True House
Covenant Community

True House was one of the first covenant communities established as part of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. It was established in the summer of 1968 by James Byrne and Pete Edwards in South Bend, IN. It drew its membership primarily from students and clergy who attended a charismatic prayer meeting on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. True House would inspire a series of similar covenant communities across the United States and Europe whose members would pledge to live lives shared in common and centered around prayer meetings that included praying in tongues, exorcisms, faith healing, prophecy, teachings on spiritual behavior and exuberant original music all structured under an authoritarian system of lay leadership. Just five years after its founding, Jim Byrne was forced to leave his leadership position with True House and move away from South Bend in August of 1973 after allegations of spiritual and sexual abuse were made against him by members of the community. This prompted members of other covenant communities to launch an “investigation” which only served to prevent the local bishop from looking into the matter. When the abuse allegations were made known to Notre Dame theology professor Bill Storey, he spread awareness of the issue across campus through an interview with the a.d. correspondence newsletter. This ultimately prompted  the National Catholic Reporter newspaper to publish a six-part expose in 1975 where it was revealed that Jim Byrne had performed forced exorcisms on its members as a means of coercive control. The True House covenant community ultimately decided to disband, with half of its members moving on from South Bend, and the other half choosing to join the adjacent covenant community in South Bend called People of Praise.

Early Days

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal traces its start to changes that occurred in Catholic Church rules following the 1965 Vatican II Council which allowed lay people to start their own ministries. In February of 1967 at a retreat conducted at Duquesne University in Pittsburg led by professors William (Bill) Storey and Ralph Keifer, people in attendance claimed that they began speaking in tongues after being prayed over. Word of the praying in tongues spread among college students, and prayer groups started to emerge at universities throughout the United States. Then students began a public prayer group at the University of Notre Dame which was hosted in the home of physics professor Paul DeCelles. Because the meeting involved the “laying on of hands” and exorcisms to drive out perceived evil spirits, it was so shocking that the student newspaper devoted its entire front page to exposing the practices. While this was first happening on campus, Jim Byrne was just 22 years old and finishing his degree. He was described as being a lapsed Catholic from Detroit who preferred drinking and parties as an undergrad. But Byrne had a conversion experience while attending an Antioch Weekend event on campus, and very quickly began looking for a way to devote his entire life to renewing the church. Together with seven other Notre Dame students and a Notre Dame priest named Fr. Ed O’Connor, they formulated a plan to recruit members of the campus charismatic prayer group to form an intense christian community that would give new meaning to their lives. Inspired by their fervor, a local motivational speaker named Herbert True donated a house near campus to their cause, and True House was born.

Establishing its practices

Byrne and other Catholic members of the South Bend charismatic community went in search of local evangelical christians who could give them advice on leading a life guided by the Holy Spirit.The man who ultimately became their primary mentor was named Ray Bullard, and he was the South Bend leader of the Assemblies of God Full Gospel Businessmen group that met regularly to pray in tongues. Despite the outside influence, True House’s membership remained exclusively Catholic. Its practices included attending daily mass and prayer meetings in the various houses it acquired near campus, as well as the main prayer meeting on campus where praying in tongues was common and singing original joyful music consumed much of the meetings. It was common for a married couple to live in a house and have one or two other True House members live with them. But as the majority of True House members were single college students, they lived in single-gender houses. Members also practiced faith-healing and prophecy, and received teachings from leaders that were at the top of True House’s authoritarian structure. Byrne was revered by many as the top leader and he often sat apart from the rest of True House’s members. He was primarily accessible through his lieutenants, Joel Kibler, Bob Colson and Paul Scheuerman. He was the one who introduced the concepts of household living and of headship to True House, in which each of the approximately 65 members was assigned a person called a “head” that they needed to submit their thoughts, experiences and spiritual life to and then that information would be passed up the chain of leadership. Byrne claimed that headship was God’s will and a spiritual principle that will not work as a source of grace unless the person under headship believes that God will work through this agency. During a national charismatic convention when he was just 26 years old, he said that “in a very real way in intense communities, those who are heads of that community stand in the place of God.” To recruit new members, True House members would love-bomb recruits and encourage them to “throw themselves away” so that they could live a new life as a christian in True House. The reason people were willing to submit their lives was because of the sense of belonging to a community that True House gave them, in addition to the purpose it instilled in them to renew the church and combat the evil present in the world outside the community. But most importantly, by receiving the spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit, they felt newly empowered as individuals to do things not previously possible and to have cornered the market on spiritual truth, and as individuals they had enhanced feelings of control and efficacy in a chaotic world.

The Covenant

The following is the text of a covenant members would make before the entire community when they officially became a member of True House:

Since the beginning of mankind God has called a people to Himself. We are members of the people called together by His own Son, Jesus Christ, and we rejoice in our special call as members of His Holy Roman Catholic Church. But God has invited us, through His word to us as a community (particularly in prophecy and in the desire He has put in our hearts) to commit our lives to one another, to be a people in a special covenant relationship with Him and with one another as members of the True House community. He has called us to surrender our lives to His Son Jesus Christ as a people and to yearn for the fulfillment of the work that His Spirit is doing among us as a body. He has told us about the House He wants to build of us and among us, and about the special place in His plan for our own salvation and for the drawing of many others into His Kingdom.

