Franciscan at Home

An atheist, a pagan and a Protestant… This could be the beginning of a really bad joke or it could be illustrative of the type of people that make their way to your RCIA process. Anyone who works with RCIA knows that people come with radically different levels of faith and understanding. If we want to lead these inquirers to a real relationship with Christ and His Church, we must first lay a firm foundation. Let me share with you three real stories I’ve encountered over the years while directing RCIA.

John, in his mid 30s, knows nothing about the Christian faith. While growing up, he did not even learn basic religious knowledge from popular religious holidays. He believes in God, but has never been taught. He has a preteen daughter who has been attending a Catholic school. He has never been married and is living with a woman who is not his daughter’s mother. John finally realized he needed something more and when he saw a religious sister in town, he asked if she could help him. A few weeks later, John was in my RCIA Inquiry class.

Joan, about 20, has learned bits and pieces of Christian teaching, but most of her knowledge comes from media and friends. She is a thinker and has many questions. Joan is willing to believe, but is unsure if God even exists. She has Catholic friends who invited her to RCIA.

Jim, in his early 40s, is a nominally engaged Protestant who is married to a Catholic and has three children. The children are preparing to be baptized in the Catholic Church and while interested, he has the usual Protestant reservations about Catholicism. He believes in Jesus, but has a long way to go to accept the Catholic Church. Since his children are preparing to be baptized, he agreed to attend RCIA and learn for himself.

It is clear from the above cases that each person has specific needs and must overcome very diverse obstacles before coming to conversion to Jesus Christ. The question is, “How does your RCIA handle these diverse situations?”

The greatest disservice we can do to those in RCIA, is run them through the “program” so they can “become Catholic” and yet have no real attachment to Jesus or His Church. If we simply put people on an RCIA assembly line, we are setting them up to be nominal Catholics or future ex-Catholics. For RCIA to be effective, catechumens and candidates must have real opportunities to say “yes” or “no” to Jesus.

So what is an RCIA director to do? One important step is to develop an effective precatechumenate.

Dear Teresa,

I wonder if you can help me again. I am struggling to get volunteers to help me with my RCIA and also to be honest, struggling to get the parish to realise this is something they all are meant to be involved in. I don’t know where to go for information on this, and they just stare at me and tell me the last RCIA catechist just did everything herself. Here’s hoping you can help!

God bless,

Julie

Dear Teresa,

I'm so glad to hae someone experienced to turn to for advice.

We have a few new people in our RCIA team, and I would like to give them some basic formation on the Christian life, as this is what our catechumens and candidates are seeking. I’m not quite sure where to start though. What are your thoughts?

Yours hopefully,
Julie

Dear Julie,

How lovely to hear from you again, and I am so pleased to hear your team is growing. What a good idea to start your team’s training and formation with an introduction to the aspects of the Christian life! I suggest the best place to start is with this small scripture verse from Acts 2:42: ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ (RSV). Christian Initiation, as you say, is to prepare someone for Christian life in all its dimensions.

Dear Teresa,

Thank you for the help you gave me. It makes total sense that we should start with evangelisation, and looking to the Rites has been amazing in that it has helped me really engage with this period. I was going to ask you about the next stage, but something has come up. At the Easter Vigil, we had a small group received into the Church and then that was it for them. It struck me that this seems odd. I worry about one of them in particular as this person has no Catholic support network and her sponsor no longer calls her either. So often it seems that people lapse in their new found faith, and I wonder if this may be one reason why. I’d appreciate your thoughts.
Julie

Dear Julie,

Thank you for your letter. How interesting that you raise this point and how right you are to raise it. If you look at the Rites, you will see that this is not the end, but the period of the neophyte year which includes 7 weeks postbaptismal catechesis which is called mystagogy.

This page on Christian initiation is offered in each issue of The Sower as an on-going way to address specific questions that do not necessarily get addressed in more general articles and training resources. The questions all come straight from the field, and have two sources: 1) from readers like you; 2) from issues raised during seminars conducted by the Association for Catechumenal Ministry (ACM) over the past ten years in various dioceses.

In this issue we address the following questions:

Q: Beyond Mystagogy, why is the Neophyte Year of a new Catholic so important?

