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Charismatics:
Serious Problems
Reform or Suppression?
1975
Dr William “Bill” Storey

Professor of Liturgy and Church History,

University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana
Participant at the inception of Charismatic Renewal, Duquesne Weekend, 1967
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Dr William “Bill” Storey was a professor of Liturgy and Church History. He taught at
Duquesne University from 1955 to 1967. Then he was hired by The University of Notre
Dame in South Bend, IN where he worked until 1988. Retired from Notre Dame, he
bought a large collection of books and opened Erasmus Bookstore in South Bend, which he
tended to until his death in 2014 at the age of 90.

Dr. Storey was Baptized in the Holy Spirit at the Duquesne Weekend, in 1967. After
several years of participation in Charismatic Renewal, he withdrew from the movement.
He did not abandon the Renewal, but stayed on the sidelines, watching, observing and
visiting with many in the Movement, from members of the leadership on the National
Service Team right down to the attendees of the local prayer meetings. Then, in 1975,
having collected his thoughts, he offered one of the very first critiques of the Charismatic
Renewal. That document is in this collection.

I first heard about Dr Storey’s article in A.D. Correspondence 10 years ago. He and his
allegations are mentioned by Fr Bill Sneck in a letter to George Martin, a member of the
National Service Committee until his decision to leave it in 1973.

While Fr. Sneck states later on that Dr Storey got a couple of points wrong, he concurs on
two major issues: authoritarianism and violations of conscience. Later however he adds
this little jewel:

Fr Bill Sneck’s letter in it’s entirety is here, and well worth the read.
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I always thought that, sooner or later, I’d run across Dr Storey’s article, but all I could find
were other articles written about the A.D. Correspondence article. So earlier this summer
I began a search in earnest for it. I enlisted the help of a real Researcher, Abbie Fitzgerald
Schaub, who could find no copies of the original document online either… except a link to
the library that housed the “newsletter’ in which the article had been published. Upon
contacting the library where Abbie found it, the folks there graciously and quickly
supplied me with the it. Turns out, it was far more than a letter, but a 6-page interview.

I’ve created a collection of documents that pertain to the story.

1. The fist document is a letter to Storey’s Bishop, The Most Rev Leo Pursely, dated
April 2nd, 1975. Dr. Storey is straight to the point about his concerns:

Storey is criticized by the National Service Committee for talking about these issues
in public. But he did approach his Bishop nearly 8 weeks before he gave his
interview to Fr Reedy CSC who was the editor of A.D. Correspondence.

2. The next document is the Interview of Dr Storey, conducted by Fr John Reedy, CSC
Editor of A.D. Correspondence. It is published on May 24th, 1975.

This is the first time this document has found it’s way to the internet. A copy of the
document by itself is here.

3. Next are six unsigned testimonies of professors and students who all became
members of True House, a Covenant Community founded about the same time as
People of Praise and The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit. These testimonies can
also be found in Part 3 of the History page on a website called “Charismatic
Movement and Catholic Tradition.
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4. Finally, the last segment is a response to the Storey Interview from the National
Service Committee of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. In essence, they are quite
stung by a public airing of his criticisms. It’s not in ‘right’ order. They enlist
Cardinal Suenens to their point of view, thinking somehow it exempts them from Dr
Storey’s criticisms, the specifics of which they avoid speaking to as much as possible.

TRIGGER ALERT: Those of you traumatized by contact with the rougher edges of
Covenant Communities will hear terms that may have been used against you in the
past: “Storey’s opinions are biased because he is disaffected; the people whose
testimony he presents are also disaffected, so their testimonies are suspect; the
criticisms should not have been aired in public, but privately, in a brotherly fashion;
there have been other places with worse scandals; True House has collapsed
anyways, why is there a need to even discuss it?”

But most of their focus is on how unjust it was to defame True House, where as you
will see, people were seriously abused, mentally and emotionally. Yet as you read
Storey’s interview, you’ll notice he doesn’t say much about True House. More to the
point, he focuses on the direction of Charismatic Renewal leaders, the
authoritarianism of a movement that relies solely on personal revelation by the Holy
Spirit to find its direction. The National Service Committee, in my opinion, does a
great job of dodging the real issues that Dr Storey identifies, and uses the True
House controversy to obfuscate and deflect.

If you’ve been following the history of Covenant Communities, if you’ve been

reading the Ottenweller Report, or the reports out of Ann Arbor, Newark, Baltimore,
West St Paul, Lansing or Gaithersburg, you will see the threads of Dr Storey’s
criticisms emerging time after time after time. It’s sad, really. So much pain could
have been prevented had those with the authority to investigate Dr Storey’s reports
had done so.

But they didn’t.

John Flaherty, Grand Island, Nebraska August 17th, 2022.