I, _________, give my life completely to God and desire to live as a member of True House.”

An anthropological study

From 1972 through 1973 a Paulist priest named Fr. Ken McGuire lived as a member and leader of True House while conducting anthropology research that he used to produce his 1976 dissertation on covenant communities. McGuire anonymized the crucial names in the paper to protect his subjects, but the following is a key to understanding the dissertation with accuracy: 

People of the Promise = True House
St Marks = Notre Dame
Central City = South Bend
Kurt = Jim Byrne
Walter = Pete Edwards
Larry = Joel Kibler

The picture that McGuire paints of the True House community is that of a cult, where Jim Byrne functions as a prophet and the community gathers in meetings to hear him speak and sing guitar-driven music of praise. The average age of the community’s members was just 23, and the leaders were 25 years old at the time of the study. All the leaders of the community were men at the time, but according to a survey of True House members, 90% did not think leadership should be restricted to men. Most of the members expressed frustrations at meeting their personal goals, but realized that their own self-image had greatly improved upon joining True House. True House’s daily activities and attendance at mass would occupy all of its members’ free time to the point that they rarely noticed they weren’t allowed to date for the first year. McGuire also made note of the fact that True House had a public-facing power structure, but in practice it was Jim Byrne who had sole decision-making power over almost every aspect of the community through a covert power structure that all community leaders adhered to. McGuire also notes that Byrne formulated the power structure and covenant obligations not on methodology from other evangelical groups, but on his interpretation of the Old Testament Sinai Covenant made between Moses and God and on the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice in the New Testament as the part of the New Covenant prophecy issued by Jeremiah.

Spreading Byrne’s ideas

Jim Byrne was a prolific letter writer and maintained lines of communication with many of the 1,025 Catholic charismatic prayer groups in the United States that were present by 1973. In addition to his personal efforts, he created two nonprofits to spread his teachings and ensure that prayer groups instituted the same teachings and practices without much deviation. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal National Service Committee was created by Jim Byrne to spread his teachings, and it was staffed by prominent leaders of the movement who often traced their participation in the movement to a transformative weekend retreat that had been hosted at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University in February 1967 by theology professor William Storey. Some prominent charismatic leaders who were present at the DuQuesne weekend included Stephen Clark and Ralph Martin who went on to found the Word of God covenant community in Ann Arbor. In addition to the service committee (which now operates as Pentecost Today), Byrne started a nonprofit business called Charismatic Renewal Services originally staffed by True House member John Ferrone. Known internally as CRS, the nonprofit was responsible for creating the necessary print and audio collateral to spread Byrne’s teachings and practices. When True House was disbanded in 1975, a covenant community called People of Praise absorbed the CRS business, which it still operates under the new name of Comcenter, as well as providing offices for the National Service Committee until 1991.

Impression management

True House has from its beginnings been the subject of intense scrutiny and study by clerics, academics and writers. In one book about the early Catholic Charismatic Renewal, the authors noted that members exhibit an extreme reluctance to discuss anything that might introduce conflict, saying that anything that threatens unity could be perceived as the work of the devil. The appearance of a harmonious interpersonal atmosphere helped to attract newcomers and reinforce the bonds of mutual respect between members who were almost always accepted. The authors noted a high degree of outright manipulation present in True House that they perceived to be unhealthy for the community. As an example they described how arrangements were being made by True House to purchase houses to expand their community, and how adjacent property owners began organizing a protest over the intrusion of these religious “weirdos.” A neighborhood picnic was organized by the True House leaders to get the two factions together. Only the most articulate, attractive and impeccably well-behaved members were allowed to attend, and they were told which topics to discuss and which to avoid. The whole picnic was designed to create the desired image. It was successful and the protests were dropped in regard to the True House property purchases. A similar orchestration occurred when Cardinal Leo Suenens visited South Bend in 1973. During a reception for the cardinal, a loose but effective protective ring of bodies shielded him from persons deemed by the leadership to be intrusive or unacceptable. If such a person attempted to approach the cardinal, he or she would be intercepted by one of the bodyguards and led off to the punch bowl or to some area where little harm could be done. The phrase “create an artificial environment” was used by leadership to characterize what was happening, and the cardinal was unaware of what was happening. This was how True House leaders were able to maintain a favorable impression among the church hierarchy and the wider charismatic renewal despite their controversial practices. The practice of impression management was picked up by other covenant communities, and when those communities’ leaders first learned about abuses at True House, they too failed to disclose them to the local bishop according to reporting in the Aug. 10, 1975 edition of the New York Times.