RCIA Catechists – Stay Tuned!

This page on Christian initiation is offered in each issue of The Sower as an on-going way to address specific questions that do not necessarily get addressed in more general articles and training resources. The questions all come straight from the field, and have two sources: 1) from readers like you; 2) from issues raised during seminars conducted by the Association for Catechumenal Ministry (ACM) over the past ten years in various dioceses.

In this issue we address the following questions:

Q. An RCIA inquirer has recently come to our parish and she is seeking to have the Church address the situation of a previous marriage to a man who is a Jew. He was never baptized and neither is she. How does this situation differ from a marriage between two baptized people? Would a Pauline or Petrine privilege be relevant here?

Q. I’m having trouble finding really solid catechetical material for adults in the Spanish language. What is available for someone developing an RCIA process for a Hispanic community?

Eric Deitel looks at how we can ensure that the RCIA process is fully respectful of the dignity of each person.

Non-baptized persons and baptized non-Catholics seek to enter into full communion with Christ and His Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). Many RCIA programs can fall into the trap of making a cookie-cutter program that all people go through for a certain amount of time to become Catholic. These programs fail to assess each person’s background and history and can tend to treat the person more as an object moving through an assembly line. St. Augustine’s work, De Catechizandis Rudibus can help give great advice to help these RCIA programs get out of this trap. In the eighth chapter of his work, St. Augustine identified a type of people who seek to enter into the catechumenate but do not fit the average person. St. Augustine identified this person as someone who has some basic knowledge of the Christian faith and willingness to live it. Augustine then gives practical advice on how to individualize the RCIA process.

St. Augustine viewed that instruction for people seeking the sacraments should be personalized as much as possible. Augustine used two key characteristics to look for when assessing the individual: pure motives and a Christian education. He expressed that the individual’s motives are “to be made a partaker in the sacrament.”[i] This makes evident the purity of his or her motives. The individual was seeking ‘only’ the spiritual benefits of the Church in the sacraments and not the temporal benefit of being a Christian which St. Augustine described early in his work.[ii] The second key characteristic of this person was his or her education. The person’s education was described as “a considerable knowledge of our Scriptures and literature.”[iii] The word ‘considerable’ showed that Augustine was not speaking of someone who had heard a few stories from the Bible but an individual who has carefully investigated the meaning of the these stories. The individual had a basic knowledge of the Christian faith.

Dear Teresa,

Thank you for your letter. I can see now why RCIA is called a process and what you say about its aspects – catechetical, pastoral and liturgical make sense. I hadn’t thought about it that way before. I’ve looked at the Rites and really see that they do have all these three aspects! I can’t believe I missed this before. I’m not sure what to do at which point though. I have asked the people coming what they want to know about, but I am finding it hard to explain things as they don’t often have the basics. Help!!
Julie

Dear Julie,

How good to hear from you again. It’s an interesting point isn’t it – what to do at which point. I have heard other people having the same problem as you, so you’re not alone, don’t worry! I find always looking to the Church herself is a good starting point.

Last time I mentioned that there are three aspects to the RCIA process; now it is prudent to mention what the Church calls the periods of RCIA.

This page on Christian initiation is offered in each issue of The Sower as an on-going way to address specific questions that do not necessarily get addressed in more general articles and training resources. The questions all come straight from the field, and have two sources: 1) from readers like you; 2) from issues raised during seminars conducted by the Association for Catechumenal Ministry (ACM) over the past ten years in various dioceses.

In this issue we address the following questions:

Q. Why are the Scrutinies in Lent considered so important for the unbaptized elect?

Q. What is the Penitential Rite for a baptized candidate in Lent?

This page on Christian initiation is offered in each issue of the Sower as an on-going way to address specific questions that do not necessarily get addressed in more general articles and training resources. The questions all come straight from the field, and have two sources: 1) from readers like you; 2) from issues raised during seminars conducted by the Association for Catechumenal Ministry (ACM) over the past ten years in various dioceses.

In this issue we address the following questions.

Q. What is my essential purpose as an RCIA godparent or sponsor?
Q. How long should the RCIA process be?