ABOUT THE NSC
Pentecost Today USA (formerly the National Service Committee)
The National Service Committee was founded as a body of leaders in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal who work together to serve the Lord in renewing the grace of Pentecost in the life and mission of the Church. In July of 2019, the National Service Committee with input from the NSC Council discerned a new name: “Pentecost Today USA.”
Our new name captures our new vision and mission in response to the CHARIS commission and clearly distinguishes us from the newly-formed CHARIS National Service of Communion USA, of which we are a key participant:
“Pentecost” conveys baptism in the Holy Spirit and the charisms
“Today” stresses the urgency of our vision and mission
“USA” is our mission field
ABOUT CATHOLIC CHARISMATIC RENEWAL
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal as it exists today is the outgrowth from a retreat held in February 1967 of several faculty members and students from Duquesne University. Many of the students – though not all – experienced a movement of God’s Spirit called being “baptized in the Holy Spirit.” The professors had previously been “baptized in the Spirit” a week or two before. God’s action was also prepared for in a very human way by the students’ prayerful preparation in reading the Acts of the Apostles and a book entitled The Cross and the Switchblade.
What happened quickly spread to graduate students and professors at the University of Notre Dame and others serving in campus ministry in Lansing, Michigan. It continued to spread so that, as of this date, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal exists in over 238 countries in the world, having touched over 100 million Catholics in its nearly 40-year existence.
We recommend An Introduction to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal by John and Therese Boucher published by Servant Publications [Servant Publications recently sold its Catholic Charismatic section to St. Anthony Messenger Press] and also available from LaSalle Company (formerly Charismatic Renewal Services).
In 1975 Pope Paul VI greeted ten thousand Catholic charismatics from all over the world at the ninth international conference of the Renewal, “The Church and the world need more than ever that ‘the miracle of Pentecost should continue in history’ . . . How could this ‘spiritual renewal’ not be ‘good fortune’ for the Church and the world?” [others have translated “good fortune” as “a chance”]
Pope John Paul II has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. In 1979 soon after becoming Pope he said, “I am convinced that this movement is a sign of the Spirit’s action . . . a very important component in the total renewal of the Church.” He has met with the international leaders of the Renewal on a number of occasions, and regularly sends greetings to National and International Conferences on the Renewal.
As early as 1969, only two years after the Renewal started, the U.S. Bishops investigated the fledgling movement and the Committee on Doctrine wrote that “theologically the movement has legitimate reasons of existence. It has a strong biblical basis. It would be difficult to inhibit the working of the Spirit which manifested itself so abundantly in the early Church.”