How do I enter the Church when I cannot attend RCIA?

[Coop73]

I am 33-years-old and work full-time and attend college full-time. I am just about one-and-a-half years away from graduating. My family has found the Catholic Church and know that this is the true Church. Our local parish offers RCIA on Wednesday nights. Unfortunately this is one of my nights to attend college. My faith is the most important thing in my life but I am afraid that if I put off a year of school that I will never go back due to the difficulty in being a parent working and going to school. Should I put off school to attend the RCIA classes or is there any other way to come into full communion with the Catholic Church? I am familiar with the Catechism and believe all that it teaches; basically what I mean is I am not brand-new to what the Church teaches. What do you advise?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Here are some of the possibilities:

1. If you are already a baptized Christian, you need not go through RCIA. RCIA’s primary purpose is to catechize and sacramentally initiate non-Christians. For practical purposes, many parishes lump into RCIA baptized non-Catholic Christians and adult Catholics awaiting confirmation, but this is not the preferred method for their reception of the sacraments. As a baptized Christian, you could ask the pastor to personally instruct you – or to delegate your personal instruction to a parish staff member he trusts – and to receive you into the Church once you are determined to be ready.

2. If you are unbaptized, you could call the diocese and ask for a list of local parishes. You could call parishes in your vicinity and ask if they offer RCIA at a more convenient time. You need not be received into the Church in the parish in which you live.

3. If the local parish is your only option for attending RCIA – for example, it is the only Catholic church near to you – you could explain your situation to the pastor and/or the director of religious education and ask them for their suggestions. Perhaps you could attend RCIA classes on a more irregular basis – say, monthly, or when the RCIA class is receiving particularly important instruction – and study along with the RCIA class on your own.

4. One suggestion that may help in winning the pastor and/or DRE’s approval for option three might be to offer to attend RCIA regularly once you graduate from college. In a sense, you would be going through it again (although without participating in the sacramental initiation), but you would be receiving whatever instruction you may have missed the first time around and the experience would better introduce you to the local parish community. RCIA’s value is not just in what you learn about Catholicism – important as that is – but in becoming an active member of the local parish. That may be one of the reasons many parishes insist on RCIA for adult converts and reverts.

If you continue to have difficulty in finding a workable solution, please contact Catholic Answers directly for more personalized assistance. God bless and welcome home!

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