RCIA: I have a confession

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susant said:
I am an Episcopalian. My husband and I wanted to become Catholic after studying about it for a long time. I watch EWTN everyday and also pray the rosary several times a week. We went to the “introductory” meeting before beginning RCIA. I was brought up in a high Episcopal church. I believe in transubstantion and the apostolic succession. The priest stated that Episcopalians didn’t believe in them and he knew because his mother was one! We never went to anymore meetings or the church there. I really want to turn Catholic but I can understand what you are saying too. We also discussed things that were things that anyone going to church already know. Why sit through 9 months of that! I am not saying that if I wanted it bad enough I would endure it, but give me a break!
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BTDT. As a former High Church Anglican, I TOTALLY understand what you have encountered. But I agree: I came to the point where I knew that NOT to jump the Tiber was, for me, a sin. I came to the point where I was able to say: “I’ll do whatever it takes.” At least, having put up with it, I KNOW I didn’t just slide over out of disillusionment with Anglicanism.
 
  1. pray.
  2. martyr yourself by staying there but risk corruption in your tender state as a Catechumen.
  3. get out of there ASAP. go talk to a priest from another parish about entering his RCIA program.
  4. pray before the Blessed Sacrament.
  5. pray.
  6. ALL OF THE ABOVE, EXCEPT #2.
 
My husband and I went throught RCIA about 5 years ago, and our experience was actually quite wonderful. The speakers were for the most part faithful and knowledgeable.

There were some less than stellar moments:
  1. The OT lecturer couldn’t resist peppering his talks with (liberal) political commentary. In addition, he also said that evangelicals were anti-Semitic. That came as a surprise to my husband and me, as we had been evangelicals before becoming Catholic, and were not anti-Semitic, nor did we know any evangelicals who were.
  2. During the lectures on Catholic bioethics, one of the candidates said that if her sister asked her to be a surrogate mother, she would do it, and she didn’t care what the Church thought about it. To my dismay, the lecturer did not say anything to admonish her or let her (and the rest of us!) know that such an attitude is not acceptable.
But there can be some disappointments once you join the Church, too. As evangelicals we were used to most people in our particular church sharing our morals and values, whereas in the Catholic Church it’s more of a “wheat and tares growing up together” situation. For example, we are involved in marriage preparation at our parish, and you can usually count on the fact that most of the engaged couples in a given year will be shacking up, see nothing wrong with it, don’t intend to change, but want a Catholic wedding anyway.

Also, is it just our experience, or are many priests really timid about speaking up about the life issues (esp. abortion, but also euthanasia, embryonic stems, contraception, etc.)?

My husband sometimes misses the enthusiasm evangelicals have about their faith.

All in all, we love the Church and feel blessed to be part of her, but there was a honeymoon phase, and it did end… 🙂
 
I think they are timid - they don’t want people to scold them, & believe me, they will be scolded!

But also, the homily is supposed to be about the readings & I think they either don’t know how to “connect the dots” to real issues in our lives, or they don’t want to.

Many times the homily will be good, but often is about feelings rather than what we should or should not be doing.

In our parish we have an additional problem - our priest is from Nigeria. We love him, he is a very holy person, but we have a very hard time understanding him. He may be doing some good preaching, but who’s going to know? On a good day I can understand most, but on a bad day, very little.

I think too many in our parish don’t try to understand & use homily time for a nap. 😦
 
rrank, I believe it goes back much further to Paul VI. He saw the “smoke” quite early.
 
i was raised Episcopalian, looked into many other religions along the way, and finally joined the Catholic church at Easter 2008.

My RCIA was. disappointing, but not anything like what the OP has described. in my case we had Priests who were fairly soft on some issues… and many issues were never brought up… and i think they should have at least gone over the Rosary ONCE! but… it was tolerable, if boring.
part of the problem is that it was obvious that you had three of us who grew up with strong religious education and good reading skills… and the rest of the class was more in need of the basics.

The problem of RCIA classes being “too remedial” is one that is often seen because they are teaching all levels at once. the candidates and the catechumens are lumped together… as are all the different levels of education. this means that the people who really need more advanced theology classes have to sit through “this is the Bible” level with everyone else.
i called it an exercise in patience and gritted my teeth.

now, the doctrinal errors, and the historical errors… those are MUCH more serious. one reason they are so serious is that if they are believed, then anyone with real facts can discredit the students whole understanding of Catholicism!:eek:
i mean imagine one of your fellow RCIA students running into one of the anti Catholic religious proselytizers who finds out they were taught that the Senate voted on Mary being protector of the USA… once he discredits THAT the poor student will be thrown into doubt about all the church teaches!

talk to your priest again. tell him that maybe he doesn’t feel he can replace the teacher… but that he is endangering the students by letting them be taught such obvious false information! State that surely he could arrange for someone to sit in and correct factual errors. or make sure the students are given a copy of the CCC or something.
in the meantime, i suggest a lot of prayer. and reading good books about the truth of catholicism.
good luck
 
