Expert: Griff Ruby - 11/6/2007

Question
Dear Griff,

               In catholicism is it true that some people are exposed to speaking in Tongues like God's language? I have been exposed to it, on Pentecost the birthday of the catholic church three years ago and it happend to be on the sabbath day too! If the Sacrament of Confirmation is a sign of receiving the Holy Spirit, why don’t we Catholics speak in tongues after receiving it?

Born-again Catholics who speak in tongues are not uncommon today. Which I am a born again catholic! I feel as if I speak in this language (glossia & zenoglossia!Glossolalia: This is the most commonly meaning of "speaking in tongues." This term is derived from two Greek words: glõssai, which means "tongues" or "languages," and lalien which means "to speak."  My mom and Dad: Still comments: "To the outsider, hearing someone speaking in 'tongues' is like hearing so much gibberish.And you sound like your speaking in gibberish, but to my cousin Olga her names means Holy! She speaks it and so does her husband and littlest daughter she is in her young teens have recieved this phenomenon of intense religious experience expressing itself in ecstatic speech."

And they dont think I am speaking gibberish! My uncle recieved it as well he is Catholic same religion as me!A person speaking in tongues is typically in a state of religious ecstasy and is often unable to understand the words that she/he is saying.Most Christians who speak in tongues believe that they are speaking in an existing language that is of God. However, it is not similar to any known human tongue it is unknown. Many speculate that it is a heavenly tongue. i.e. a language spoken by angels or by God, and does not correspond to any human language. This is what I have been exposed to three years ago!

It was seen frequently in the church at Corinth in the 1st century CE. It was experienced rarely during the history of Christianity until the 20th century when it became quite common.

Xenoglossia: (a.k.a. Zenolalia, Xenoglossia) This is the ability to spontaneously speak a foreign language without first having learned it, or even been exposed to it. This term is also derived from two Greek words: Xenos, which means "foreign" or "foreigner", and glõssai, which means "tongues" or "languages." An event in which an individual who knows only English, has never been exposed to any other language, and who suddenly starts to speak in fluent Swahili or Aramaic even Dutch would be an example of Xenoglossia. Still people states that essentially all claims of xenoglossia are hoaxes. Conservetive Catholic groups generally teach that believers are "saved" or "born again" when they trust Jesus as Lord and Savior and baptisted in water then recieve sacrement of communion then confirmation. Some teach that a believer must first repent of their sins before being saved and receiving communion. Others believe that the act of repentance is a "good work" and thus not needed for salvation.

Non Catholicism experience these false tongues

Being slain in the Spirit -- fainting and remaining motionless for several hours,
Laughing in the Spirit -- exhibiting uncontrollable waves of laughter,  
Getting drunk in the spirit,
Weeping in the Spirit,  
Barking like a dog, and
other unusual activities.

In our true religion we dont do those silly things above that I listed we are told in Mark 16:17 – right before Jesus ascended into heaven, He prophesied “they will speak in new tongues.” It happened!  There are only four instances in the New Testament where people speak in tongues:

1 - Acts 2:3 – when the Holy Spirit descended upon the twelve apostles on Pentecost Sunday, they began to speak in tongues.  Acts 2:6 says that men from fifteen different nations each heard the apostles speaking in their own language.

2 – Acts 10:44-46 – after Peter preached the gospel, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word, and they (including the Gentiles) began to speak in tongues.

3 – Acts 19:5-6 – after Paul baptized and confirmed about twelve Ephesians, they spoke with tongues.

4 – 1 Cor. 12-14 – Paul teaches that members of the Corinthian church had the gift of speaking in tongues.

In each instance in the book of Acts, tongue speaking is heard as if it is a foreign language. This gift of the Holy Spirit was for the purpose of spreading the gospel to all peoples of the world.  Peter supports this view when he equates the Gentile tongue-speaking with the tongue-speaking at Pentecost (which was heard as foreign languages) when he says “the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning” (Acts 11:15).
In my case it fell on Pentecost three years ago so my experience is real and truth!

Paul says “For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit.”  Paul teaches that tongue-speaking is a gift of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:4,10-11).  Paul therefore does not prohibit tongue-speaking (1 Cor. 14:39) and even encourages it (1 Cor. 14:5) when received according to his parameters.

