The weird Charismatic pivot in Alpha Course #9

In Alpha Course #9, we began quite a strange pivot into Charismatic-specific flavors of Christianity. That’s no accident, either. As we’ll see today, the masters of Alpha Course might say it’s ecumenical, but this course really aims for one specific destination in converting viewers. We’ll trace the origins of this destination—and see how very earthly it is.

(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 11/29/2025. They’re both available now! From introduction: Lonnie Frisbee’s appearance on Kathryn Kuhlman’s TV show. Answering Alpha tag for the entire series.)

SITUATION REPORT: An excitable old priest reveals the Charismatic bias in Alpha Course

Just like we see in the 80s movie Ladyhawke, an excitable old priest tells observant viewers exactly what they need to know about Alpha Course.

In this episode, this guy’s mere presence alone captured my attention so much I had to find out who he was and why Alpha Course showrunner Nicky Gumbel wanted this one guy there instead of countless other possible Catholic leaders.

His name is Raniero Cantalamessa. (As one reader has pointed out, that last name sounds strikingly like “Sing the Mass,” a fact that will become relevant in a few seconds.) He’s here to help Nicky Gumbel set up his desired results. When Gumbel drives home his point in the next video, we’ll be seeing even more of this fella.

Clearly, Gumbel hopes to convert viewers to Charismatic styles of Christianity. I can see why, too. During this video, we’re going to see constant references to powerful emotional experiences that Alpha Course will paint as divine in nature. They’re not, not even a little. But they’ll likely be new and unfamiliar enough to modern audiences that plenty of people will be fooled into making that mistake.

A quick overview of Alpha Course’s favorite Catholic

As the screenshot billing indicates, Raniero Cantalamessa was indeed (at the time this video was made, the mid/late-2010s) the official Preacher to the Papal Household. He’s a Capuchin friar, part of the Franciscan order, so he wears a plain brown robe and rope belt. During that time, he served John Paul II, Benedict, and Francis. In 2020, Francis made him a cardinal.

After Francis died this year, Cantalamessa—who’d already retired in 2024—gave a long-winded “exhortation” before the Conclave held its first voting session to elect the next Pope. (Being in his 90s, Cantalamessa couldn’t actually vote, since the age cutoff is 80.)

But Cantalamessa is also a huge proponent of Charismatic Catholicism. During a trip to the States in 1976, he got zapped by the Holy Ghost! And as we’ll see shortly, the place and timeframe of said zapping is incredibly telling. He doesn’t speak in tongues himself, but he often “sings” in tongues. (See? Relevant!)

So all this time, the Preacher to the Papal Household has been a big name in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR).

‘They’re not like us’: A 1970s fault line in Catholicism became a fault line in Christianity itself

Raniero Cantalamessa himself is part of a serious fault line in Catholicism that developed right around the time he got zapped by the Holy Ghost in Kansas City. In the late 1970s, I got to see the effects of that fault line firsthand when I was 8 years old.

At the time, I lived with my grandparents, along with my mom and younger sister. They were intensely German Catholic. Even at that age, I was a complete readaholic. One afternoon, I was hunting for new reading material when I encountered stacks of Catholic magazines under my grandma’s bed.

At first, they didn’t exactly look fascinating. But I was hard up for something new to read. I sifted through the issues until I came to one with an intriguing cover story about “Charismatic Catholics.” Immediately, I devoured the article. But it told me nothing concrete. All I gleaned was that this was some new movement in Catholicism that made other Catholics uneasy.

So I did the logical thing and took it to the closest expert I could find in Catholicism, my grandmother. (My aunt the nun wasn’t there that day. I still wonder what she’d have told me if she’d been close to hand. I’m not daring enough to ask her now.) I showed my grandma the magazine and asked what these “Charismatic Catholics” were.

She gently took the magazine from me and looked at the cover. A long moment passed.

Then, her mouth pursed, she said, “They’re not like us.” She handed back the magazine.