I believe there are many reasons for a weak RCIA program. At a former parish we had a quite liberal priest. I was discussing some things with him one day and he told me that while in the seminary he worked at Krogers in the afternoons because the seminarys were in disarray after Vatican II, and were not sure what to teach. Gulp! I’ll never forget what he said, “Do you now understand why I am the way I am?” I also have a good priest friend who told me many years ago, “So goes the Bishop, so goes the priests”.
 
re: remedial teaching… Fr. Corapi, after receiving 5(?) degrees was asked where he wanted to teach, namely, which university or seminary. he responded, “Kindergarten”. when asked why, he said because most of the faithful are at a kindergarten level. 🙂
 
I am currently in an RCIA class. I am a baptized Catholic, spent 10 years in Catholic schools, and wandered in and out of my faith for nearly 40 years. The weirdest thing happened to me this year. After wrestling with God all this time, I finally said, “You win!” and went back to Church…and of all days…on Divine Mercy Sunday.

As for the RCIA classes. Like you I have found if the moderator is not a trained, skilled cathecist you can get off-center very quickly. That happened once in our class. We had one young woman in the class who’d never been baptized and I felt so strongly about the erroneous information being proposed that I was driven to speak to our Deacon. You should do the same.

One other aspect of what I read in your message. You, like I, appear to be quite advanced in your spiritual path. Not all of us are in your time line. Be patient, be helpful, be faithful.
 
susant said:
I am an Episcopalian. My husband and I wanted to become Catholic after studying about it for a long time. I watch EWTN everyday and also pray the rosary several times a week. We went to the “introductory” meeting before beginning RCIA. I was brought up in a high Episcopal church. I believe in transubstantion and the apostolic succession. The priest stated that Episcopalians didn’t believe in them and he knew because his mother was one! We never went to anymore meetings or the church there. I really want to turn Catholic but I can understand what you are saying too. We also discussed things that were things that anyone going to church already know. Why sit through 9 months of that! I am not saying that if I wanted it bad enough I would endure it, but give me a break!
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From what you have said about yourselves, you and your husband should NOT have to sit through 9 months of RCIA (which is designed for people who begin knowing nothing of Christianity) in order to be received in to full communion with the Church. You should tell the priest so, and demand a shorter process for yourselves. But look on the bright side, at least the priest actually believes in transsubstantiation and apostolic succession and is willing to talk about them and point out that they are required beliefs for Catholics.
 
Wow, I’m in RCIA now too, and it’s nothing like you describe. Father Chris starts right at 7:30, he doesn’t even wait the usual 5-10 min even though there are always people coming in late, and we usually don’t get out until around 9:30.

He’s also very firm on everything, and me being someone who has only experience with Protestant Christianity, all I ever think is “Dang, this church doesn’t joke around, they mean business!”
He even said “We do these classes because you better know what you’re in for before deciding to convert to Catholicism.”

I’ve actually been pretty overwhelmed by it all, but in a good way, I guess. The structure is what I find most appealing, even though some things still make me like “That’s a sin too? And this too? Huh. looks it up in Bible on why Oh yeah, I guess it is.”. You don’t find that structure of adhering to what’s absolute rights and wrongs in many Protestant churches.

I think it’s strange your teacher is telling people how to look up Bible verses, we didn’t have that, but some people might need to be taught how, I guess.

What caught my eye in your list of complaints was about the U.S. senate and the constitution. Are you sure it wasn’t an analogy? Cuz Father Chris used the US senate as an analogy of the governing body of the church, and used the constitution as an anaolgy to describe the Bible that the governing body must interpret, and is the law not to be contradicted for whatever the “supreme court” of the governing body of the church puts in place. And the Pope is like the President.

If it was an anaolgy, then what your teacher said kind of makes sense. ?Maybe? you missed that part, and heard something else he said misunderstanding the context it was said in?

My only complaint with RCIA classes is Father Chris has kind of a Ben Stein boring tone. What he says is very interesting, but the boring monotone sometimes causes me to check out for a minute or 2. 🙂
 
I’m in RCIA currently as a baptized Christian, and I’m having a lot of the same issues with classes being very simplistic and nothing being organized. The majority of our class time is spent answering questions that don’t have anything to do with the topic, and then the topic is never finished. Actually, more often than not, someone asks a question and the question isn’t even directly answered-- we just get a tangent that skirts around the question for 20 minutes or more.

This past week our topic was supposed to be “Scriptures”, and I thought it strange that the Bible wasn’t brought out once during the class. Basically the first hour was about how Catholics and Protestants accept different book as canon, with a tangent beginning after someone asked “what does the word ‘canon’ mean?” Then the other hour was spent going on and on about how Catholics don’t know their Bibles but perhaps some of the Protestants in the class could whip out all of their memorized verses from Sunday school as a kid.

Oh, and a lady asked a question about where she could read the “extra” books in the Bible (the ones we spent an entire hour listing and relisting, but just their names) and the speaker told her that her Protestant Bible at home would have them tucked in the back, because all Protestant Bibles do. (Erm. I own 30+ Protestant Bibles, many different versions, and I can tell you that the only commonly sold version that has any Catholic books is the NRSV.)

