Brackettville, Texas:

"The Catholic Charismatic Group"

"The Charismatic Renewal group has changed the meeting day to Monday nights at 6:00 PM.

"This group is committed to learning, receiving, and using the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

"If you have a need of any kind of healing -- physical, emotional, or spiritual -- we invite you to come join us so we can pray for you."

From: The parish bulletin, on any given weekend.

Cautionary Note:

Here locally, at least, instead of basing their customs and usages on standard works with such titles as The Life In The Spirit Team Training Manual, or at least the newer version from around 2000, our (for me now former) group does its own legendary improvised quasi - ritualistic mumbo - jumbo

Thus, we immediately reported it to Archbishop José Gomez, when on Wednesday evening, August 1, 2007, "we" were coached in "mutual blessings."

FACT:

These so - called "mutual blessings" were right out of the old, old, Life In The Spirit Team Training Manual of the early 1970s.

And back then they were explicitly described for what they were intended to be: "Mutual exorcisms!"

Then, too: our senior leadership appears to draw heavily on what was described 30 or more years ago as Type I Catholic Pentecostalism.

Thus, Brackettville's para - liturgical rituals with oils seem to me, anyway, to be drawn from decades - old Protestant rituals; in the latter case, it seems that anointing oils helped Catholics to receive the Protestant notions of Baptism of the Holy Spirit, according to first - hand published testimony we're using in our ongoing Borderlands project from one of the Protestant leaders personally involved 'way back then.

A superb witness!

Both unbiased and sympathetic.

None which I am, personally.

Senior leadership seems to equate Jesus Christ as some sort of what Thomas Molnar (I think it was!) called "Jesus the maximum man;" in his book, most likely it would have been called something like The Pagan Temptation.