
- Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:36-41)
- This Jesus, God raised from the dead; we are all witnesses of it (Acts 2:14, 22b-33)
- «Builders of Peoples»: Leo XIV, the Scouts and the Soul of Europe
- Yamoussoukro, a beacon of the world: when the largest basilica on earth becomes the voice of Rome for Francophone Africa
- Magnifica Humanitas: when the Church speaks to all humanity, in its own language
- The omnipotence of love: what Leo XIV said to the miners of Shanxi — and to all of us
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. (Ezekiel 36:26)
Apocalyptic visions, oracles of judgment, and the promise of the restoration of Israel.
→ Explore the Ezekiel Codex- Leo XIV and the SSPX: The Church put to the test by its own memory
- «Not a superpower, but the omnipotence of love»: Leo XIV’s Pentecost homily in the face of the empire
- Prayer as diplomacy: Leo XIV, the Liushenyu mine, and the mystery of the Church in China
- Pentecost with a thousand faces: the Eastern Catholic Churches, the fiery lungs of the one true Catholicism
Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:20)
The Gospel of the King: Jesus, the new Moses, fulfills the Scriptures for Israel and the nations.
→ Explore the Matthew Codex- «Not a superpower, but the omnipotence of love»: Leo XIV’s Pentecost homily in the face of the empire
- Under the digital cassock: when Russian espionage targets Eastern European churches
- Poland, sword and shield of the Church in Europe: the Tusk-Parolin audience and the spiritual weight of a nation on the front line
- Vocation as a gift received: when inner life thwarts the tyranny of the personal project
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