Mine did! We got a whole night devoted to the Church’s stance on various life issues, contraception included.
Contact the parish office about registering at the parish. In the meantime just attend Mass every Sunday until your RCIA begins, you don’t have to be a member of the parish to attend Mass, it is open for everyone.
Likewise here.Mine did! We got a whole night devoted to the Church’s stance on various life issues, contraception included.
Seeing threads like this make me very thankful to have found the parish I did. The RCIA program I went through was awesome, and runs year-round.
.Precisely! At the moment my wife and I are unsure if we should continue going to this priest’s parish (he’s the pastor there of our current church). He holds several opinions which are clearly contrary to the teachings of the Church, and he has refused to give us even a general time when we can be confirmed. He practically said that we must work on our marriage first, and then our religion will follow. (For us, our religion GUIDES our marriage! God comes first in our lives). His general lack of interest/liberal leaning in RCIA and Church teaching, his irreverence and liturgical excesses during Mass, and his non-nonchalant attitude toward making us wait an indefinite period of time to receive the graces of the Sacraments, all together make us feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in his parish. What does everyone else think?
Again, precisely! Pretty much only (a) someone on their death bed and unable to see a priest, or (b) a priest who must celebrate Mass and absolutely can’t confess beforehand would qualify for this. Not “our good reputation”
I totally agree with #2 (which is why I insisted so strongly on it), and as for #1, the National Statutes of the Catechumenate, which govern RCIA in the US where I live, state the following: “If conditional baptism… seems necessary, this must be celebrated privately rather than at a public liturgical assembly of the community and with only those limited rites which the diocesan bishop determines. The reception into full communion should take place later at the Sunday Eucharist of the community.” (NSC 37, emphasis mine)."
No, I don’t think any questions were restricted… it’s just that the kind of questions I’d ask are the ones I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to answer. For instance: (A) What kind of evidence from the early centuries of the Church do we have for the Assumption? (there was a feast for it in the 400’s, I think) Or (B) does my instructor think that Mary’s Immaculate Conception affected her body (so that it was like Adam and Eve’s while they were in Original Innocence, free from disease and such…), or just solely the state of separation from God we have at birth? (C) Here’s one more: If we’re persisting in mortal sin when we’re baptized, that clearly means the baptism won’t absolve that sin (though the baptism itself is still valid) until we repent. But in this case, do we have to go to Confession to repent of the sin, or will mere private repentance do? Mortal sins after baptism must be confessed, sins before baptism are taken away by the baptism, but what about unrepented mortal sin during baptism?
See, I just sensed that my inquiries would have been out of place at my RCIA classes… kind of like college-level questions in elementary school 
And with you as well!
said:
We live in the Diocese of St. Petersburg, and there’s over fifty parishes and missions located here, so hopefully we will find a parish somewhere that will treat us as candidates for full communion who actually know about the Faith, rather than assuming we’re ignorant, not bother to check otherwise, and then just automatically lump us in with the catechumens in the RCIA program and make us a wait a year (or worse, indefinitely).
Thank you very muchly for your prayers!OP, I scrolled through your thread. At first I was going to respond with something sincere but short, like,
“Becoming a Catholic is hard, because BEING a Catholic is hard.” Based on the response from the world, knowing about our faith, etc.
But then I saw many of your points, and I want to encourage you, and let you know I will pray for you.
And, when you and your wife do achieve your goal of full communion, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get involved in the RCIA program at whatever parish you join. You know the old saw, “If you see the problem, it’s up to you to help be the solution!” Others need your zeal and enthusiasm for the Church, think what you could do in a positive way instead of feeling persecuted and excluded!
Yes, definitely, we will be getting involved in some sort of evangelizing ministry! It’s desperately needed in the Catholic Church right now… sure we have missions and other things in 3rd World countries, but what about in countries like the USA, England, etc.? Do we expect the church buildings themselves to evangelize or something? No, we just wait for people to walk in the door, and then throw them into a nearly automatic process with very little tweaking to the real spiritual needs of the individual.
I’m not dissuaded, and determined to move forward. I’m fully committed to conversion. I’ve felt such peace and certainty since arriving at the decision that it never occurred to me that there could be such a thing as a “bad RCIA experience.” Call me naive, I guess. Humans are still imperfect and fallible, even when doing the Lord’s work. Still, I hope to also be lucky . . . although your experience probably isn’t the norm either since your teacher is so renown.Neesy, please don’t let this thread dissuade you from RCIA. I just finished 9 intense months of RCIA study and was accepted into the church at the Easter Vigil. It was without a doubt the best year of my life.
I thought I ‘knew it all’, I thought I was ready and just wanted to bypass RCIA and join up. Boy, was I wrong! The guidance, love, spiritual support and nurturing I received not only from the teacher but the other sponsors and candidates & catechumens was priceless. And it was just me who was treated that way, it was everyone in the class. I know I was lucky- my RCIA teacher is one of the top theologians in the country and had written books on teaching scripture, and was a major contributor to The Catholic Bible, Personal Study Edition.
It makes me really sad to hear that other people have had bad RCIA experiences when my own was so wonderful.
People generally seem so generally happy every time we attend Mass, that I’m sure my worries are unwarranted. I know I don’t know it all yet, which is one of the reasons I was looking forward to RCIA and have already started researching the specifics of the faith. I have a lot to learn before I’m ready for confirmation. I’m hoping it will only take the nine months. 
my advice would be… don’t give up! there are even stories of the Saints when they were prevented from doing God’s will for a long time, and that was a test and a trial for them… don’t give up!! prayers for you…
- God didn’t intentionally kill anyone in the Old Testament - all of those wars and plagues were just the “writer’s perception of the events” - God is too nice to kill or punish anyone (a priest said this)
- Good Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, etc. who are sincere are just fine and will go to Heaven (a deacon AND an RCIA director told us this)
- As long as you’ve confessed your mortal sin and are sorry, you can take Communion first and then go to confession later (same priest as above said this). To use his exact words, “We’re entitled to our good reputation.”
- I’ve never heard the Early Church Fathers discussed at all (Maybe after all this time I haven’t been going to Catholic parishes… that’s got to be my problem!
- Conditional baptism removes all sin, so I don’t need to to go to Confession before the Easter Vigil and my conditional baptism. (After I pointed out my RCIA director’s error, she changed her mind, but still said I would receive my conditional baptism at the Easter Vigil, in direct violation of the National Statutes of the Catechumenate, which says that it must be celebrated outside of the Vigil.)
- I’ve never heard any teaching at all on Church history, the canon of the Bible, Ecumenical Councils, the nature of the Trinity, contraception, indulgences, heresies (Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Arianism, etc.), or papal infallibility.
that’s unfortunate… it sounds like maybe the parishes you’ve been part of have been more on the liberal side? that’s another good thing about traditional parishes, they definitely teach the Catholic doctrines there… unfortunately we’re still dealing with the crisis in the Church.Hi Monica,I I never managed to get my baptism certificate from the church I was baptized in. So it was kind of complicated, but - in the end it worked out
God bless!
I never did get it… the priest asked me to find two witnesses to sign a paper saying that I was baptized. I got my parents to do it cause they were both there. I still don’t know the date of my baptism and maybe never will… I do know I was baptized though cause I was around 12-14 years old and I remember it
I didn’t need a conditional baptism because it was at the Orthodox church so they knew it’s Trinitarian and everything.Please persevere in your quest. It really is worth the trouble you have experienced.