My Experience in a Covenant Community [Transcript]
John Flaherty · Columbus, Ohio · 12 August 2026
A note on this transcript.
John Flaherty is speaking from twenty-two years inside a Sword of the Spirit covenant community and from four decades of collecting the movement's documents. The recollections, characterizations and judgments in this talk are his own, and he alone is responsible for their accuracy. They are published here as his account of the movement as he lived it.
Nothing he said has been removed for comfort. Where he makes a checkable factual claim about a named person, I have checked it against the public record; where the record differs from his recollection, I say so in a bracketed editor's note rather than cutting his words. Those notes are mine, not his.
Transcribed from the recording. Filler words and brief interjections have been removed; nothing else is reworded, and no passage has been cut. Speaker labels were assigned from the transcript rather than by voice identification: a new QUESTIONER turn is marked only where a question is clearly put to John, so a few shorter audience remarks may sit within his turns. Timestamps refer to the published audio.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:00:02] Well, a little bit of background. My name is John Flaherty. I'm a graduate of the College of Steubenville before it became Franciscan University. I was raised from a Catholic family. My parents were both Catholic, married in the church. Of course, I went to church every Sunday. And in my teenage years, I started playing guitar at two masses every Sunday. So I was extra Catholic. But I was internally agnostic, actually. And it came time for me to go to college, and I decided to go to the College of Steubenville, which is 30 miles down the river, private Catholic college.
I was Catholic, so kind of just all kind of fit together. And while I was there, I became involved in the Thursday night prayer meetings on campus. I've never been to a prayer meeting. It's a time of worship and praise. I liken it now, looking back, it's kind of like a Christian variety show. We would have worship and praise and play guitars. And then we would have worship. We would sing in tongues and pray in tongues. Then someone would give a prophecy, or someone would read from Scripture. Then we would have a prayer meeting. And then we would have worship. And then we would have Then we'd all sit down and a priest from the university or a lay leader would come forward and give a little talk. Or we would invite people up to give a witness if somebody wanted to witness in front of the group. And some of the witnesses were really interesting and good. And some of them were rather comical. You know, thank you. And then we'd sit down at the end of the prayer meeting. Sounds a little bit like an AA meeting. Yeah. Actually. Yeah. Yeah. So and then we would have a closing song and worship. And then we'd all hug each other at the end. And some people would go out to dinner together and have coffee. And some people would sit around and just pray over others for healing and things of that nature. And we'd probably start about seven o'clock on a Thursday night. We'd be done by about 8:30 and the chapel would clear out by about 9:30. So and I got involved in this. I was 19 years old. And because I played guitar at mass, I was sooner or later hooked into the music ministry. And so we did that. And then in 19 that was 1974, 75. Then in 77, a group of people from the prayer meeting decided they wanted a closer committed relationship. So they formed the Covenant Servants. And tried to start a covenant community. Then in 79, I don't know if any of you have ever heard of Father Michael Scanlan. He was the president of our university. And he was a nationally known speaker in the charismatic renewal. And Father Michael had a prophecy from God saying that if we wanted to become a covenant community, we had to come under this Ann Arbor group, which was called the Word of God. And for formation and training. And so we did that. And some people from Ann Arbor moved to Steubenville in 1979, stayed three years. Didn't interact with the membership that much, but interacted a lot with our leadership because they were going to form the leaders into forming us. So that happened. Then in 1982, the Ann Arbor Word of God group launched an umbrella group called the Sword of the Spirit. And the Sword of the Spirit was meant to have many member communities. So like we had a community in Newark, New Jersey. We had a community in Akron, Ohio. We had Steubenville. Where else? And later on, they would expand west. But and then we had, we had, I think we had a community in Ottawa, Canada. So we were, we were kind of spread out. There were probably five or ten of us all together under the Communities. Of communities under the umbrella group called the Sword of the Spirit. The Sword of the Spirit was run by Stephen B. Clark, who was a major leader in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. And Ralph Martin, who today has his own ministry called Renewal Ministries out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. So, and so. Stephen B. Clark passed away here just a couple years ago. So the covenant communities began as a way of enjoying Christian community. Many, many of us were Catholic. About 10% were Protestant. And we were considered ecumenical. We were never submitted to the Catholic Church. We were never under the authority of a bishop. We were never under the authority of a bishop. Or in the Catholic Church. We developed a Catholic lay association that had a connection to the diocese.
QUESTIONER: [0:05:31] But what did that mean?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:05:34] Well, exactly. A Catholic lay association is essential because I looked it up. It's essentially a club. It's like you can have a Catholic lay association of dentists, if you want, and they'll get together and have. A mass and maybe a potluck dinner and once a month or something like that. And they're all Catholics and they want to be into this group. And so maybe they give pro bono dental services. Maybe I don't know. Yeah, whatever they're supposed to be. Well, if it's a Catholic Dentist Association, it's just going to be dentists.
So maybe they might service each other. I don't know. But so that's basically what it was. And it was separate. It was a separate entity. It was connected to the community that they were in, but it was a separate entity. And the larger sort of the spirit that the community alongside the Catholic Association was not submitted to the bishop and did not have a Catholic identity. Okay. They had this Catholic lay Association and people would say, well, now you can join because now we're Catholic. But no, the community was. It was not Catholic, but the lay Association was and that was developed to give us some credibility and shelter, I think, from criticism.
QUESTIONER: [0:06:58] I want to go back to your history. So, you join this covenant community and you made a covenant to?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:07:04] Yeah, right. Well, to God and to each other. Basically. They called it a covenant. But it's not legally a covenant where each party has equal rights. Okay. In this situation, if you didn't follow the rules, the coordinators could fire you to throw you out of the community.
QUESTIONER: [0:07:34] So what did you promise?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:07:36] We promised to love God and follow the rules of the community and and to submit to the authority of the coordinators.
QUESTIONER: [0:07:46] Okay. So you’re acting like that’s just a little thing. The first one. I was like, oh, this doesn't sound so bad.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:07:50] I don't always remember the details. I don't remember the details. But that's kind of like, I should have brought a covenant with me. I have them online.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:04] But think about the military oath, right? You swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And you swear to fulfill the lawful orders given by your superior officers.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:07:50] Right.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:15] A key disclaimer, there being lawful orders.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:18] Lawful orders, there's conditions. And that is a massive oath.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:08:19] Yeah.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:20] It's unbelievable.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:08:21] Yes.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:24] Civilians do not do that.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:08:25] No.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:26] Military people do. They're under a special military code. This is a non-military, non-civil, and it's not a religious order. And you're taking a kind of an oath, maybe technically an eventual oath.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:08:39] Yeah, it's an oath.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:40] To say, I will obey the orders of this coordinator person.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:08:44] Right. Right. That's true. That's what we're saying.
