A sitting American bishop casts a condemned movement as part of a Pentecostal renewal.
New Ways Ministry’s podcast recently featured Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, in an episode titled “Pentecost Reminds the Church That All Are Welcome.” The episode’s framing is already revealing. Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Ghost descending upon the Apostles to send them into the world preaching Christ crucified and risen, is now treated as the feast of ecclesial inclusion. The Church’s birth becomes the symbolic birthday of pastoral accommodation.
Stowe’s words are not even new. New Ways Ministry had already published his Pentecost reflection in 2020, where he compared the work of New Ways Ministry’s founders and supporters to John XXIII opening the windows, Francis of Assisi embracing lepers, Paul welcoming the Gentiles, Dorothy Day serving the poor, and Mother Teresa tending the dying. Francis, he wrote, had led the Church toward “a new Pentecost.”
That is the scandal beneath the scandal.
Stowe takes an organization long identified with opposition to Catholic moral teaching and places it inside the symbolic lineage of St. Paul, St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and Pentecost itself.
The implication is obvious. The critics are confinement. The activists are the Spirit.
Once that move is made, argument becomes nearly impossible. Who wants to argue against Pentecost? Who wants to be the man closing the window on the Holy Ghost?
But this is precisely how doctrinal revolution works in the modern Church. It does not usually begin by saying, “The old teaching was false.” It begins by saying, “The Spirit is doing something new.”
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