Welcome

The Catholic Church in the English-speaking world is in urgent need of reform and renewal.  The scandals of the past two years, although exaggerated and fanned by the hostile secular media, nevertheless point to the great need for reform and renewal in the Church.  Many devout Catholics, laity, religious and clergy are looking for some way that they can join in a church-wide effort to start a serious reform.  We are proposing a way that is simple, powerful and completely alien to much of the public relations approach to religion we have been experiencing for several decades in almost all Christian denominations. 

Beginning with the tapes of the Grassroots Renewal Project, “An Urgent Appeal”, the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal are trying to offer to as many people as possible an effective way to work for reform.  Founded in 1987 to work for the poor and reform of the Church ,the Friars are offering a simple, instructive and deeply personal movement toward reform.   We are borrowing the concept from a powerful Catholic movement that began almost thirty years before the Protestant Reformation.  This is simply a series of prayer groups that meet once a week for an hour for prayer, meditation, scripture reading and hymn singing.  At the end of the fifteenth century such a movement inspired by a remarkable laywoman, St. Catherine of Genoa, began the Catholic Reformation in Italy and reshaped the whole face of Catholicism in Southern Europe.  A distinguished historian of the period, Dr. John Olin of Fordham University, wrote that the effective reform of the Catholic Church in these troubled times began with the establishment of prayer groups by St. Catherine of Genoa.  The method is simple and can be very effective; not only in a person’s own spiritual life ,but in the lives of those around us.