We do have a syllabus but I think it only goes to the end of January and most of the dates are blank. I don’t have a clue when we’re doing any of the rites. In fact, the rites haven’t even been mentioned yet. At all. So, I imagine there are some confused people in the class, because I doubt everyone does nearly the amount of outside research that I do, based upon questions I’ve heard. We also haven’t read any of the Bible or read anything out of the Catechism, yet. Nor are we using any outside text…

/end rant!

I am learning some things… mainly the “how to be Catholic” stuff, because these are the things I really don’t know. But, theologically? I’m not sure I’ve learned a thing yet. It’s a good thing I spent months obsessively reading before I started or I’m not sure how’d I feel right now.

Part of me wants to ask the Priest if perhaps I could start the process of being accepted into the Church a bit earlier, but part of me wants to go through this process even if it’s so crazy.

I think I’m going to take this as a lesson in patience though, like the original poster! Thank you for posting this!

-Lauren
 
I am feeeling really blessed by my own RCIA program. For me, as a Baptized Christian, much of it was review, but my Priest was present, and led some of the sessions, and our DRE led others. We had a syllabus from the beginning, including all the rites and a retreat the first sunday of Lent. I enjoyed it so much that this year I am on the RCIA team (but with a new DRE tings are different, but I hope this can change)
 
Petergee said:
From what you have said about yourselves, you and your husband should NOT have to sit through 9 months of RCIA (which is designed for people who begin knowing nothing of Christianity) in order to be received in to full communion with the Church. You should tell the priest so, and demand a shorter process for yourselves. But look on the bright side, at least the priest actually believes in transsubstantiation and apostolic succession and is willing to talk about them and point out that they are required beliefs for Catholics.
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While the process can and perhaps should be modified for candidates as opposed to catechumens, I would suggest that “demanding” anything does not reflect an appropriate disposition for approaching full Communion with the Church. Modest supplication might be a better approach. And well-prepared candidates are in a good position to help others. Without taking over the class, they can augment the experience for those who come without any preparation at all.
 
I teach RCIA in my local parish and the conditions you describe should notbe allowed to continue. You owe this to yourself and the other candidates as well as to those who will follow in future years.

Go to the pastor and follow with the bishop if things don’t change. How do the other candidates feel?

Read “On Becoming Catholic” by Thomas Howard and “The God who loves you” by Peter Kreeft to catch up.

Please do not let this slide.

May God bless you.

Walter
 
An interesting discussion!
I’m doing RCIA for the second time round. One thing that has struck me is the diversity of individuals who participate and the different nature of the two groups. Last year there were youngsters in the group who whilst baptised had no practical experience of the church amongst a variety of others, this year the group are all experienced Christians from a range of Christian traditions. Last year I chose to ask little because I knew even the questions would not be understood by some of my fellow travellers. This year I am choosing to ask what may seem odd questions, in order to fill in the gaps in my understanding, because I know the questions will be accessible to the group.

I think the thing to bear in mind is that RCIA is a shared journey in faith and part of it is learning to be part of the community of faith. I can look up anything I’m not sure of, but for me the journey is not so much about collecting facts as allowing myself to be open to developing Catholic Christian attitudes and responses to Christ in life.

‘Waterbrook’
 
I’m going through RCIA now, too. I actually first looked into it a couple years ago, but was turned off by the kind of rude response I got from the priest I emailed, and stopped looking into it until more recently.

I have to say, I don’t like my RCIA. Luckily, my sponsor is AMAZING, and has been able to stand up and defend against things being taught that aren’t Catholic in nature- such as the assertion by the leader that “Jesus didn’t really say these parables. They were most likely common stories that the early Church attributed to Him to make Him look better.” I even emailed my priest to see if I could skip parts of the process- I’ve been reading and learning a lot on my own, and I think I have a solid grasp of the faith- but he’d rather I go through the process. I’m kind of glad he did that, though, because maybe my sponsor and I can be of some positive influence throughout this journey. As far as I know, I’m the only candidate- the rest are, I believe, catechumins, at least in the group that went through the Rites of Welcoming and Acceptance a few weeks ago.

My RCIA is actually on a “break” right now, because it’s a primarily University parish, so we go by the University’s schedule- no regular meetings over winter break, just one retreat next weekend. I’m considering going to the retreat, but there’s one part of the itinerary that concerns me- an hour of guided meditation. Now, I could just be paranoid, but this is a very liberal church, with a very liberal priest, and a very liberal RCIA. I’m coming from a Pagan background- my experience with guided meditation is the “connecting with the higher power residing inside oneself and harnessing your own will and potential” kind of meditation, which to me, borders on… not right. Any thoughts?

I’m just looking forward to Easter. What I would give to receive my Lord now!
 
I’d try to find a more orthodx parish, and try to see if you could switch to their RCIA program
 
I can’t. My university is in the middle of nowhere. The actual church I go to is more orthodox, but they combine with the University parish for RCIA.
 
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