My own small personal experiences with the Neocatechumenal Way:
When the Italian missionaries first came to my American parish [NOTE: Not my current parish!], I went to one of their catechism nights just out of curiosity. The advertising flyer sounded rather pie-in-the-sky, promising you a happy feel-good cure-all type of thing if you were feeling blue about the troubles in your life. The very first night, I realized the Neocatechumenal Way was not for me, for two reasons.
A) They placed a lot of emphasis on being there for adult Catholics unfamiliar with their faith, and that just doesn’t describe me, since my family background is such that I’ve voraciously done intense Catholic spiritual reading even as a child.
B) They suggested that we keep repeating “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” like it was a mantra. For example, in the car all the way to work. Now I can see praying the Rosary while driving to work, but repeating a single phrase for maybe hundreds of times personally just didn’t feel right when it came to my prayer life.
There have also been two occasions where I’ve gone to the Perpetual Adoration Chapel to make a quiet visit to the Blessed Sacrament, only to find anything but the peace and quiet I’d been looking for because the Neocatechumenal Way were occupying the chapel, the tabernacle door was closed, and the closest you could come to contemplation was to offer up the noisy environment as sacrificial prayer.
The first occasion, they were offering one of their private Masses to ring in the New Year. The Mass must have started about 11:00 p.m., because when I arrived shortly before midnight was right before Communion. I was invited to join the group by sitting in their circle, and found it most embarrassing when I was offered Communion in the hand while sitting down, because I had to publicly refuse Communion, in front of everyone, at close quarters, as we were all practically sitting on top of each other. (Since I hadn’t known I’d be attending Mass, I hadn’t made an hour-long fast before Communion.)
The second occasion was a Wednesday evening, stopping by the chapel for quiet prayer after an evening class at the university had ended. This was their Liturgy of the Word where they had a theme that they all spoke on after various Bible readings and songs to the sound of rattles and guitars. Now I enjoy hearing passages read from both the Old and the New Testament. What made me wonder was how they could shut up the Blessed Sacrament behind tabernacle doors so that they could focus on describing their intimate feelings about how great (pious) they and their lives had become since joining their group. One man in particular did this, on the verge of tears. The others in the group seemed to enjoy emphasizing that they had put in time preparing a talk for the theme.
If they had read Bible passages aloud and then wanted to sing and pray aloud such prayers as the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet, it would have been an experience where we were all together as a community focusing on Christ, in which case, I would have been happy enough to have the chapel silence broken. But for people to pat themselves and the members of their clique on the back only a few feet away from the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist … well, yes they had permission to be there, but couldn’t they have chosen a different location?
Meanwhile, I wasn’t the only one who had come in for a simple visit to the Blessed Sacrament and gotten something different than what I’d bargained for … a man came in a bit after me. He seemingly needed to be coaxed into coming in, sitting down, and listening to the Liturgy of the Word … possibly he’d been about to leave, discouraged that here he’d come to be in the welcoming presence of Jesus and now felt as though he might be intruding on some group’s private service. When I was taken notice of at that point and invited to sit up front with everyone, I bowed out with the very real reason of it being 9:30 p.m. and not having had dinner yet, because people kept getting up and talking, and there didn’t seem to be a very good time to leave without seeming impolite by walking out on one speaker or another giving an intimate from-the-heart witness that they had worked so hard on for their theme.
~~ the phoenix