And that was that. For decades, that’s all I knew about Charismatic Catholics. When I did learn who and what they were, I marveled at how simple and accurate my grandmother’s assessment had been years ago.

Yes, indeed. They weren’t like us at all.

And now these practices have infected not only Catholicism but evangelicalism. I use the word “infection” for a reason, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Sidebar: Some lingo to know

Charismatic: Using the so-called “gifts of the Spirit,” or charism, which Christians regard as divine gifts from Yahweh. There are lots of them, but usually the term focuses on speaking in tongues, magic healing, and prophecy. Sometimes, prophecy gets called a word of knowledge or something similar. For our purposes today, I’ll be capitalizing the word “Charismatic” to differentiate it from the personal quality of charisma.

Holy Spirit/Holy Ghost: The force behind “gifts of the Spirit.” It’s supposed to be the part of Yahweh that actually does stuff. Nicky Gumbel doesn’t like calling it the “Holy Ghost,” for some reason, vastly preferring “Holy Spirit.” Pentecostals back in my day said “Holy Ghost” with no apologies. They’re the same thing.

Infilling/Baptism in the Holy Spirit/Spiritual Baptism: The moment that Yahweh’s Spirit possesses a follower. (Yes, he’s supposed to be everywhere, but nobody thinks about it too much.) Pentecostals believe that the infilling always results in speaking in tongues. Other Charismatics might allow other expressions.

Speaking in tongues: Usually baby-babble evoking Ancient Aramaic, but it can mean different things to different Charismatic Christians.

1. Someone baby-babbles during personal prayer, at which time it’s a secret prayer language that isn’t meant to be translated. Heck, it doesn’t even need to sound like a real language—which is great, because it sure doesn’t.
2. One person stands and baby-babbles during revival preaching or sermons. Everything has to stop till they’re finished, and then another person must then stand up and “translate” the baby-babble because it’s a special message from Yahweh for the congregation. If nobody is willing to do that, the pastor or the babbler must then “translate,” but this doesn’t happen often. The “translation” will almost always be nonspecific rah-rah or a generic warning/exhortation to listeners. Many Charismatics believe this is the only valid form of speaking in tongues; they call it prophecy or a word of knowledge.
3. Apparently, one form involves singing in wordless melody during prayer. (See: Raniero Cantalamessa.)

Everyone, meet the Catholic Charismatic Renewal

Way back in 1967, a Catholic history professor and a Catholic grad student at the Catholic school Duquesne University in Pittsburgh found themselves in a prayer meeting with Charismatic Episcopalians. (Apparently, they exist!) At this prayer meeting, both Catholics experienced the infilling. From there, it spread rapidly. Later that year, these new Charismatic Catholics had a big meetup at Notre Dame that drew in even more curious Catholics.

By 1969, the movement solidified further. It gained formal leaders and officers, along with establishing services they could offer interested Catholics. Some historians link it to the Cursillo Movement, which sought to deepen lay Catholics’ faith and fervor, because some of those early Charismatic Catholic leaders were formerly involved in leadership roles with Cursillo and many early Charismatic Catholics attended functions in both movements. In 1975, they moved their annual meetup to Rome—and received Pope Paul VI’s endorsement!

At the time in 1975, Raniero Cantalamessa was a regular Catholic professor in Milan. He’d already heard of this new Charismatic Catholic movement, and he didn’t like it at first. A year or so later, he traveled to the United States to learn English. While there, he got a ticket to the 1977 Conference on Charismatic Renewal in the Christian Churches. It was held in Kansas City and it was huge, with 40k-50k people attending.

On the way home from the conference, he says he attended a prayer meeting in New Jersey—and experienced his own infilling. But he didn’t speak in tongues then, nor even later. All he’ll admit to is chanting wordlessly in singsong cadence, sort of like singing.

Dazzled by these experiences, Cantalamessa quit his professor job to become an itinerant preacher. But in 1980, not long after that decision, Pope John Paul II hired him to be the Preacher to the Papal Household. This appointment granted the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) movement a great deal of legitimacy.