QUESTIONER: [0:08:47] Yeah. So why? What motivated the people there? Well, because... Why couldn't people say, well, I want to join this community, but I don't want to take, you know, loyalty oaths.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:08:55] Because everyone had to be under submission to the authority of the coordinators. Like, that was essential. The pastoral system is the heart of any covenant community. And that is the head coordinator, and under him, the junior coordinators. Then under them, the district heads. Under the district heads, the ordinary pastoral leader. And under the pastoral leader, the ordinary members of the community. And there was this hierarchy of power. And that's what you basically were taking an oath. Now, when I made my covenant, I was thinking of these wonderful people that I knew and were sharing my life with me.
And we were all sharing our resources. We were trying to live like a first century Christian lifestyle, where everybody lived together and shared everything together. And I wasn't from college. And this is... This is great. You know, this is what God wants, you know, for us to live as brothers and sisters in Christ. And I never dreamed that that would be abused. And my leader was a Catholic priest. My head coordinator was a Catholic priest who was president of a national Catholic college, which became a university. So it was like, no duh.
QUESTIONER: [0:10:23] They were indirectly reporting to Fr. Scanlan?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:10:26] No. No. But everything I say could get up there. It could flow up.
QUESTIONER: [0:10:32] Ok, but Scanlan was the lead coordinator.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:10:34] He was the head coordinator.
QUESTIONER: [0:10:32] Head coordinator. He wasn't direct. He would have gone through the chain. But the head coordinator is Scanlan. You're identifying the correct person. Okay. Yeah.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:10:44] Yeah. He's the head coordinator. So, yeah. So, and we, in 1982, we became a geographical parish of the diocese. A non-geographical parish of the diocese of Steubenville. So then we were under our bishop, which made me even feeling even better, you know, because we had our fellowship parish, and then we had our covenant community.
And we didn't have CKA back then, the lay association thing, because we didn't need it. We had a full sacramental lifestyle. We did births. We did funerals. We did weddings. We did baptisms. We did worship. We never did holy orders, but we could have, you know, if we'd have stayed. So we were completely in the Catholic Church. And, but the problem was, is that we had this Catholic fellowship, and then we had this covenant community right beside it. We were told to divide up our tithes. 30% went to the fellowship. 70% went to the covenant community. And we were participating in the schools, the Catholic schools.
QUESTIONER: [0:11:54] But none of this was going to any kind of diocesan-recognized church. You were giving your money to the covenant community and to the lay association.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:12:06] Well, it wasn't a lay association. It was a parish. It became a parish. We never did the lay association. We didn't need to. The lay association was just peanuts compared to what having a full sacramental lifestyle is with our own priest and . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:12:19] you had a priest and a leader.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:12:22] Right. And pastors.
QUESTIONER: [0:12:13] And essentially have a church.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:12:24] Right. We were in the Catholic church. We were a Catholic parish. Except what had happened over the years is that Father Michael, our leader, told us that all of the outlines of all the tapes of the covenant community had been submitted to the bishop. And the bishop accepted them and approved them. Okay? That was not true. That was never true. I went to the bishop as you, and I explained to him who we were.
And I sat there as his jaw just kind of dropped further and further and further. And I, you know, when we were done, he said to us, or he said to me, John, I'll keep this all in confidence. You don't have to worry. And I said, this is all stuff that you should know.
QUESTIONER: [0:13:19] We thought you already had it.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:13:20] Right. Right. I haven't told you anything that our leaders haven't told us that you already know. And I think that kind of floored him. But that was the case.
And that was the problem. And that's, you know, if I were to make one point tonight, that's the problem with the Sword of the Spirit is that they are not trustworthy. They are not trustworthy. You cannot believe what they tell you. You have to find the documentation or you have to get someone to be honest with you. But you cannot trust what they say.
QUESTIONER: [0:13:54] So give us some examples of what you were saying when you talked to the bishop and you were revealing things that he was jaw dropping at. You assumed that obviously he knew already. What alarmed him so much?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:14:08] Well, one of the things that I shared with him was my pastoral plan. So my head had sat down with me and talked about my life and created a computer readout. And this is 1982. So it was that paper that you had to tear the edges off of. It was that old. Pardon?
QUESTIONER: [0:14:32] It was a track feed. A track feed.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:14:35] Okay. Yeah, you're my age. So he created this pastoral plan for me. And on it, he had, you know, John's going to work on this in his marriage. And John's going to transition from music ministry into Couples for Christ.
And, you know, where I was going to serve and what I was going to do. And what I was going to work on with my kids, because, of course, we had to form our children into what Stephen Clark said they should look like. And so John's going to work on this with his kids. And in terms of my personal character, I was considered somewhat emotional and effeminate. And so I was going to work on building manly character. And one of the things they devised for me to do with my lack of manly character was I was going to learn how to hunt and kill things. And that was going to make me more manly, you know. And by God, it has. So, yeah. So I shared this with the bishop. And he's looking at it. He's looking at it. He's looking at it. And I didn't realize it at the time because I thought this was normal. Okay. Right. But I'm sure he was thinking, what are they doing? Why are they involved in his marriage like this? You know, why are they telling him that he's not manly enough?
QUESTIONER: [0:16:06] And devising hunting trips.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:16:07] Yeah. Well, he didn't ask me to go. But so that was one of the things I shared with the bishop. And at the time, I had no idea how he was interpreting it. Because I was in La la land. I was over here where everything's normal. And but then I shared with him, there was this priest, Father James LeBar, who was under John O'Connor, Cardinal John O'Connor in New York City. And Father LeBar had edited a book called Cults, Sects, S-E-C-T-S, and the New Age. And I had a chapter nine of that.
And in chapter nine, he says, Catholics should not participate in the Sword of the Spirit. This was 1989. And so I shared him a copy of that, you know, and what was some other stuff? I forget. But I had several documents...
QUESTIONER: [0:17:14] Hang on. This is a new piece of information. Who is this?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:17:17] Father James LeBar. He is deceased.
QUESTIONER: [0:17:24] But he published.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:17:26] Well, he edited and contributed to this book called Cults, Sects, and the New Age. And then, just to kind of fill out the picture, Father LeBar also was credibly accused of sexual abuse. Just so that’s out in the open. I always include that as part of this. But later I discovered he became the guy responsible for the visitation, Bishop Ottenweller. And based on my information and the information of several other people, because he called a former coordinator and asked him what he thought. And then he met with some other people. And then he met with a gathering of community women on a Saturday night in January or January, the first week of January. And there were 35 of them in the basement of this one house. And he said, I'm just here to listen to you. I'm going to tell you what you have to say.
