FIRST SEE:
Deceptive antics of the Catholic Charismatic renewal: Father Expedicto Magembe of Mountain Sion and Christ the King prayer Group
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2009/06/deceptive-antics-of-catholic.html
Taking Catholics back to the ‘upper room’
Sunday Life | July 26, 2009
http://www.monitor.co.ug/artman/publish/sunday_life/Taking_Catholics_back_to_the_upper_room_88656.shtml
Scores of Catholics flocked the Namugongo Martyrs shrine for a week recently to attend a conference, led by one of the people that were present during the small retreat that saw the birth of the Catholic Christian Revival, writes Vicky Wandawa.
Ms Patti G. Mansfield was one of the 25 university students that attended the retreat in Pittsburgh, which led to an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and thus a renaissance in the Catholic Church.
She was the main speaker at the conference at Namugongo Martyrs shrine, for which the theme was, “Return to the upper room,” in other words beseeching the participants to boost their spiritual lives. The conference attracted people from all walks of life. Naturally, large gatherings usually attract traders as well. Along the pavements in the compound were numerous traders ranging from those selling African jewellery, rosaries, t-shirts and herbal medicines.
A number of dioceses all over the country were represented, such as Hoima, Teso, and Fort Portal among others. Each day, a different diocese led the mass through prayer and singing. The members of that particular diocese made a joyful procession through the crowd, amidst singing and dancing. Most of the participants from upcountry spent their nights at the grounds, right from the first day of the conference to the last. This explained the spectacle of mattresses, mats, bed sheets, travelling bags, and cooking gadgets, spread among the crowd.
One mother, Margaret, who spent the nights at the Namugongo grounds during the conference, said: “I came on a truck from Fort Portal and have spent the whole week here. I had no worries about my baby sleeping outside because I knew that with God, she would not fall sick. I am a born-again Catholic and I could not miss this conference for anything in the world. I feel like I have received spiritual healing and witnessed miracles. Many people have been healed.”
The conference attracted different classes of people including the working. Lydia, a catering manager, said: “I am a charismatic Catholic but there are times I feel that my faith has reduced. I now feel rejuvenated. Though I am so busy, I have been commuting from work to here for the past two days. From Patti, I have learnt that with humility, God will surely lift me up.”
Mansfield got the crowd excited as she occasionally tried to exchange places with her Luganda interpreter and mentioned some Luganda words. She moved the crowd when she said someone once told her that the most beautiful and delightful people are found in Africa, and that she had proved it true.
Among the Christian principles she preached about was humility. “If you are filled with your own plans and ideas, you will live empty. Therefore, in order to get a great response from God, we have to embrace humility. God will lift up the lowly,” she said, quoting a verse from Luke, chapter 1.
Mansfield took the crowd through her life history. She was born to an Irish mother and Italian father, both Catholic, and had big dreams. “Just like any other girl, I dreamt of marrying a rich man and living in a castle and I always prayed to God to “send me a French man, make sure he is rich, I want to live in a castle,” a prayer she later called selfish because it wasn’t asking for the will of God. On she went to a Catholic university, and it’s here that she experienced the renewal.
At university, she joined a small group of other students who used to study the rosary daily and extensively. During one of their prayer sessions at the university chapel, the young people experienced what Mansfield described as close to what the apostles in the Book of Acts experienced, they were baptised in the Holy Spirit. “As I knelt down in front of the tabernacle where Jesus was, I started to tremble. I had a sense of the awesome presence of God.”
Following the incident, she went to one of the priests at the chapel and described what she had experienced, only to be told her that the exact thing had happened to a prayer-mate of hers. She prayed for more of her prayer-mates to get the experience she had gone through and after a while, the congregation was all baptised by the Holy Spirit.
“None of us had any idea that what happened at that chapel, to a group of very ordinary students, would begin a renewal of the Holy Spirit that has gone all over the world.” Mansfield says that currently, there are 119 million members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in 235 countries, including those in Africa.
