M
montanaman
Guest
Last week I accompanied my girlfriend to RCIA inquiry classes. She’s not necessarily converting yet, but she wants answers. She wants to get into the nuts & bolts of Catholicism and compare it to scripture. I went with her because I was trying to be supportive and she seemed to want me there. I also wanted to see if it would be worth her time.
The class was held in the basement of the cathedral of the big, local diocese. Roughly fifteen people showed up, and nearly all of them were there for marital reasons–they’d either married a Catholic, or were planning to. They had quite a diverse background, but they were all more or less life-long Christians (with the exception of one atheist).
The “facilitator,” as she described herself, was a very nice woman. Very approachable. She gathered up questions written down on little strips of paper and “analyzed” them. A common theme was the Immaculate Conception–my girlfriend had even asked a question that touched on that. So, the facilitaor decided to focus on that for the first answer.
“Well,” she said with a big smile, “The Immaculate Conception is one of those things the Church has always believed. You pretty much have to just accept it.”
That was it. Except for a short monologue about “What the Immaculate Conception means to me,” she had nothing to offer. I’m not being one of these holier-than-thou traditional Catholic types, I’m serious–it’s as though she was trying to fake her way through something she’d never heard of before. I could see these “Bible-based,” scripture-saturated lifelong non-denoms looking down at their hands and I imagined they were thinking “WHAT am I doing here?”
I had to break in and do a little explaining. I talked about kecharitomene for the most part, and that seemed to save the beginning of the experience from total despair. However, the rest of the night was just about the same: She fumbled, everyone talked about their feelings, I wrapped up the segment with something meaty.
I wroter her an e-mail the next day offering any help. She wants to meet with me for lunch so she can get to know me better. My girlfriend wants me to step away from theology for a while because I DO get a little intense sometimes, and I’d like to oblige (oh how I’d like to oblige), but what’s happening in that Church basement is depressing. Worst-case scenario–these proto-catechumenists will be turned off by the Church. Best-case–they join the Church poorly-educated. (This woman also strongly hinted at the idea that some things are “optional.”)
That’s your report from the front lines…
The class was held in the basement of the cathedral of the big, local diocese. Roughly fifteen people showed up, and nearly all of them were there for marital reasons–they’d either married a Catholic, or were planning to. They had quite a diverse background, but they were all more or less life-long Christians (with the exception of one atheist).
The “facilitator,” as she described herself, was a very nice woman. Very approachable. She gathered up questions written down on little strips of paper and “analyzed” them. A common theme was the Immaculate Conception–my girlfriend had even asked a question that touched on that. So, the facilitaor decided to focus on that for the first answer.
“Well,” she said with a big smile, “The Immaculate Conception is one of those things the Church has always believed. You pretty much have to just accept it.”
That was it. Except for a short monologue about “What the Immaculate Conception means to me,” she had nothing to offer. I’m not being one of these holier-than-thou traditional Catholic types, I’m serious–it’s as though she was trying to fake her way through something she’d never heard of before. I could see these “Bible-based,” scripture-saturated lifelong non-denoms looking down at their hands and I imagined they were thinking “WHAT am I doing here?”
I had to break in and do a little explaining. I talked about kecharitomene for the most part, and that seemed to save the beginning of the experience from total despair. However, the rest of the night was just about the same: She fumbled, everyone talked about their feelings, I wrapped up the segment with something meaty.
I wroter her an e-mail the next day offering any help. She wants to meet with me for lunch so she can get to know me better. My girlfriend wants me to step away from theology for a while because I DO get a little intense sometimes, and I’d like to oblige (oh how I’d like to oblige), but what’s happening in that Church basement is depressing. Worst-case scenario–these proto-catechumenists will be turned off by the Church. Best-case–they join the Church poorly-educated. (This woman also strongly hinted at the idea that some things are “optional.”)
That’s your report from the front lines…
) Think carefully before you respond to anything and gentle down your responses by 2 steps or so. Remember that these folks are there because they wanna be, so this is not as hostile a crowd as we deal with on the n-C forums, though they may well have been exposed to that rhetoric. The Holy Spirit and the truth will do all the work, all you gotta do is supply that info.
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