Editor's note. Fr. James J. LeBar (1936–2008) does appear on the Archdiocese of New York's public list of 26 April 2019. He appears, however, in the subsection reserved for clergy who do not meet the archdiocese's criteria for a credible accusation, but whose claims the independent administrators of the Reconciliation and Compensation Program determined were eligible for compensation. He was never removed from ministry and never charged, and he died eleven years before the list was published. Mr. Flaherty's practice of disclosing this about a source he otherwise relies on is his own; the phrase “credibly accused” states it more strongly than the archdiocese's own wording does. — Ed.
QUESTIONER: [0:18:31] This is Bishop Ottenweller?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:18:34] Yes. Yes. And the first woman starts to talk and her voice cracks and she starts weeping. And every other woman in the room started weeping. I was not in there. This is what I was told by the people who talked to me afterwards. And he was in there two and a half hours listening to these stories. And these women were crying the entire time. And Father Monsignor Foys, who became the bishop down in Kentucky here a while back, Father Monsignor Foys was with him. And Foys remarked later on that after that meeting, the bishop and him went out and got in the car to go back to the rectory.
And he said the bishop was angry at the pain he had heard. He was angry that this had happened under his watch. And that he had been deceived or he felt deceived. Because every year, Bishop Ottenweller for 10 years would meet with the leaders of the community, the men. And then he at one point said, you know, I hear a lot of negative things about how covenant communities treat women. And the leader said, oh, well, we've got wives. We'll send them in to talk to you. You can talk to these women. And they would send their wives. And who were fully committed to the way. And oh, everything's fine. Everything's fine. We love our life. You know, we have no problems. And the bishop would get phone calls from other bishops saying, you've got a covenant community. You experience any problems with the in your community, like related to men and women roles or marriages or things. And the bishop would say, no, everything's fine here. Everything is fine. So they kind of used him. And to cover their tracks and problems that we actually had in the community, you know, he would never find out about. So, yeah. So in 1990, he decided after visiting with several people, myself included, he just and having that meeting.
QUESTIONER: [0:20:53] Just to back up, John, what prompted you to go to the bishop?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:20:59] Well, so that so I was fully committed from 77 right up until I think it was 1989. And then I had a visit from a friend. He came to my house and he asked me to go out and remove all the knives from under the front seat of his car. And he was in the community and he had a pastoral leader. And he's a theologian on top of that. And I asked him. And so he was in this murderous rage. He wanted to murder his his leader who he worked for.
He also worked for him at the university. And so I said, what's going on? And he explained to me that the way he was being pastored was this brutal, rough pastoral. Where your pastoral leader called you inferior and unable to to really be a good husband or father. It was very critical. And it's sometimes demeaning, like saying, calling him Pigpen. He called this particular man Pigpen because he ran around with this cloud and everything was always hard and difficult and everything. And so he had this cloud over his head, you know, so he called him names, you know. And all this was supposedly a pastoral methodology because I went to Father Mike about it. I was so alarmed when I heard about it. I went to our priest, Father Michael Scanlan, and I said, how is this possible that it's happening? How is this approved? He says, well, John, he goes, I personally would never pastor anyone that way, but it is an approved method in the Sword of the Spirit to pastor people this way. And that was from our head coordinator and our priest. So it was after that I realized. And then there was a second event where we had conducted a self-evaluation of our community. And in 1988, excuse me. [Phone Ringing] And so we had conducted this self-evaluation where you're supposed to write in the strengths and the weaknesses of the community and what you thought of this leader, what you thought of this leader. Right. And it was all supposed to be anonymous. And it had sat out there for a year and a half. And we were all like, well, whatever happened to the self-evaluation? And so finally they say, OK, we're going to talk about self-evaluation. And it was at a general gathering. And a general gathering is like a big prayer meeting is all. And it begins with worship. And then we have a teaching in the middle. Then we say prayers for other people, intercessory prayer and closing song. And we're done.
QUESTIONER: [0:24:05] Can I just pause? Did you participate in Lord's Day activities as part of your community?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:24:13] Oh, yeah. Oh, Lord's Day.
QUESTIONER: [0:24:14] Can you just tell us what that is?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:24:16] Well, let me finish this story, then remind me. So we have this. The coordinators announced we're going to discuss the self-evaluation. So we get in there that night. Everyone's excited. And I'm leading music. And then we settle down. And then. The coordinator comes up to the microphone. He goes, well, we were supposed to talk about the self-evaluation tonight, but we're not going to do that. Instead, Father or Sister Isabel Betwee has just contacted one of the seers in Medjugorje and has important information for us. So Sister Isabel, who runs the conference office at the university and who does tours to Medjugorje, has been like takes people over there and brings them back.
She stands up and she says, well, one of the seers has contacted me and told me that the Blessed Virgin has said that there are three days of darkness coming. And we are going to. You were there when you got the three days of darkness prophecy. And we are going to . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:25:17] Oh, you were there when you got the three days of darkness prophecy?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:25:20] Well, that's a different thing. But the three days of darkness were always pretty. I have. Yeah, we're a tradition in our community that there were going to be societal collapse and hard times within the decade. So within by the by the 1990s rolled around, we were supposed to experience the societal collapse.
Never happened. But towards 87, 88, 89, when Sister Isabel got up there, that's kind of confirmed that this was going to happen, OK, and we'd all been kind of waiting for it. So she got up there and said, the seer has called me and she says this is going to happen and she's going to call me 24 hours in advance. So when the collapse comes, we'll all be safe and we'll be ready. OK. And of course, you can't hear a pin drop in the gathering because we've just . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:26:14] . . . listening to this.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:26:16] You know, we're all on the edge of our seat. We're thinking this is it. It's going to happen. So. So at the time that she's doing this, I'm I'm sitting up there. I'm right next to the coordinator. We sat in kind of like this square and we had chairs. We go back and and I'm up there with my guitar. And all of a sudden I'm thinking, wait a minute, we're supposed to talk about self-evaluation. And now we're all getting kind of scared to death about this collapse coming? And that on top of the knives and get the knives out of my car.