From there, the movement only grew. In 2008, Pew Research estimated that 54% of Hispanic Catholics identify as Charismatic, while about 12% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics do. That same year, Barna found that about 36% of Catholics in America were Charismatic. In 2013, The Catholic World Report estimated that there were 160M Charismatic Catholics in the world.

So my grandmother was right: They really weren’t like us. But they would become far more numerous than either of us could have imagined.

How the roots of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal entwined with those of the Toronto Blessing

You know what else was happening in the mid-1970s? Well, lots of stuff actually.

One major influence on the Toronto Blessing is the Jesus People movement. It began in 1967 and drew in many thousands of American teens and young adults with its emphasis on euphoric, spiritual-seeming experiences. By the mid-70s, it still profoundly influenced evangelicals—who wanted to make their entire lives a reflection of their deep, fervent faith.

Meanwhile, Alpha Course started in 1977 in London at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB). Originally, it was just meant to be an onboarding course for new members of the church. Later on around 1990, Nicky Gumbel revamped it to be more evangelistic—and it went global.

And stateside, Charismatic Christianity was having a moment in general. That 1977 conference represented a serious turning point: Protestants and Catholics praying together in Charismatic harmony, all chasing the same Jesus People-style experiences and highs. As one writer put it, it was “the Conference ‘heard around the world.'” Its speakers hailed from every corner of Christendom: Catholic, Pentecostal, nondenominational, Lutheran, Foursquare, Southern Baptist, you name it. About half the attendees seem to have been Catholic.

Kansas City was a wise choice for this ecumenical conference: It’s in the middle of the United States, more or less, and central to pretty much every other part of the country. So big developments in the Kansas City area can easily spread nationwide. (That’s not always a great thing.) Indeed, from that conference, Charismatic Protestant groups flowered forth. So did a sudden emphasis on prophecy as a legit Christian function, since prophecies flowed left and right from the conference.

(You can see a bunch of these prophecies on page 10 of this PDF from a Catholic group. None would look like prophecies to normies, however. Rather, they all sound exactly like the utterly unimpressive, nonspecific rah-rah “translations” I used to hear as a Pentecostal: Stay the course! Keep praying! Jesus harder! Y’all better get your shit together! I’m coming back any day now!

In 1982, just five years later, Mike Bickle founded the Kansas City Fellowship (KCF). A former Catholic turned evangelical, he’d attended conferences like the 1977 one, though not that specific one. That KCF congregation looked strikingly Pentecostal, right down to people speaking in tongues. It grew very quickly. Out of this church, the Kansas City Prophets movement flourished in the early- to mid-1980s. Eventually, KCF and its associated movements profoundly influenced the Vineyard Church movement led by John Wimber. From 1988-1991, KCF and Vineyard worked together fairly tightly.

In 1990, Wimber headed to London because a KC Prophet, Paul Cain, told him there’d be a massive revival there soon. Many Charismatic-friendly Anglican leaders offered formal support for the project, including Sandy Millar of Holy Trinity Brompton! (See: pp. 11-12 of this PDF timeline.) The revival failed to materialize, and the hypocrisy of the “Prophets” ended up embarrassing Mike Bickle and Wimber both.

Also in 1990, John Arnott founded Toronto Airport Vineyard (TAV), which would be so instrumental later in spreading Charismatic ideas and practices to Protestants.

By the end of 1993, Vineyard churches were ready for a massive revival. At the beginning of 1994, they got it—with the Toronto Blessing at TAV.

Nicky Gumbel enters the chat

This is where Nicky Gumbel comes in. He was a big part of the early Toronto Blessing!

In 1994, he was a curate at HTB. (That means he was a newly-ordained priest/deacon, but still in training under the church’s vicar.) One evening in May 1994, Elli Mumford of South West London Vineyard held a little meeting at her house to talk about what she’d just experienced at TAV. Gumbel was at this meeting. Under Mumford’s influence, Charismatic manifestations broke out in the group during prayer.