However, Paul warns us that tongue-speaking is not always a gift of the Spirit, but may originate out of spiritual pride and immaturity.  This is why Paul called the Corinthians immature (1 Cor. 3:1-3; 14:20), and said they were seeking the wisdom of men and not God (1 Cor. 2:5,13; 3:18).  Many people in the Corinthian church claimed to have the gift of tongues, but were actually mimicking the divine gift in order to gain ascendancy in the church. This caused arrogance, dissensions and jealousies among them (1 Cor. 1:10-13; 3:3; 4:6-7,18; 5:2; 11:17-22).

Tongue-speaking can also have demonic origins.  When people are unfaithful and motivated by pride and not love for God, God can allow demons to enter the church to punish the unfaithful. These demons can appear holy and good, and inspire tongue-speaking and other speech, but they are really deceivers who wish to confuse the faithful and lead them away from the truth (cf. Ezek. 14:6-11; 1 Kings 22:22-23).  Paul warns that some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons (1 Tim. 4:1).  This is why John tells us to “test the spirits to see whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1).

Therefore, tongue-speaking can be a gift of the Holy Spirit, or may be of human or demonic origin.  Paul makes several important points regarding the gift of tongues:

1 – The gift of tongues is a lesser gift from God.  While speaking in tongues is a gift of the Spirit, Paul teaches that it is a lesser gift on the continuum of divine gifts from God (1 Cor. 12:10,28,30). For example, Paul says that tongues is a much lesser gift than the gift of prophecy (1 Cor. 14:1-5,19,22).  In fact, the gift of tongues is not even mentioned among the gifts of the Spirit in the latter books of the New Testament (Rom. 12:4-8; Eph. 4:11-12; Gal. 5:22; 1 Peter 4:7-11; 1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6).

2 – The gift of tongues will cease.  Paul says “as for tongues, they will cease” (1 Cor. 13:8).  The Greek word for “cease” (pauomai) means that the gift of tongues will end abruptly, on its own, and will not be replaced by another gift.  The gift of tongues is the only gift of the Holy Spirit that is said to “cease” in this way.  When Paul says that prophecies and knowledge will “pass away” (1 Cor. 13:8), the phrase “pass away” (in Greek, katargeo) indicates that these gifts will be replaced by a superior power.  This appears to take place when we begin our life in eternity (1 Cor. 13:10-12).  Not so with tongues.

Paul does not say when the gift of tongues would cease, and whether the gift would return intermittently after its cessation.  However, Augustine wrote that the gift of tongues had ceased by the time of his day.  Augustine explained that this was because the Catholic Church now spoke the language of the nations, and tongue-speaking was only for purposes of evangelization (Aquinas agreed). The fact that the gift of tongues is not recorded in later books of the New Testament suggest that the gift may have even been ceasing during the biblical period.

Nevertheless, there are a few recorded instances of saints speaking in tongues over the centuries (Sts. Dominic, Anthony of Padua, Francis Xavier, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola).  This demonstrates that the gift of tongues is very rare, and given to the holiest of people.

3 – Tongue-speaking has strict parameters.  Finally, Paul prescribed strict parameters for those who would receive the gift of tongues:

(a) The person who speaks in tongues should pray for the power to interpret his own tongue (1 Cor. 14:13), or have someone who has the gift of interpretation present to interpret the tongue (1 Cor. 14:27).  If the tongue cannot be interpreted, the person is to remain silent (1 Cor. 14:28).  Therefore, tongues should not be unintelligible utterances, but should be understood (1 Cor. 14:6-12).

           (b) In a congregation, only two or three people at most should speak in tongues (1 Cor. 14:27), and each must speak in turn.  This is the case even though there may be hundreds or even thousands of people in a church.  The many Protestant churches that call upon many people, even hundreds during a service, to speak in tongues contravenes Paul’s divine mandate, and raises doubts about its authenticity.

           (c) The tongue-speaking must be done for the edification of the Church (1 Cor. 14:5,26).  Paul says that a person who speaks in tongues edifies himself (1 Cor. 14:4) which is good, but Paul also says tongues must edify the Church. This is why Paul requires one to interpret the tongue, and why Paul says only two or three at the most should speak in tongues during an assembly.  A mass proliferation of tongue-speaking in an assembly would lead to confusion.  This would not be of divine origin because Paul says, in connection with tongue-speaking, that God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33).

           (d) After setting the parameters of tongue-speaking and warning against avoiding confusion, Paul says that “women should keep silence in the churches.  For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, even as the law says” (1 Cor. 14:34).  This means that women are not allowed to speak in tongues in church.  Paul is underscoring that this is a divine command from God when he ends his statement with “even as the law says.”  Again, many Protestant churches contravene this divine command by allowing women to speak “in tongues” in their assemblies.


