RCIA and North American Forum for the Catechumenate

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My biggest gripe with the Forum, which is otherwise a fine organization, is their emphasis on liturgical catechesis.

I think that catechesis should be systematic, with a rational ordering of topics. I agree with the notion that we should be mindful of the liturgical season and the readings from the weekend liturgies, but the liturgical catechesis folk take it much further than that. At the extreme, there are those who advocate basing catechesis exclusively on the readings (particularly the gospels) from the weekend liturgies.

Given the fact that most Catholic parishioners have a poor understanding of Catholic teaching, despite having been through many annual cycles of preaching from the weekend readings, I think it’s unreasonable to expect that, without a more systematic approach, RCIA can do much better in the short time they have to form the catechumens and candidates .
 
Let me be more precise about my comments above: I am opposed to a reliance on lectionary-based catechesis, while I do embrace liturgical catechesis, which is systematic in approach but respects and draws from the liturgical cycle. A nice treatment of this distinction can be found at: acmrcia.org/pdf/catechesis_in_the_Cat.pdf
 
I am currently AT a beginings institute. I sit here on Day 2 in my hotel room wondering why the 4 of us have not gone home. Is the NAF a subdivision of Call to Action?

Here is what I have observed.
  1. Bad and aging presenters.
  2. NO (I mean absolutely NONE) prayer. Not even an opening prayer. They are feeding us and we are not even praying before our meals as a group.
  3. Agining feminist Nuns who don’t have sister on their name tags
  4. priests who are not wearing their collars and don’t a “father” on their name tag
  5. BONGO DRUMS!!! I am not kidding BONGO DRUMS
  6. A phoney fake rite of election
My group of 4 will be reporting back to our parish that this is an agenda driven waste of time. I honestly feel like I am attending a call to action conference.
 
Dicerning said:
I am currently AT a beginings institute. I sit here on Day 2 in my hotel room wondering why the 4 of us have not gone home. Is the NAF a subdivision of Call to Action?

Here is what I have observed.
  1. Bad and aging presenters.
  2. NO (I mean absolutely NONE) prayer. Not even an opening prayer. They are feeding us and we are not even praying before our meals as a group.
  3. Agining feminist Nuns who don’t have sister on their name tags
  4. priests who are not wearing their collars and don’t a “father” on their name tag
  5. BONGO DRUMS!!! I am not kidding BONGO DRUMS
  6. A phoney fake rite of election
My group of 4 will be reporting back to our parish that this is an agenda driven waste of time. I honestly feel like I am attending a call to action conference.
Click to expand...
My prayers are with you!
 
I was very recently at a Forum workshop and it was nothing like you describe, except for the priest not wearing clerical clothes. The name tags indicated who was a priest, sister, or deacon. There was beautiful prayer, in fact a lot of it was chanted and some in Latin. The presenters were wonderful, and one was rather young. There was nothing said that went against Church teaching so I wonder what you heard that would associate it with Call to Action.

As far as a “fake” Rite of Election. The purpose of Forum Institutes is to form catechumenate teams but having them experience the rites and then break them open as one would do in a mystological reflection following an actual rite in a parish. It is supposed to be experiential, not didactic.

Sorry you had a bad experience. The one I attended was wonderful, and everyone I spoke to who attended thought so too.
 
Joannm said:
I was very recently at a Forum workshop and it was nothing like you describe, except for the priest not wearing clerical clothes. The name tags indicated who was a priest, sister, or deacon. There was beautiful prayer, in fact a lot of it was chanted and some in Latin. The presenters were wonderful, and one was rather young. There was nothing said that went against Church teaching so I wonder what you heard that would associate it with Call to Action.

As far as a “fake” Rite of Election. The purpose of Forum Institutes is to form catechumenate teams but having them experience the rites and then break them open as one would do in a mystological reflection following an actual rite in a parish. It is supposed to be experiential, not didactic.

Sorry you had a bad experience. The one I attended was wonderful, and everyone I spoke to who attended thought so too.
Click to expand...
Thank you for sharing a positive experience of the organization. As Annie stated earlier, it seems more depends on who is hosting the NAF than the NAF themselves. The wide variety of different experiences on this thread seems to bear this out.
 
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