The situation got so emotional that Gumbel completely forgot about his upcoming staff meeting at HTB. When someone else finally remembered to call Sandy Millar, the vicar, he didn’t condemn what was happening. Instead, he consulted with Gumbel—and invited Mumford to preach at HTB the next Sunday, which was May 29, 1994. According to the timeline of the event (p. 25), “this is the day that the TAV-based movement ‘goes public’ in Britain.”

The next Sunday, Gumbel and other members of HTB gave their testimonies. The results were spectacular, with TAV-style manifestations everywhere. Later on, Gumbel wrote glowing endorsements of the Toronto Blessing in church periodicals and books. (But in early 1996, he and other UK leaders seem to have declined an invitation from a Toronto Blessing critic, Mark Haville, to live-debate the Blessing onstage in front of an audience.)

So Nicky Gumbel is part of the bridge between Charismatic Catholics and what would become fundagelicals: the fusion of staid, scholarly evangelicals with the rambunctious fundamentalists who’d already been speaking in tongues and dancing in the Spirit for decades by then. When he revamped Alpha Course, inevitably he would do it from the point of view of his own favorite form of Christianity. As one 1997 critic notes:

However, to look more closely at the teaching of Alpha is soon to realise that it seeks strongly to promote ‘supernatural gifts’, in particular, tongues, healing and words of knowledge. [. . .] It cannot be overlooked that Alpha has surfaced hot on the heels of the ‘Toronto Blessing’ and that HTB was the focal point in Britain for that dubious burst of religious hysteria. [The Banner of Truth, 1977, reprinted in Christian Study Library.]

Interestingly, the critic also notes that Gumbel promotes Wimber’s “‘power evangelism’ model.”

Alpha Course is hyping Charismatic experiences here, and for a reason

My official Alpha Course overview manual says that Alpha Course talks 8-10 are meant to be “Weekend Talks.” Other resources call these the “Holy Spirit” talks. The organizers of this course really want people to attend this weekend retreat, too. According to the Alpha site, these events are crucial parts of the recruiting process:

It’s the part of Alpha that many people say was the turning point in their Alpha experience. We consistently see hearts more open to Jesus and lives changed. And that’s why we do it.

We see exactly this quote elsewhere on the site. I can see why, too. Getting people out of their normal contexts is very important when trying to persuade them of strange new ideas they might not normally accept. Getting them around new people is important too, especially if the leaders among those people are all on board with the strange new ideas. If attendees have to spend time preparing for and traveling to the event, all the better: they’re emotionally and materially invested in it.

But it’s not just the weekend itself that’s important, of course. It’s also the actual content of the weekend. The talks given at these retreats are all oriented around “the Holy Spirit.” Not only that, but they’re oriented around an extremely specific version of the Holy Spirit: the Charismatic one that seeks huge physical effects and possible weird manifestations like speaking in tongues.

If attendees aren’t completely on board after #10, the rest of the course won’t land at all. It’s all about spiritual warfare, evangelism, magic healing, and mandatory church attendance. It’s all very evangelical-sounding, but don’t forget Raniero Cantalamessa: Catholics willing to do all this are more than welcome as well. The point man for three popes thinks this is all great stuff, so Alpha Course hopes he’ll bring in more Catholics with his seal of approval.

Alpha Course DENIED

Who Alpha won’t bring in, though, are Christians who get rightly skeeved out by the Holy Spirit emphasis here. There are plenty of them, too. They’ll rightly perceive that emphasis as an infection that forever shifts the very nature of their religion and how it’s practiced.

So Alpha Course has had to make some course corrections in how it approaches these supposed manifestations of the Holy Spirit. The masters of Alpha Course want the converts, but not the messy controversy. That’s where we’ll take up next as we review video #10, the last of the “Holy Spirit Weekend” videos.

We’re almost finished with Alpha Course itself! And it only gets weirder from here.

NEXT UP: Alpha Course #10, where it seals the deal on that Charismatic pivot. See you soon! <3

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