And I just, it wasn't an intellectual thought or anything, but I just felt everything drain out of my body. All the love and the loyalty that I had felt and the zeal. I was like it was just like water that ran through my body onto the floor somewhere else. It just fled me. To this day it was the most significant spiritual experience I think I've ever had. And and I couldn't explain why at the end. I was, I was just done. so that's how that happened. That, you asked me, how did it, how did I get out of it? Those were the experiences that led me to say, this isn't right. Something is wrong, you know. And I fully, I fully believed I would be a part of the community until the end of my life. You know, I would always be there. I began that way, but you just don't know what's going to happen. You know, you just can't predict life. Life is going to do. So, you asked me what?
QUESTIONER: [0:28:03] Lord's Day.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:28:04] So the Lord's Day is a parallel to the Mass.
It's like the Passover meal, the Jewish celebration of the Passover. Passover, you have you go around the table and you say your name and then we recite these verses that are out of the Torah about, you know, and then hard times came and then, you know, we love the Lord and all this. It was kind of this ritual and we would pass around a piece of bread. Everyone would take a piece of bread. Then they would pass around a chalice with wine in it. You took a sip of wine . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:28:50] Did your, whoever your group leader was, he makes it one, was it always a man that presides over?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:28:54] Yes
QUESTIONER: [0:29:01] And then, two, was there a liturgical blessing over the bread and the wine?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:29:07] Well, yeah, you're blessed. You bless the bread and the wine. but it wasn't, yeah, he didn't lead this. Every head of the house, household, like every man, husband, father would oversee it and you could invite other families to join you. And we often did. We often had the Lord's day and like two families, like at my house, we would invite neighbors or they were all in the community, but we would say, let's do the Lord's day or why don't you come over for the Lord's day?
And that it was always celebrated. In that way. but it really is a close representation of the, of the mast of the, of the liturgy of the Eucharist. Yes. So, So, yeah, so that's that. So, so that's how I get in. That's how I got out. And I was, I was really angry when I left. And for several years after that. We moved away. We left Steubenville and moved to Nebraska, where I live now. And then, and then I, for a couple, well, for about 15 years, I had a couple boxes of files and documents I had collected. And I kind of gave them to a friend who was either “burn them or put them somewhere safe” where I couldn't look at them because I was, I started taking some Zoloft to help me manage my aggravated mood all the time. And I had three children to raise. And I had, I started a private practice as a counselor when I moved out there to Nebraska. And so I had a lot on my plate just with living. And, but this always kind of was within me. I was always, it was always in the back of my mind to some degree. Then in 2009, a friend of mine. Actually, it was the wife of the man who had come to my house saying, “Get all these knives out.” We had, she posted a document on scribd.com. And Scribd is a site on the internet where you can post documents. And it was this letter by 27 community members that they, I didn't, I wasn't a part of this, but, in the beginning, 27 members had gotten together and wrote out 10, 10 or 11 ways that they felt their rights as Catholics were being violated by the Sword of the Spirit. And they had taken it to the coordinators in house and the coordinator said, well, you're just go home and submit and, well, don't worry about this. We're, we're, we're taking care of this or something like that, but basically had poo pooed them. And they met together afterwards at, at somebody's house. And I was there, even though I was not a part of the community at this time, I was there and nobody asked me to leave. So I stayed. And then afterwards, they had all were discussing, well, what are we going to do? We should trust this coordinator because he sees us, and this coordinator is never going to tolerate this. And, you know, they were all kind of besides themselves about what to do. And. I spoke up at the end and I said, well, you know, I have a, a visit scheduled with Bishop Ottenweller in about a week. And if you want me to, I'll take this document to him. And nobody spoke. Everybody was scared to death to say, okay, take the document to the bishop because then you were going out of house. Then you, and it was really, I mean, you have to understand the pressure was we were a contained and insular group. And so actually no one, no one said anything at that point. And the guy who wrote the document later at the, as we were leaving said, come on over to my house. And he gave me a copy. He said, yeah, take it to the bishop. So that's one of the things I shared with the bishop. I think you asked me what kind of documents I'd share. I'd forgot about that one, but I'm sure that alarmed him when he read that. So. So, yeah, there was. And then I was outside the community and the bishop was, he announced that he was going to do a pastoral visitation to the community because we were a geographic parish. Right? He had every right to step in. We were a parish in his diocese. So he was going to do that. And so he announced that and said that Bishop McKinney, who was a longtime liaison with Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Vatican, that Bishop McKinney was going to lead this pastoral visitation. And Father Michael and the other priests who were leading the covenant community, were all excited about that, because Father Mike and Bishop McKinney were close friends. And so it's going to all be OK. It was going to be OK. Well, the bishop got wind of that and said, hmm, I better rethink this. And so he ended up contacting Father James Lebar who I referred to earlier as the editor of the book called Sects and the New Age, because I'd given him a copy of that chapter that said the Sword of the Spirit’s bad news. So so Bishop Ottenweller had to contact Cardinal O'Connor first and get the cardinal's permission to bring Father LeBar in. And it's something I discovered after the visitation is that Father LeBar was also the chief exorcist of the diocese of New York City or the archdiocese or whatever. So, you know, we have this exorcist coming in to do this investigation. And I guess it couldn't be better planned. But so once they get the news that Father LeBar is coming, well, then every all bets are off, you know. And and a weird thing that happened was that, you know, the coordinator. The coordinators had always been in tight control, you know, who got up and said this. We had for a prophecy. We've got to talk about prophecy. We had a prophetic team that would screen people who came up to give a prophecy. “Well, no, that's not what the Lord is saying, go sit down,” you know, or “Yeah, yeah, that's what the Lord is saying. Get up here and say that.” So and if you're not familiar, prophecy is a charismatic, one of the charismatic gifts when you speak for God in the first person, like you would say, “I, the Lord, say to you, do not fear. Do not be afraid, for I have given you grace to win the battle.” And this is how you would prophesy. And that's how Father Mike prophesied when we came under the Word of God. You know, he would say, he said, “Don't trust, Don't worry about the details. Just submit your lives to them. They will know what to do. They will know the authentic cry of your souls for their help. And so, but so this prophecy, let's see, where was I? Help me go back because I kind of went on a tangent.
QUESTIONER: [0:37:05] Yes. Well, let me ask this question. So prophecy is a big part of this community and their culture.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:37:09] Yeah.
QUESTIONER: [0:37:10] But were there some prophecies that seemed to be more important that got passed up further?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:37:18] Oh, yeah. Yeah.
QUESTIONER: [0:37:19] And what are their special ones of those?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:37:24] Yeah. Okay, hang on to that, because I just remembered what I was talking about. So the coordinators always kept tight control over the community, and they would screen the prophecies, and no one was a leader who they didn't appoint. And, you know, if you said something at the gathering that might have been off base, your pastoral leader would come over to you later and say, “What are you doing,” you know?