Controversy

From the very beginning, True House was defined by scholar Joseph Fichter as a cult. And it had been successful at limiting knowledge about its most coercive practice of forced exorcisms. Defined internally as a “breakthrough ministry” or “deliverance ministry,” it involved pulling an unsuspecting member of True House out of their bed in the middle of the night and taking the person to a secure room in the presence of True House leaders where they would perform interrogations and exorcisms on the person until that person’s most intimate history was disclosed. These forced exorcisms could last days while the person was sleep deprived, and they often involved burning the person’s clothes or possessions during the exorcism. By obtaining intimate details about a person, Byrne would then insinuate that the person was damaged and in need of Byrne’s guidance to live a true Christian life and obtain a new personality. In one-on-one sessions with young male initiates, Byrne was also convincing young men that they were ignorant about how to have sex, and then he would sexually abuse the men in the guise of teaching. True House members who were interviewed about this after True House was disbanded did not describe Byrne as gay, but they said that these coercive practices were done in order for Byrne to maintain power over other people. In a letter to Fr. Ed O’Connor, Byrne described himself as being guilty of committing wicked acts for his own sexual gratification and of having homosexual urges, but that he was praying for them to go away. By 1973 William Storey had left Duquesne University and was now a theology professor at Notre Dame. A gay man himself, Storey heard about Byrne’s abuses from a member of the fledgling LGBTQ student group at Notre Dame. Storey then published letters about the allegations and mailed them to the bishop in charge of the diocese that encompassed Notre Dame as well as other leaders throughout the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The allegations gained public awareness when Storey submitted to an interview with Notre Dame’s a.d. correspondence newsletter in the May 24, 1975 edition. That prompted a multipart investigation by the National Catholic Reporter newspaper of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in August and September of 1975 in which the reporter likened the leaders of covenant communities to Mussolini and Hitler. Eventually the remaining members of True House decided to disband the community and its properties and half its membership were absorbed into the People of Praise covenant community.

Aftermath

Jim Byrne was in a state of despair after it was revealed that he’d been sexually abusing young men, and he left the community abruptly in August of 1973 under pressure from Steve Clark and members of the National Service Committee. Byrne then moved to Clearwater, FL to stay in a home owned by the Charismatic Christian Foundation. He maintained written correspondence with Fr. Ed O’Connor during this time and detailed how he received a $10,000 payout from the National Service Committee and how he was dabbling in the life of a fledgling charismatic community in Clearwater called the Spirit of God community. O’Connor proposed an arranged marriage between Byrne and a True House member named Maria Difato as a means of muting the damaging allegations of abuse. Maria Difato was the daughter of Edith Difato, who herself was the co-founder of another covenant community in Gaithersburg, MD known as the Mother of God community. Edith Difato approved of the arrangement, so Maria Difato, Byrne and O’Connor went to the Washington DC suburb of Gaithersburg to perform the marriage ceremony. He would return to Florida for the next several years to attend law school at a satellite branch of Stetson University in St. Petersburg before moving his new family permanently to the Washington DC suburbs in Maryland. Byrne would never officially join Mother of God, but his membership in a leader’s family made him a constant presence and demonstrated his inability to stay away from covenant community life. Allegations of abuse also followed him to Maryland, when in 1987 a police report was filed by a Mother of God member alleging that Byrne had sexually abused his son at the Mother of God community’s school. However, it is not known if Byrne was ever convicted in a court of law for his serial sexual predatory actions. His 2018 obituary states he helped found the law school at George Mason University and taught there for 30 years in addition to being the Director of the Institute of International Banking Law & Practice.

The revision of the
charismatic movement’s history

Given the scandalous nature of the allegations made against Jim Byrne, a concerted effort has been made to erase True House’s status as one of the first covenant community of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and to minimize it as the origin point for many of the teachings, practices and organizations of the renewal. Even “Pentecost Today” has fabricated a revisionist history to rewrite its own history to avoid mentioning Byrne or True House. But because Byrne was a prolific writer and organizer, a careful examination of the dates associated with his records at the Notre Dame archives reveals that True House was indeed first, was indeed the founder of the National Service Committee and Charismatic Renewal Services, and the original group that hosted the international charismatic renewal conferences at Notre Dame. And even though People of Praise absorbed True House members, practices and properties, members rarely talked about True House and many People of Praise members don’t know that the house that People of Praise prophet Kevin Ranaghan raised his family in (1003 St. Vincent St) was originally the seat of True Houses’ operations. When the National Service Committee investigated the situation at True House in 1973, it appointed Bert Ghezzi to help conduct the investigation, even though Ghezzi had been Byrne’s professor at Notre Dame and had been one of two people to pray over Byrne to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Needless to say, the NSC never reported its findings to the local bishop before True House disbanded in 1974, which prompted an angry letter from Bishop Pursley to Kevin Ranaghan and also prompted Pursley to announce in Newsweek magazine that he wouldn’t investigate True House. The reason for the coverup was to ensure that an international conference to be held in Rome in the summer of 1975 went smoothly so that the Pope would be unaware of the scandals in covenant communities and then bless the charismatic renewal – precisely the scenario of “impression management” that Bill Storey warned about in his Scholastic interview earlier in 1975. When Storey read in Newsweek that local Bishop Pursley didn’t intend to investigate True House, he wrote a letter to Pursley saying, “I am completely floored by your statements, as quoted, in the Newsweek report on Pentecostalism. I really can’t believe that you made such statements in light of your personal letters to me… I certainly hope that you did not make them because I would feel that my initiatives, taken at great personal cost, have been almost utterly useless.”