Thread by @SamRochadotcom

Re: People of Praise Charismatic Covenant Community (CCC)

I grew up in the most radical and truly cult-like CCC, Bread of Life, founded by Richard Herman in Akron, OH. We were associate members in OH and then moved with the founders to found their mission in Reynosa, Mexico.

We considered The Sword of the Spirit ecumenical communities like People of Praise or Alleluia to be too secular and worldly. We saw Word of God community founded by Ralph Martin in Michigan to have lacked resolve when he ended it and apologized. We were lunatics but influential.

Based on this experience, I do not think the People of Praise community is quite as wild and niche and over the top as most people think. It was a Pentecostal and Charismatic, which scares many Catholics and seculars alike, but not cult-like.

This doesn’t make me happy about the potential nomination or register much on the optics in general, but I know what a cult is like from experience and I do not like seeing it get watered down into hyperbolic rhetoric.

There were and are real cults and abuse in the Catholic Church and it does no favours to those of us who survived them to see un or underinformed hot takes casually making these serious determinations Willy nilly.

I don’t often talk about this cult experience because it is painful and also because I am just not ready yet. But it is hard to see so much of this flying around without making this one note.

By the way, I would love to say I WAS IN A CCC, THEY ARE CULTS, THIS IS A CULT, IT IS EVIL! But precisely because I was in one, I know that not all CCCs were the same and cannot in good faith lump my horrible experience with this one.