So everything was tightly controlled. Well, after they learned that Father LeBar was coming to head the visitation team, they were all hands off. Like,”You guys can only save us now. You have to tell this visitation team everything's okay, and that you love being here. There's nothing we can do as leaders anymore.” So they, in a sense, they had had such tight control over these people for so long, and then they just turned them all loose and told them they were on their own, and that they had to save the community. It was on them now. So that was quite, I think that was quite traumatizing for a lot of people, because we had been under strict submission and authority for a decade. I had. I had been, you know. And if I'd suddenly been told that I'm in charge and I have to decide and I have to make good decisions and I have to say the right thing, you know, that would be quite nerve-wracking. So now you asked the question about?
QUESTIONER: [0:39:08] The prophecies.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:39:10] The prophecies. So prophecy, I would say, was one of the fatal aspects to this whole thing, because, our head leader, well, so we would get these prophecies, we called them the doom and gloom prophecies.
And they were like, “The societal collapse is coming. You have to be ready. I want you to be able to serve God. I want you to be able to serve without fear or to be strong enough to serve. And so, the Lord said, ‘I'm going to lay a burden of service. I want you, my leaders, to lay a burden of service on my people.’” In other words, we were to suffer in a way that would form our characters and we would be ready for the collapse to come. And these are posted online. I forget what, oh, I forget what this one is called, but it's up online. And, and that prophecy, I think, and the belief that societal collapse was a matter of years, not decades. It's in the prophecy and it's in the policy notebook. They believe this. They made it a policy that this was going to happen. And it turned out it never happened. You know, we're all still here. Society did not collapse. But in 2017, the chief prophet of the Sword of the Spirit, his name was Bruce Yocum. And he's, he gave a talk on the 50th anniversary of Catholic charismatic renewal. This is online on a YouTube channel. You just Bruce Yocum, just a search for that name. And he talks and it's only a short interview. It's probably 12 to 15 minutes, but about minute 10, they ask him, what's the future hold. And first thing he does is he leans back in his chairs and he says, well, you know, it's still coming. Societal collapse, it's still coming and we have to prepare for that. and I was astounded when I heard it, that they were all these years, you know . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:41:32] still prepping for the end times.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:41:35] Yup. Yup. And, so that, that, that was prophecy. And, also, so in order to prepare for the end times, they developed this course called, The Training Program, and the training program was to prepare us for the hard times that were coming. So, and, and if you looked at the training program, you would say to yourself, well, this is just scriptural. Everything is scriptural. Everything makes sense. and, but of course it was bent to their agenda. You know, the scriptures were bent to, to, reinforce this need for suffering, this need for, to build up strength by, carrying a burden of service.
And at the end of the training course, you took an oath to five things. Now, I'm not going to remember all five of them, but the big one was called the Death Oath. And, first of all, we went from calling our leadership coordinators and pastoral leaders to “commanders.” Secondly, we were, we were told what we will not give any information to the evil one, the devil, or his agents. Now, so essentially you couldn't talk about the community to anyone outside the community.
QUESTIONER: [0:43:10] Wait, wait, wait. You can't break your, because you had me at, yeah, you should not be collaborating with demons and Satan, but I feel like they're interpreting demon and Satan and demons a little more broadly than probably I would.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:43:30] Yeah, well, and that's any of his agents. “His agents” is the key word . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:43:36] Because everyone who's not in the community, they ask you . . .
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:43:40] They could be an agent. You didn't know who was an agent of the enemy, but anyone could be so you just didn't tell people what was going on in the community. You were just kind of sworn to secrecy. then there was . . .
QUESTIONER: [0:43:36] but nobody thought it was strange that you had these super secret predictions about the end of the world. And only you all knew, only you all were preparing and no one was allowed to tell anybody. Everyone in the group thought this made sense.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:44:10] Yes. Everyone who took the training program training, I never took it because I was considered too effeminate and too emotional.
QUESTIONER: [0:44:18] You had to hunt more . . .
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:44:19] and not mature, that I need to do more hunting and killing.
QUESTIONER: [0:44:22] Did the training program involve actual combat training?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:44:26] It could have, I don't know. I do have an entire copy of the coursework and it's online. It's called the training program. It's got as many of the handouts, as the source had. I've also got three sets of tapes they made of the training program. I haven't listened to any of them yet because I have a life. You know, and this is, they're like 30, 30 sessions, an hour a piece or more. And so I just haven't listened to them. I was going to digitalize them and put them online eventually, but you know, I'm only 70.
I've got plenty of time. So, yeah, so, so you agreed to these things, these five things, to be loyal to your commanders and to be willing to die if the Lord calls you to, if the Lord calls you to lay down your life for your brothers and sisters. Okay. So, you're basically taking an oath that you will die if the Lord calls you. Now, if your pastoral leaders say, “John, you've got to run this ammunition through the lines and you made get killed,” you know, that's apparently to me, that was one of the caveats. What if, what if you had a crazy pastoral leader or coordinator and they said, you know, “Go blow up the Congress or whatever? Cause. They're going to outlaw Christianity” and I don't know, you think about it at the time you think, well, these men love me and care about me. You don't think about it. And you think about laying down your life, your brothers and sisters, like that's a normal thing. Like you, we all did that for each other in a, you know, we'd go and help people clean their houses or put up their garage or, you know, do whatever service that they needed. And, and that was kind of like. Yeah, that was kind of like laying down your life for your brother and sister. But now we changed. We went, and Stephen Clark, the architect of covenant community, the Sword of the Spirit, says in this talk, we are going to go from being a family of Christians building community to fighting the Christian war. So, and that was in 1980. And that launched the training program. Okay. And so we went from being a Christian community to this militaristic thing. We're going to fight the Christian war and whatever that meant. I know at one point in 1984, they sent this gentleman who was Hispanic. They were fighting a civil war in what, Noriega, it was in Latin America.
QUESTIONER: [0:47:20] El Salvador?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:47:21] Yeah, maybe. And there were communists trying to overthrow, you know, the government. And we actually supported a man down there who was working for the Contras. Remember the Contra Iran scandal?
Okay. Okay. So we were, what were we, we were selling weapons to the Contras and we were funneling it through Iran somehow, but there was a big investigation. But we actually sent somebody down there to help the Contras fight against the communists. So, yeah, there's an article up online that describes that. It's called, oh, what is it called? When Right Goes Wrong, I think is what it's called. Umbert, what's his name? Oh, he's a, I've talked with him a couple of times. He was, it was a national Catholic reporter. It was a big five-page article, described Steve Clark and Ralph Martin and the covenant community then, and what they were doing in El Salvador or wherever this war was going on. It's right on the tip of my memory.