   Paul teaches that a proliferation of tongue-speaking in a church may actually be a sign of unbelief and God’s ensuing judgment upon them.  When Paul teaches the Corinthians about the proper use of tongues (1 Cor. 14:21), he quotes from

Isaiah 28:11-12: “By men of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.”  Paul’s use of Isaiah is significant because he is referring to the apostate Jews of the 8th century right before they were destroyed by the Assyrians.  To punish the Jews, God first allowed the Assyrians to speak in foreign tongues to them to confuse them before they were ultimately destroyed. God’s judgment being revealed in the form of foreign tongues was first prophesied to Israel in the 15th century, B.C. (see Deut. 28:49-50).  Remember also how God sent unintelligible tongues to punish His people for their lack of faith at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11).

Therefore, Paul is warning the Corinthians that their abuse of tongue-speaking is a sign of God’s judgment against them. These abuses included many people speaking in tongues, out of turn, without an interpreter, and for pride and not the edification of the church.  This is why Paul says that “tongues are a sign…for unbelievers” (1 Cor. 14:22).  This is the same “sign” that God gave the unbelieving Jews before they were punished.

This is also why Paul says that unbelievers look at the whole Corinthian church speaking in tongues and conclude that they “are mad” (1 Cor. 14:23).  Paul is telling the Corinthians that their abuse of tongues makes them look insane, and this is a sign of their unbelief (that is why tongues are a “sign for unbelievers”; the “unbelievers” were the Corinthians themselves).  This is the same reason why Jesus spoke in parables, to further harden the hearts of those who did not believe in Him, as a punishment for their lack of faith (Matt. 13:13-15).Paul says that “women should keep silence in the churches. Why did he say this and yet most churches have women preaching or reading gospels?

Are you Pre, Mid, or Post? If you don’t know how to answer that question, you’re probably a Catholic. I get ask this all the time but,Most Fundamentalists and Evangelicals know that these words are shorthand for pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, and post-tribulation. The terms all refer to when the rapture is supposed to occur. In Revelation 20:1–3, 7–8, we read, "Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while. . . . And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth."


The period of a thousand years, the writer of this book Revelation tells us, is the reign of Christ, and the thousand-year period is popularly called the millennium.

The millennium is a harbinger of the end of the world, and Revelation 20 is interpreted in three ways by conservative Protestants but what about Catholicism interpretation. The Protestants claim there are three schools of thought are called postmillennialism, amillennialism, and premillennialism.

With respect to the rapture, Catholics certainly believe that the event of our gathering together to be with Christ will take place, though they do not generally use the word "rapture" to refer to this event (somewhat ironically, since the term "rapture" is derived from the text of the Latin Vulgate of 1 Thess. 4:17—"we will be caught up," So my other question to you is why does the bible say at one point two people will be in the feild one taken and the other left? I dont get it? And arent ghost in purgetory? The souls that are dead but dont know they are dead arent they in Purgetory or cleansing state?  

