Confirmation requires nothing from us. It’s done to us and it’s done to babies if they are baptized in danger of death. In the East it’s always done to babies at the time of their baptism. So a sacrament of maturity where we profess our catholicity it isn’t. It is a discipline of the West that we have to have catechesis before we receive Confimation unless we’re in danger of death.
Until 1910, Confirmation was always before First Communion and both were in the teens to early adulthood. In 1910, Pius X asked that children be given Communion at the age of reason and that resulted in the order of those sacraments being flipped. This also resulted in Confimation taking on a totally different meaning in the minds of the people and in some dioceses it got pushed back as late as the last year of high school in order to keep students in religious education, a really bad reason for delaying Confirmation and the graces and gifts it confers. I must admit, though, that in the diocese where I grew up everyone who had made their First Communion was prepared for Confirmation when the Bishop came to confirm every second year. I was confirmed when I was 7. That lasted until the mid to late 60s when Confirmation started being pushed back later and later until it became a mid-teens sacrament.
For a while our diocese restored the sacraments to their original order so I’ve been involved in preparing childen, both 7 year olds and teens, for Confirmation and let me say that the 7 year olds got it better than the teens. They also wanted to be there, which the teens usually didn’t. Unfortunately our diocese was suppressed and our part of it was merged with a diocese that confirmed in grade 10. The compromise was to return to a flipped order for us and raise it to grade 6 from grade 2 and lower it to grade 6 for the rest of the diocese.
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