QUESTIONER: [0:48:41] So that exposure must have not sat well with the group.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:48:45] No. Well, first of all, many of us in the other covenant communities under the umbrella of the Sword of the Spirit, we had no idea what they were doing. And of course it was secretive. So, yeah, they kept it secret. And I, and people, if, if you're a lay person and you read this like weird story about, you know, this group here and in, Ann Arbor where I live sending, you know, people down to fight a war against the communists, you know, you might go, well, that's weird, but you wouldn't think anything more about it, you know?
And, generally the covenant communities have always been moved that that way. They've always laid low enough, stayed off the radar. and when people try to understand what they are, it's so complicated and you have no idea, you know? That's really what's going on. That's why I wrote this little paper. And this, I just did this a year or two ago after, like, trying to run, trying to do this for like 10 years. I wrote this 10 page paper on what is a covenant community, because it is so complicated. You know, and I asked other people to, to write their comments or what they, I used other people's descriptions, because I don't have all the, you know, all the bandwidth on that. So, yeah, and, you know, it's quite complicated. And so it stays under the radar. And even I don't even think the Catholic bishops realize what a covenant community is, and that it's not under their control. It is not under, they are not Catholic. They are not submitted to anyone but themselves. And that is, I think that's what the Catholic Church should be the most worried about, is, you know, and they're, but they love Catholics, and they want to recruit as many as they can into their communities. And they're going to, like, rework their minds and reframe their minds. And I don't want to use the term brainwash, because I guess it is brainwashing, but it happens so slowly and incremental by being members for, you know, you're, you're underway for at least two years, you know, which means you're just getting into the life of the community, you're sharing in men's groups, you're, you're participating in service things, you're always at gatherings or, and you're getting accustomed to being under the authority of a pastor or leader. So you kind of get, you know, it's like turning up the heat of the pan with the frog is in, okay. And you just kind of get accustomed to it. And then slowly they reveal to you, well, here's what we really think. And here's what's going to happen in the world. And this is what, don't trust the media. Don't trust the newspapers. You can only trust what we tell you. You know, it's all biased out there. You know, this, this is biased. This is biased. They're very pro-life which causes most of them to be very conservative groups, so, and there were actually, I don't want to say liberal, but there were other charismatic communities in the very beginning that had, that wanted to serve the poor, that wanted to reach out and do actual works of mercy and reach out to poor people and to try to help society. But they, they disappeared. They died away. And all that was left, all that stayed is these high control groups that enforced a level of compliance and membership. And, and they survived.
QUESTIONER: [0:52:47] But when they made these predictions about the societal collapse, and they've now got a quasi-military training program, and Clark keeps pushing this. How do you walk, how does he, how do you walk back from that?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:53:01] Well, he never did.
QUESTIONER: [0:53:03] Okay, so the community...
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:53:04] He's dead.
QUESTIONER: [0:53:05] He's dead now, but for 20 some years from when you left, he was still leading this organization. They were still doing the training course or some version of it?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:53:13] I don't know. I know that the, the, the main mothership, Word of God, schismed. Clark went one way, Martin went the other way, and Martin developed, created a new covenant community called Word of Life in Ann Arbor. And that was their, that was their main base of operations. And the Word of God that went with Ralph Martin, eventually, because they didn't have all these rules and regulations, people said, well, this doesn't feel like covenant community. And so it kind of dwindled to like 100 people now. And the same thing happened in Steubenville when the bishop finished his pastoral visitation, is that...
The people who really wanted to be in the Sword of the Spirit left Steubenville and, [phone ringing] my apologies, the people left Steubenville and moved to other covenant communities. And the people who stayed got together and reformulated some, but it's usually, they've stopped growing from the original, the original members were young college students like me and many of them. And they just got... And they just got older and stayed in the community. And they didn't, they didn't have any more recruitment. No one else was interested in joining. And so they've just kind of dwindled and dwindled over time. And their way now, they figured out they need new people, they need blood, they need young people. And so now they're using two organizations to recruit on the college level. And one is called University Christian Outreach, which, and the other one is called... And the other one is called St. Paul's Outreach, SPO and UCO. And these groups are active on campuses and they bring people in and they form them, they give them teachings, they give them the opportunity to live in formation housing. And it's all based on interest and volunteering to be a part of this Catholic organization on campus that you can, you meet at the Newman Center or some Catholic parish and, and you're in it. If you're, if you go into it as a freshman, you'll be in it for four years and you'll receive teachings and everything. And then at the end of that, when you graduate, they say, well, guess what? There's a covenant community here that you can join and you can continue to live this lifestyle. And so they kind of funnel young people, young families into that. And a lot of people in these groups, they're very young, they're very sociable. They, they meet other interesting people that they're all Catholic. Generally, they're all Catholic and they celebrate the mass together and they start marrying other people. And, and then they find themselves in these small groups, you know, because they're, well, we should, we, we should join the community, you know? So they are the UCO and the SPO are the recruitment machines for the covenant communities now. And they're really, they're really the only way covenant community is going to survive. They've got to bring in new blood. They've got to bring in young people. They've got to bring in families. And because that's, that's what gives it strength and virility.
QUESTIONER: [0:56:48] It's interesting to suggest that they're the kids in covenant communities are not sticking with this system.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:56:55] Well, I would say easily 90% of kids who are in a covenant community eventually say, no, this is because they never made a personal choice. Now they may turn 18 and they're given the option of joining the community or not. I don't know. Some of them probably say, oh yeah, I want to be a part of this like mom and dad. And some of them say, oh, I don't want to be.
QUESTIONER: [0:57:31] The Amish are actually way more successful. Right, their percentage of preservation. Which is a lot higher than 5 or 10%.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:57:33] Yeah. I think too, the Amish have that year off. What do they call it?
QUESTIONERS: [0:57:36] Yeah, the chaos year. What's it called? Rumspringa.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:57:42] Have we got some Amish back there? So, yeah, and they get to go out and they get to experience the world.
QUESTIONER: [0:57:52] Yeah, and the covenant communities are afraid of doing that. Terrified, right? The last thing they want to do is let the teens run wild.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:57:57] Well, I don't know. I can't say I know that for sure, but it's reasonable that they would want to retain as many as possible.