Answer
Pardon me for not providing you with a custom answer to this, but as it does not seem that you have been reading my answers I will instead (for anyone who does read this) provide an article about the "Charismatic Movement" which is the best researched I know of and definitely worth a read:
       Charismaticism is a particularly virulent modern-day mania infecting the Church of the New Order, which has its roots deep in heresy.
       In the late 17th century, the beginnings of Charismaticism can already be seen as a derivative of the Protestant heresy.  Philip Jakob Spener and his disciple, August Hermann Francke, from his vantage point at the new University of Halle, through over 6,000 graduates in Protestant theology, spread the ideas of "Pietism" throughout Germany.  The Pietists specially emphasized emotional feeling rather than reason and cultivated "enthusiasm" in worship.  They encouraged "Herzensreligion," a religion of
the heart founded on an "individual, personal experience" of Christ, much like the modern Protestant Evangelicals, who talk about a "personal experience of Christ," by which they refer to an over-emotionalized, highly personalized attitude that overrides true belief.
       The roots of modern-day Charismaticism (Pentecostalism) go back to 1901 when a group of Methodists at a Topeka, Kansas, prayer meeting began "experiencing the spirit."  The emotional prayer style soon spread throughout the Assemblies of God, as well as other small Protestant denominations.  A typical charismatic prayer meeting includes music, singing or praying in tongues, healing sessions, prophesying, and body prayer.
       The phenomenon caught on nationwide among Novus Ordinarians who were searching for new ways of praying during the first flurry of Vatican II changes.  The movement names Vatican II as the starting point, crediting a prayer by Pope John XXIII to the Holy Ghost to "renew Thy wonders in our day as by a new Pentecost."  The Charismatic Movement in the American Catholic Church traces its beginnings to a "spirit-filled" graduate student and faculty retreat at Duquesne University in 1967.  Protestant Pentecostal prayer forms such as speaking in tongues (glossolalia) and being "baptized in the Holy Ghost" took hold.
       Known initially as "Catholic Pentecostalism," the movement was renamed to reflect the various spiritual "gifts" (charismata), purportedly given by the Holy Ghost to individuals.  The movement is associated with such other cult-like, mind-controlling organizations and programmes as the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD, which was perfectly traditional before Vatican II, but afterwards was corrupted), Taize, "oecumenism," Marriage Encounter, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), Renew, Focolare, Cursillo, Neo-Catechumenate, Legionnaires of Christ/Regnum Christi, Communion and Liberation, Miles Jesu, Theology of the Body, and Wicca (Gaia).
       RCIA is the New Order's "Christian Initiation of Adults," replacing the traditional Sacrament of Baptism.  It is full of an amalgam of naturalism, environmentalism, a bit of voodoo, wicca (a simplified version of Satanic witchcraft for mass consumption), and some Protestant traits all mixed together, but absent is genuine Catholicism.  (By the way, RCIA was never approved, even by the Modern Vatican.)
       Renew is a program of deconstruction of the Church, in which the idea of a priest offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is being scuttled.  
Committees decide what prayers to say and what their approach to sin is, if any.  Renew has been piped into schools and parishes, so that it has blanketed the Catholic Church in the United States and abroad.  Having a veneer of just enough Catholic-sounding phraseology to deceive the unwary, Renew has changed Catholics without their even knowing that they are being changed.
       Moreover, Renew appears to be a front group for the extremist Call to Action group, which advocates the reinventing and re-founding of the Church with an entirely different structure and doctrine.  It advocates the worship of a feminist/environmentalist Goddess Earth, priestesses, Church-approved homosexuality, Church-approved abortions, and witchcraft-based enneagrams, introduced through lay-led "liturgies" that take place in private homes, much like the Marxist "study clubs" of the 1950s that were transformed into the "parish council," which took over the direction of the parish and eventually the entire diocese.  It has also become associated with extremist social causes and liberalistic political programs.
        Wicca (White Witchcraft), also associated with Gaia, or Goddess spirituality, is of rather recent vintage.  Its virtual grandfather was Aleister Crowley, an English satanist from around 1900.  After having been expelled from the occultist Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he set up his own "Abbey of Thelema" to practice "sex magic."  Crowley's younger friend, Gerald Gardner, in the 1950s designed witchcraft rituals borrowed from Crowley, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and the Order of the Golden Dawn.
        This Charismatic Movement is far from true Catholicism.  It represents an almost complete abandonment of even nominally Catholic practices, beliefs, and modes of discourse.  Charismaticism is based on the erroneous notion that emotional experience always accompanies the conferral of grace, whereas the Catholic doctrine is that the only sensible indication of the conferral of grace is the Sacramental sign itself.
       Charismatics see no reason to exclude non-Catholics or even non-Christians from the chance to experience the "charismata," the extraordinary manifestations of the Holy Ghost, which helped to spread the Faith during the early Church, but disappeared after the Apostolic Age, when the Church had established itself and had no further use or need of the charismata.  Such manifestations had specific purposes, such as to spread the Gospel to hearers of different languages, or to prove the credibility or holiness of an apostolic speaker.  In fact, one of the aims of the Charismatic Movement is to unite various Protestant movements with New Order Catholics under the banner of "signs and wonders."
