A prominent Catholic peace activist says the Holy Spirit today is found in groups like Christian Climate Action and Extinction Rebellion rather than in the institutional Church

At Mass every Sunday between Easter and Pentecost, we listen to readings from the Acts of the Apostles. They depict the early Church as a community which is alive in the Holy Spirit. ‘‘Without the Spirit,” Pope Francis said in homily when celebrating Mass on the solemnity of Pentecost in St Peter’s Square two years ago, “Jesus remains a person from the past; with the Spirit, he is a person alive in our time. Without the Spirit, Scripture is a dead letter; with the Spirit it is a word of life. A Christianity without the Spirit is joyless moralism; with the Spirit, it is life.’’

Confirmation is the sacrament which Catholics believe bestows a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I was confirmed in my early teens. I have no recollection of it opening up a change in me. I have virtually no sense of it being nurtured subsequently by the homilies of priests or the statements of bishops. Why is the Church virtually silent about this momentous reality? Francis challenges this absence by inviting us to ‘‘let the suffering around us touch us so that we hear the Spirit of God speaking to us’’. He affirms my own experience of the Spirit bringing me through much suffering, and awakening me to the ­suffering of others and the destruction of the earth.

In Whereon to Stand: The Acts of the Apostles and Ourselves, the American Jesuit priest, peacemaker and poet Daniel Berrigan – whose civil disobedience and prophetic actions led him to being imprisoned – contrasts the vibrant experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the early Church with its absence in the Church of his time.