QUESTIONER: [0:58:08] What year did Waco happen? Ninety-three. Ninety-three. Does that sound right? I'm curious how you all must have been aware that the whole Branch Davidian thing, the ATF attack out in the compound, and then the shootings. Remember this whole thing with Branch Davidians and David Koresh? So, here's a military prepping group. Yeah. They're at war with the world, and they have prophecy, and David Koresh is the golden boy. When you all heard about that, did you think, did people say, oh, they're a bunch of crazies? Or was there a little bit of looking at yourselves like, oh. Yeah. Seems to be some good ones here.
QUESTIONER: [0:58:45] The ATF could be coming our way.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:58:48] Well, first of all, that was after our covenant community disintegrated. Because the pastoral visitation was finished in June of 91.
QUESTIONER: [0:58:57] What year, do you recall, did they ask you to take the death oath?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:59:03] Well, that was early on. That would have been as early as 80.
QUESTIONER: [0:59:07] Oh, okay. Wow.
QUESTIONER: [0:59:09] So, the training program was running for at least 11 years before Bishop Ottenweller pulled the plug?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:59:13] Well, no. The training program probably started maybe in 79, the first iterations, and then was delivered every year to different select groups of the community until about 84, 85, after which they just gave it to the whole community. They basically gave all the teachings and started teaching it publicly.
QUESTIONER: [0:59:37] One of the main criticisms that you see about covenant communities is the charge of elitism.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:59:44] Yeah.
QUESTIONER: [0:59:43] Can you speak to that?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [0:59:44] I can after I use a bathroom . . . I will show you the direction. Forgive me . . . I'm an old man and this happens.
[… cross-talk during a break; speaker unidentifiable …]
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:00:39] Bishop Ottenweller. And this is really important. He's the only Catholic bishop who ever did a full investigation, talked to all the people about the Sword of the Spirit, looked at their teachings and everything. And he made this statement. He said “the strong connection that Servants of Christ the King,” which is our covenant community, “had with the Sword of the Spirit skewed your relationship with the magisterium of the church. Your vision, your teachings, your formation was from Ann Arbor.” Meaning the Sword of the Spirit. “Your attention was in that direction. The authority came from the Sword of the Spirit.”
“As bishop, I had responsibility for oversight, but there really was no link between me and the Servants of Christ the King. It is odd that despite the fact that I am the chief teacher of this diocese, I was never invited to give a teaching at a Sunday night gathering of the community.” So they never invited him to the portion of our life that was Sunday gatherings or the Sword of the Spirit-dominated, controlled gathering. Now, he did come on a couple of feast days that we had and do mass, and we would all come on and stand up. And when he was going to retire, we gave him a golf putter as a gift. So there was one “Sword of the Spirit of teachings,” he writes, “and programs that made a deep impression on the membership,” Ottenweller told the newly elected interim community leadership. “There needs to be... Therefore, a program of reeducation of the members to return them to a sense of church that is important for those who call themselves Catholic.” So anybody who's been in the Sword of the Spirit, this bishop is saying, needs to be reeducated. And I think that says it all. You know?
QUESTIONER: [1:03:07] At some point, it must have occurred to you, I was in a cult, the C word.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:03:14] Not till I was out. I mean, that's kind of what I mean. Yeah.
QUESTIONER: [1:03:18] How did that process go? And when that dawned on you, was that like a foreign moment? Or were you so prepared for that realization, you were like, oh yeah.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:03:27] Well, the bishop was ready to call us a cult. The only reason he didn't was because the priest leaders of the community submitted to him for the investigation. He said, if they hadn't submitted them, Father LeBar told me this, if they hadn't submitted, he would have called them a cult and washed his hands. And actually, the bishop that took over for Bishop Ottenweller when he did retire was Bishop Sheldon out of Akron. And we had a covenant community out there, a Sword of the Spirit covenant community.
Bread of life. And they did. The bishops said, you've got to re-recognize, re-write your articles of constitution to come under if you want to stay a Catholic. And they were a Catholic organization. They were under the bishop and they dumped him. They dumped the bishop out there. And then he wrote up a little summary article saying they're a cult. So that's in that article on the Bread of Life that's online.
QUESTIONER: [1:04:36] I'm also in correspondence with the Diocese of Cleveland asking if there are any other documents related to that investigation that they would be willing to share.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:04:46] Boy, oh boy. I don't ever want to make you mad at me. So, yeah.
QUESTIONER: [1:04:55] Why do you think they target Catholic Churches, versus, say, some other Christian?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:05:04] Stephen Clark and Ralph Martin, the two leaders, were devout Catholics. And I would say probably until the day they died, they remained devout Catholics. When the Baptism of the Spirit and the Charismatic Renewal emerged, they heard God say that he wanted to unite all the churches through Charismatic Renewal. This is in the early 70s. This is written in one of their coordinator meeting notes. So they viewed themselves as a new thing, that God was doing something new, that he was going to unite all the churches through his Holy Spirit, through Charismatic Renewal, as one.
And they were even worried about which rituals from which denominations to keep. They said, we're going to have to figure that out. So, then your question, I want to make sure I answered you fully. What was the rest? Say that again.
QUESTIONER: [1:06:20] Basically, why did the Charismatics come after Catholics? Why did they try to kind of wiggle their way into the Catholic Church, versus, say, a Baptist Church, or a Presbyterian Church, or a Episcopalian, or just a local evangelical church?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:06:36] Gotcha. First of all, the Protestant Charismatic Renewal is already out there. And they are antithetical to... Submission and authority. [Phone Alarm: Hey! Hey!] Like, that's why all these evangelical churches stand alone. And they don't have one bishop that monitors a group of them. You know, they're all independent. And they call themselves Independent Charismatic Renewal. And they're pretty much covered by the Protestant Charismatic Renewal.
QUESTIONER: [1:07:08] So, this would be your Assemblies of God, your Independent Pentecostal Churches.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:07:15] Right, right, all of them. And the Catholics, too, are amenable to authority and submission, because we have the Pope, right? And we have the bishops. And we've always had this authority structure as Catholics over us. And they like that, because they want to take authority over people. And, you know, create their own parallel church, is what they're doing. And they would think that they're renewing the Catholic Church. Is what they would think.
QUESTIONER: [1:07:47] John, can you speak a little bit to the Baptism in the Holy Spirit? And as I recall, I think this is still on Sword of the Spirit's website, to become a member of a Sword of the Spirit community, you must receive the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Which is distinct. This is not the Baptism in the Trinitarian formula. This isn't confirmation. As it's administered as a sacrament.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:08:20] Right. So this, the Baptism in the Holy Spirit is the entryway into charismatic renewal. All charismatics have been baptized in the Holy Spirit. They... You receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues, the ability to verbally worship God out loud in front of other people, the discernment of spirits. The... The deliverance from evil spirits, they would say. All the gifts... There are seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Prophecy is one of them. So, charismatic renewal brings all of that down on you, and they lay their hands on you and ask God to come into your body and into your life and to release the power of the Holy Spirit within you, and you pray with them, and if you do what I did, they're praying in tongues around you and worshiping, and you're listening. You're going, I could try that, you know.