      Charismaticism is intimately connected with the error of "Fatimism," which finds a new basis of faith in private revelations, prophecies, visions, "signs and wonders."  So far does this sometimes go that there are "Charismatic Catholics" who still continue to practice witchcraft and idol worship.  All this is, of course, heretical and of Satan, as St. Paul tells us:
"And then that wicked one shall be revealed:  whom the Lord Jesus shall kill with the spirit of his mouth and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:  him Whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power and signs and lying wonders:  And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish:  because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.  Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying" (2 Thessalonians 2:8-11/DRV).
      Charismaticism bears a frightening relation to several heresies condemned by the Church:
Gnosticism:  a heresy proclaiming a secret knowledge (Greek:  gnosis) that makes its possessors the only true believers.
Messalianism:  a heresy that originated in Mesopotamia in A.D. 360.  The Messalians denied that the Sacraments give grace and declared that the only spiritual power is prayer leading to possession by the Holy Ghost.  Such "possession" eventually led to immorality, from which they were also called "The Filthy."  They were condemned by various bishops and councils of the Church.
Montanism:  a heresy that claimed the Holy Ghost superseded the revelation of Christ and was supplementing the revelation of Christ, such that they were acting under a "new outpouring of the Spirit."  Pope St. Zephyrinus (199-217) denied them communion with the Church.  Note that this same heresy is prevalent in the Church of the New Order, when it proposes that the Deposit of Faith, as revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ, can be "updated" or "modernized" or even replaced by some kind of "spirit of the times."
Nominalism: an erroneous modern philosophy teaching that there are no absolutes, only the senses and feelings.  This philosophy led to the denial of several doctrines of the Church (the divinity of Christ, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the Saints).
       Regardless of the fact that certain New Order Church officials have made personally favorable statements or that the post-conciliar popes have addressed groups of Charismatics, no official pronouncement has been made or official approbation given.  Even the U.S. bishops in a "Statement on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal" (1975) had to point to the dangers of the movement:  gnosticism, biblical fundamentalism, exaggeration of the importance of emotionalism, reckless oecumenism, and "small faith communities."
       Archbishop Dwyer, of Portland, Oregon, in a scathing criticism of the charismatic movement, warned in 1974: "We regard it bluntly as one of the most dangerous trends in the Church in our time, closely allied in spirit with other disruptive and divisive movements threatening grave harm to unity and damage to countless souls."
       One author sums up the error and danger of the Charismatic Movement as:
"a blighted tree bearing poisonous fruit, sown by the Devil among Protestants and transplanted into the Catholic Church after Vatican II....  This fruit is truly a seed of destruction.  Make no mistake.  More than just a fad, the charismatic 'renewal' is a dangerous and heretical movement that is installing itself in the Catholic milieu.  First, it attacks the Church's character of exclusive mediator between Our Lord and men, which she possesses by divine mandate.  Second, this kind of oecumenical gathering denies the exclusive nature of that mediation by encouraging inter-communion with other confessions.  Charismatics should be called what they really are:  "chari-schismatics" (John Vennari, "Close-ups of the Charismatic Movement [Tradition in Action, 2002], 175 pp.).
        St. Vincent Ferrer in his Treatise on the Spiritual Life rightly condemns such an attitude as unCatholic and spiritually deadly:
The soul that attaches itself to these false consolations falls into very dangerous errors, for God justly permits the devil to have power to augment in it these kinds of spiritual tastes, to repeat them frequently, and to inspire it with sentiments that are false, dangerous, and full of illusions, but which the misguided soul imagines to be true.  Alas!  How many souls have been seduced by these deceitful consolations? The majority of raptures and ecstasies, or, to call them by their proper name, frenzies of these forerunners of Antichrist spring from this cause.
       The consequences of such poisonous fruit can be seen from the following Associated Press release from Sao Paulo, Brazil:
The Rev. Marcelo Rossi readies a bucket of water and flashes a grin that might be devilish if it weren't on the face of a priest.  "Here!  Here!" screams the crowd, mostly women.  The 192-centimeter-tall former gym teacher rears back and sends a jet of holy water over the excited congregation.  Then another, and another.  Soon everyone within 15 meters of the stage is soaked -- and ecstatic.
It's not your average Catholic mass.   But Rossi is anything but an average priest.  With his movie-star good looks and a chart-topping record, "Music to Praise the Lord," Rossi regularly draws crowds of 70,000 to the masses he celebrates four times a week in a former bottle factory on Sao Paulo's south side.  The turnout is surprising.  Although some 80 percent of Brazilians ostensibly are Catholics, far fewer regularly attend church.
Rossi is part of a new generation of clerics who belong to the Catholic Church's charismatic movement.  The local press has dubbed them "pop star priests."
Others include Padre Zeca, the "surfing priest," who recently drew 35,000 people to a mass on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro.  Basketball-playing priest Giovanni Carlos has a big following in Brasilia, the nation's capital.

This has been taken from the website of another of the experts here:  http://www.traditio.com/tradlib/faq10.txt