Country Rocker in Concert at Convention Center : Franciscan’s Song Is Evangelistic

John Michael Talbot, a country rock singer turned Franciscan brother, compares the modern Catholic Church to a gourmet restaurant with a large menu--and too few waiters.

The church, he said, needs to provide more modes of worship and personal fulfillment before “people who are hungry . . . go down the street to another restaurant.”

Talbot, 32, is a featured performer in the Diocese of Orange’s Project Renew, an ongoing program of spiritual renewal. The founder of the 1970s musical group Mason Proffit, Talbot will perform tonight at the Anaheim Convention Center in a concert called “Celebration ‘86--A Renewal of Life.”

A thin, intense man with a short black beard and close-cropped hair, Talbot dresses like other members of his order in a traditional Franciscan robe with knotted belt and sandals. He mixes music, preaching and personal testimony, and acknowledges that many of those attending the free weeknight meetings are probably more attracted by his singing than his speaking.

Convert to Catholicism

Among the “gourmet foods” offered by the Catholic Church, Talbot said, is the charismatic and evangelical mode of worship more typical of fundamentalist Protestant churches. Talbot, a former Methodist, said that style is meaningful to him “because I’m a convert from evangelical Christianity,” the son and grandson of “itinerant preachers.”

Charismatic worship is generally defined as stressing direct divine inspiration, often including faith healing by touch and glossolalia, or speaking in tongues.

For the past week, Talbot has been speaking and singing nightly at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in La Habra, beginning each night’s meeting with several songs, sung in a sweet voice that has sold more than a million rock, classical and religious records and songbooks over the past 16 years.

Quoting frequently from the Gospels, Talbot assured those in the church that charismatic worship is well within the Catholic tradition, historically and doctrinally.

“The first Catholics were charismatics,” he said, frequently “speaking in tongues” and “laying on of hands” for healing. “They were wild and crazy,” he said. “There’s just no way around it.”

Framework for Charismatics

“Our church is a charismatic church in the broadest sense of that term,” said Father Arthur A. Holquin, director of liturgy for the Diocese of Orange, which is jointly sponsoring the concert. The primary difference between Protestant and Catholic charismatic practice is that Catholics do not accept what Holquin called “the notion of free interpretation of God’s word,” which “can and has created tension.” Catholic charismatics work within “parameters of understanding” outlined by the Pope and bishops, he said.

Like Talbot, Holquin traces the roots of modern varieties of Catholic worship, including charismatic and evangelical practices, to the Second Vatican conclave called in the early 1960s by Pope John XXIII.

Many of the changes mandated by Vatican II, Holquin said, “remained on the theoretical level,” leaving questions of implementation unanswered. “How do these changes impact on the person in the pew?” he asked. “How do you make real the vision of the church articulated by Vatican II?”

In the meantime, Holquin said, some evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal churches which offer charismatic prayer were drawing converts from Catholics, especially in Latino communities in the United States and Latin America--a practice known as “sheep-stealing.”

Holquin emphasized, however, that charismatic worship and large events such as Talbot’s concert are only two of many programs of spiritual renewal offered over the past three years through the church’s Project Renew, which he heads. Renew’s current theme, he said, is “Evangelization in our lives as Catholic Christians.”

Renew is “a very broad-based and broad-appealing program which builds upon the basics of Catholicism,” Holquin said, which was organized at the direction of the late Bishop William A. Johnson. In Orange County, where “our parishes are huge,” often with 2,000 to 4,000 families, “there’s a real hunger for spiritual growth.” he said. “The death of parish vitality is the anonymity people can feel in such a setting,” Holquin said. “Where is the sense of belonging?”

Fellowship Groups

As part of Renew, Holquin said, more than 15,000 Catholics in the diocese have been involved in “faith-sharing groups” of 12 to 15 people who meet once a week for six-week periods in the fall and the spring. These fellowship groups have lay leaders, and meetings are conducted in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Korean.

The meetings begin with a brief reading from Scripture and conclude with a prayer, since “outside of Mass we don’t always pray together,” Holquin said. “Here is an informal setting for Roman Catholics to pray together. There’s nothing very liberal or subversive about that.”

But the groups, Holquin said, are not fundamentally for Bible study or for prayer. Using discussion outlines prepared by the diocese, Holquin said, group members focus on topics which raise the question: “What does that say about the way you live your life?”

Tickets for the Talbot concert tonight at 7:30 at the Anaheim Convention Center are $8, $10 and $12. During the concert, a collection will be taken for the Franciscan Mercy Corps, which provides food and relief supplies to the hungry and the homeless in this nation and the Third World.