Francis MacNutt (1925-2020) built bridges across religious, racial, and gender divides, while reconciling tension between religious beliefs and the experiences of pain, pleasure, and sexuality. “This is the first book-length, critical biography of a celebrity priest who catalyzed the U.S. and global Charismatic renewal,” said Professor Brown. “MacNutt has been credited by historians as, more than any other person, starting the Catholic charismatic renewal in Latin America. Today, roughly 635 million Pentecostals and charismatics are numbered among the world’s 2.4 billion Christians, and MacNutt played a major role in this movement.”
In the book, which combines methods of archival research, historical and literary analysis, and oral history, Professor Brown argues that MacNutt’s unique biography shaped his views on the body, and on pain, pleasure, and sin. MacNutt’s father, a late convert to Catholicism, studied at Harvard and MIT to be an engineer, but later decided to become a portrait painter. His mother was a dancer who grew up attending an Episcopal church. When his parents married, they had to do so privately because it was a “mixed” marriage. MacNutt thus was raised in the Catholic Church courtesy of his artist father.
“Francis MacNutt grew up hearing about animosity between Protestants and Catholics,” said Brown. “At the time people like his mother had strong feelings about things like contraception—in St. Louis his mother worked with children and families who didn’t have a lot of money, mothers who were trying to juggle a lot and couldn’t take care of so many children.”
A Catholic surrounded by Protestants, MacNutt developed a strong sensitivity to sin and judgment. “He was terrified going to confession,” said Brown, “and he was afraid of what I call ‘embodied experiences.’ When he was very young, for example, he was concerned about violating the fast from food before taking communion, and so worried about accidentally swallowing toothpaste before going to Mass.
During college out with friends one winter evening, “They were catching snowflakes on their tongues after midnight and took communion the next day anyway, and a priest yelled at him for the seriousness of that sin.”
As a young man, he dated a number of women and was in love with someone just before he joined the priesthood, but didn’t think that he could have both. “That was incredibly difficult for him. He gave up on the hope of marriage, to the point where he made himself physically sick from it,” said Brown. “He lost a lot of weight and lost his voice for more than a year, because he was emotionally and physically constricted by the difficulty of this cross that he felt he was supposed to bear as a way of sharing in the sufferings of Christ.”
But it was when MacNutt attended a charismatic conference with Protestants that everything changed. “Upon feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit, and laughing joyfully, at that moment he realized ‘a physically pleasant experience is leading me towards God.’”
Up to that point in his life MacNutt associated pleasure with sin and pain with sanctity. He began to question his previous understanding of Church teachings about the spiritual value of physical sickness and sexual abstinence. Concluding that mandatory celibacy is unhelpful, and often hypocritical given lapses in practice, he argued for optional clerical celibacy.
When MacNutt decided to marry and was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1980, “That was the beginning of another 40 years of very influential global work,” explained Brown. “One of his of groundbreaking roles was to reach across the divide separating Catholics and Protestants.”
As a bridge builder before and after his marriage, “MacNutt insisted on the importance of women preaching and ministering, and of laity working alongside priests,” Brown said. He also worked for racial reconciliation in an era when there were tremendous divisions along racial and ethnic lines in the U.S. and abroad.
MacNutt also brought together practitioners of healing prayer with medical doctors and with psychotherapists. “Even within the Catholic Church,” noted Brown, “he built bridges between promoters of liberation theology and social justice, and those who had more of a charismatic emphasis—often those things didn’t really go together.”
For more than 50 years, MacNutt proclaimed that the good news of God’s healing is part of, and not peripheral to, the gospel message of Christianity. “MacNutt preached that good physical health, emotional health, sexual pleasure, all of these things can be good and healing spiritually,” said Brown.
Ultimately, Brown said, “MacNutt was making a case for having consistency in position and avoiding the trap of hypocrisy. This is the story of how his ideas and practices developed out of very particular combinations of influences in his upbringing,” said Brown, “yet this is very relevant to contemporary conversations about belief and lived experiences.”