Pentecost is at once both a festival of the Holy Spirit and a festival of the Church - it's almost as if the two are inseparable. The "prayer group" of the Apostles, Mary and the disciples in the Upper Room received the gift of the Spirit, not as isolated individuals, but as individuals within a community. The gift then establishes an evangelising impulse that is, in time, to have a universal reach.
It is not a surprise, then, that the gift of Baptism in the Spirit should give rise to new communities rich in evangelising energy. Charismatic Renewal has given rise to a wide range of communities, some of them quite local and others with a national or international reach. They have become schools of Christian life and mission for Catholics in every part of the world. Often these communities include members from different states of life in the Church - men, women, married and single, those in consecrated life. There are also new religious congregations, whose individual charisms are rooted in the grace of Baptism in the Spirit. These communities, whilst being entirely "new," are at the same time faithful to "old" principles of Christian life such as poverty, chastity and obedience lived out according to an individual's state of life.
Such communities are a model for the present times of the "first community" of Christian life that is the Church, actualising in a particular place and time a style of life that is of universal value for the Church and for the Christian life.
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