And open yourself up to it, and then try to let the gift emerge of tongues. So, that's how. And then, I think they're loosening a little bit their grip on that, because now they have some allied groups. They're not in the community, and they're not under the rule of the Sword of the Spirit, but they're allied. Like, have you heard of the Bruderhof Communities? Okay. I think they're a group of German Christian communities. They're not baptized in the Spirit, but they have a very agreeable theology with the leaders of the Sword of the Spirit. And if you look on the Sword of the Spirit's webpage, you would probably find a couple articles about them allying themselves as allies with the Bruderhof group. So, they know that they're not growing the way they need to, or they're thinking, well, how else can we fulfill this mission that God has given us to unite all the Christian churches? And so, they used to have this real strict, rigid criteria that everyone had to meet to become a member of the Sword of the Spirit. And I think they're realizing now they can't be so strict. That they've got to open up a little bit and accept these groups and these groups and just become friends and allies, so to speak, and maybe share resources or worship together or something like that. So, I think, from what I've been able to observe and read about, that appears.
QUESTIONER: [1:11:15] The Sword of the Spirit, to Joe's question, also has a... A specific time, like, event. I'm thinking about the Duquesne weekend. Can you talk about that?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:11:32] Yeah. Well, Catholic Charismatic Renewal came into being in 1967 at a weekend retreat at Duquesne University. And it's called the Duquesne Weekend, and it's celebrated annually, I think. The leaders of that retreat were never discussed publicly because they were both gay men, and that’s not the image they wanted to portray, original Charismatic Renewal wanted to portray*.* Bill Storey, and the other guy's name is Roger, and I can't remember his last name. But Bill Storey was a professor at Duquesne University. Later, he got a job out in South Bend and moved out there. I think he was a professor of liturgy. Bill was a homosexual and he knew that wasn’t right with God and he wanted to be cured of that. So he attended a Pentecostal Church where they prayed over him to be healed of that. I guess he thought that he was healed. And he thought that this is great. I’ve got to share this with my Catholic friends.
So he had this retreat, and, you know, people got prayed over for healing, or for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And that's how it began. That's how Charismatic Renewal was born into the Catholic Church. So, I don’t think Bill was ever healed. He had a partner when he died. But later, he published the first really critical piece... about Charismatic Renewal. And that's up on the website, if you've been there. And he basically said that this is an authoritarian movement, and not authoritarian in the sect of like, you know, people just taking outright control of people. But he was thinking of how people in Charismatic Renewal believe that they hear God in their head, God is the ultimate authority, so they hear God in their head, telling them to go down the street and evangelize these people. That's what they've got to do.
And so you can't challenge that, because the author of that directive is God. And it's the same thing with prophecy. It's how we got... Prophecy would work. They would utter prophecies, and that was God speaking, right? Who... Are you going to challenge that? No. God is the authoritarian voice. You know? And he says this, and we do it. So, yeah, that's how he looked at that.
Editor's note. Two matters of record. The co-organiser of the Duquesne Weekend was Ralph A. Keifer (d. 5 July 1987), later professor of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago — not “Roger.” And the two men stand differently as to what is publicly known: Dr. Storey's published obituary records his partnership with Philip Howland Schatz from 1980 until his death in 2014, so that much is a matter of public record, while we have found no comparable record concerning Dr. Keifer. What is said here about Dr. Keifer, and about either man's motives in seeking the baptism in the Spirit, rests on Mr. Flaherty's recollection alone. — Ed.
QUESTIONER: [1:14:34] Some of the people at the Duquesne, was Stephen B. Clark there too?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:14:39] No, but he came a couple months later. He heard about it because some of the people went out to South Bend and prayed with people out there, and that's how things got started there at People of Praise, which is another, a similar group to the Sword of the Spirit out in South Bend, People of Praise. And while they never did like the crazy military stuff that we did, they have all the other features, the prophecies, yeah, the pastoral system, pastoral leaders and everything. Amy Coney Barrett on our Supreme Court is a former handmaid of the People of Praise.
QUESTIONER: [1:15:23] You probably need to explain what that means, given the Handmaids Tale, the Atwood book.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:15:29] Right, right. They're not the same definition. A handmaid was just an assistant to a man, a male coordinator, or some male leader. So, the handmaid would, you know, do the typing or call people.
QUESTIONER: [1:15:44] Sounds a lot more dramatic than, like, church secretary.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:15:48] Yeah. They're not having babies for other leaders. Okay. So that's all you really need to know, you know, the only difference. And Amy Coney Barrett has a lovely reputation backing People of Praise. They would talk about people that I know who knew her said, that any time you saw her, she was covered with children.
She always had children around her. And, you know, she had seven children, and two of those were adopted, I think. And she went to law school. And people sometimes point to her and say, well, this is a woman that came from a covenant community. How can you say bad things about how women are treated in covenant community? What you have to understand is that Amy Coney Barrett is, she's only where she is because some man in the system somewhere said she could do that. And she's wonderful, and she's smart, and she's bright, obviously. But she's only there because a man in the covenant community to which she belonged gave her permission. You think about that, and it's really horrible. Because think of all these brilliant women who never get permission to become who they are.
Editor's note. Justice Barrett's association with the People of Praise was widely reported in 2020. The community used the title “handmaid” for women in a particular leadership and mentoring role and later discontinued it; reporting on whether Justice Barrett personally held that title has been contested, and the community has not confirmed it. The point being made here — that the People of Praise is a covenant community with a pastoral-headship structure comparable to the Sword of the Spirit's — does not depend on the title. — Ed.
QUESTIONER: [1:17:12] And this is America. This is happening here.
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:17:15] Not Gilead, America.
QUESTIONER: [1:17:17] Right, not Gilead. Yeah. Alright, any other questions?
JOHN FLAHERTY: [1:17:26] If you guys want, I know that after you hear all this stuff, you think to yourself, I have an email address. Use it. I think it's on some of these documents there. If you want to, please email me or you can text me if my phone number's on there.
I'm available. I'm retired now, so I don't care. Some days I don't do anything. It's kind of nice at some point. So feel free to contact me anytime you wish. Identify yourself, say you were here at this meeting, so I know.
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