Anyone who can’t see the youthful sparkle in Dr. Ralph Martin’s eyes, can’t see. Despite decades laboring in the vineyard of the Lord, Ralph’s love for Jesus Christ and his Holy Church remains visibly undiminished, most likely because the foundation of his apostolic life remains unchanged.

“One of the most important decisions I ever made as a young man was to take some time each day for personal prayer,” says Ralph, who begins every morning with a cup of coffee and a prolonged period of prayer in his home office before an icon of Jesus.

“I knew that my experience of Christ’s love, my experience of his presence, was going to fluctuate, but I also knew that this was the most important relationship in my life, and I needed to build prayer into the structure of my daily life, to pay attention to the Lord even when I didn’t feel like it.”

Ora et labora. Prayer and work. Ralph remains one of the most influential figures in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which he sums up as a movement within the Church seeking to “renew or stir up the graces of baptism and confirmation” among lay and ordained Catholics, sometimes through the fostering of covenanted communities of like-minded families.

Despite his long-standing connections to Michigan, Ralph is not a native of the Great Lakes State. Born in New York. Raised in New Jersey. He studied philosophy at Notre Dame University in Indiana. Far from home, and ever further away from his childhood Catholic faith.

“I was drifting away from the Lord, drifting away from the Church, I had become a philosophy major because I wanted to know what the truth Was, but the more I studied philosophy, the more confused I got, and the more I got caught up in the relativism of the culture.”

All that changed upon encountering the Cursillo movement during the last semester of his senior year at Notre Dame. Founded in Spain in the 1940s, Cursillo is a Catholic apostolate that promotes Christian living and personal growth through a three-day weekend retreat and small group follow-up. It was on the second retreat held in South Bend that Ralph found truth in the person of Jesus Christ.

“It completely opened my life up to a much more radical and personal relationship with the Lord,” says Ralph.

“I even remember what I said at the end of the Cursillo: ‘I want to spend the rest of my life knowing and loving the Lord and helping other people know and love him too.’ That’s basically the rest of the story. That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since.”

It was this radical openness to the prompting of divine grace that first led Ralph to the Diocese of Lansing. The year was 1965. In the wake of a summer retreat at a monastery, Ralph and his friend, Steve Clark, jointly discerned that the Lord was calling them to leave doctorate programs in philosophy. Ralph was at Princeton. Steve was at Yale. The episcopal moderator to the Cursillo movement was the Most Reverend Michael Green (1917-82), auxiliary bishop of Lansing. Bishop Green asked Ralph and Steve to move to Michigan’s capital city to work for the National Office of the Cursillo movement. He also requested that both men serve in campus ministry at St. John Student Parish at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

“Soon, we were having prayer meetings in our apartment on MAC Avenue, just down the street from St. John’s, and we were having a big impact,” he recalls.

“Some players from the football team were coming and, one day, one of the football players really had a big encounter with the Lord and, well, he actually fell on the floor and started saying, ‘I love you, Jesus! I love you Jesus!’”

“Well, that scared a couple of girls who worked at the Newman Center, so they ran down and told the pastor at the time that things are ‘getting a little emotional here.’”

The fallout was as instant as it was dramatic. Upon returning home from a leadership training course in Colorado, Ralph found himself struggling to unlock his front door.

“The key to our apartment didn’t work. I then looked in the window and it wasn’t our furniture. It turned out that while we were gone, we had got fired from our job at St. John Student Center and also got suspended from our jobs at the Cursillo movement because people didn’t know what to make of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal — it even took us a while to find out where our furniture had gone!”

Born of necessity, campus ministry quickly gave way to manual labor as Ralph and Steve were hired to dig a sewer line for George Martin, who was director of religious education for the Diocese of Lansing. It was his job to advise Bishop Alexander Zaleski of Lansing (1906-75) on various important matters, including assessing the fruits of the fledgling Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

“At that time, Bishop Zaleski of Lansing was the chairman of the Committee on Doctrine for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and, so, he published the first official statement in the world about how to understand the Catholic Charismatic Renewal,” recalls Ralph.

“He said, ‘It seems like it’s a good thing, it’s bearing a lot of fruit but, of course, we need to be prudent, we need to be balanced,’ that type of thing. It basically opened the door for Catholic Charismatic Renewal being received as a legitimate renewal movement within the Catholic Church.”

This episcopal imprimatur encouraged others to embrace Charismatic Renewal. In the summer of 1967, Ralph and his fellow team members were invited to undertake campus ministry at St. Mary’s Parish in Ann Arbor. The impact was so sudden and spectacular — with over 300 students regularly attending prayer meetings in the student chapel — that the pastor of St. Mary’s soon suggested that Ralph, Steve, and others start their own ministry.

The result was one of the world’s first charismatic covenant communities. The group was called The Word of God, and it soon included thousands of local Christians of various ages, states of life, cultural backgrounds, churches, and other denominations. Since then, the Charismatic Movement has continued to have a positive impact on the life of the Diocese of Lansing.

“Take, for example, Christ the King Parish here in Ann Arbor, which is an outgrowth of the charismatic communities,” says Ralph, who is himself a parishioner at Christ the King.

“Out of this one parish, 35 vocations to the priesthood have emerged. On top of that, there’s all those who have been called to the diaconate and religious life — that is what happens when you have people raised in fervent families, living Catholic family life and, indeed, open to new life.”

In 1982, Ralph founded Renewal Ministries, a nonprofit aimed at fostering growth in holiness and evangelization among Catholics. Renewal Ministries was a deliberate pivot away from an interdenominational brand of Charismatic Christianity and towards something more exclusively Catholic.

“While what was happening in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was good, that’s only one dimension of the whole faith and my concern then really switched — I just wanted to live a full Catholic life,” Ralph says.

“That’s a full Catholic life that involves the charismatic dimension, yes, but also involves the contemplative dimension, it also involves teaching and preaching, it also involves the sacraments. These help people awaken to the treasures we have in the Church, and to who Jesus is, and to become active lay Catholics.”

Over 40 years later, Ralph is still the president of Renewal Ministries. He is also teaching at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, having gotten a doctorate in sacred theology from the Angelicum University in Rome. He also hosts a popular and long-running program on the Catholic media network EWTN.

More significantly, Ralph is husband to Anne who, together, have six children and 19 grandchildren, all of whom are practicing their Catholic faith. Deo gratias.

“I consider that an unmerited, undeserved, unearned miracle, and I can’t tell you how we did it. We tried. We tried to live a Christ-centered Catholic life. We sacrificed to send our kids to Catholic schools. We sacrificed to send them to Franciscan University. We tried to do all we could to put them in situations where they could own the faith, and eventually they all have. It was the mercy of the Lord. An undeserved gift of God.”

As for what’s next for Dr. Ralph Martin?

“People say to me, ‘Are you thinking of retiring?’ I say, ‘I don’t have a job I can retire from.’ I have a call the Lord has given me until he releases me from that. I have no choice.”