RCIA: My Experience, My Critique

ne of the most annoying parts of becoming Catholic was RCIA, or Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (for the uninitiated). I was glad to do it, having come to the conclusion that I should from my historical and theological reading. But at the same time, I felt that the entire tone was wrong.

The leader said to us on the first day, and this is very nearly verbatim, "No matter what tradition you come from, whether you're Baptist, or Lutheran or Whatever, you'll always be Baptist, you'll always be Lutheran. We just want to broaden your experience and welcome you." Now there is a real truth that vaguely resembles this statement, in that, all that which is good in Lutheranism, Baptist Religion, and Whateverism, is preserved and perfected in the Catholic Church.

Yet the manner in which this person communicated made me fear that that is not what the speaker meant to convey. Rather, what I got out of the message was a Relativist critique of the very things that drew me into that classroom in the first place. I didn't want to be a Lutheran or associated with that brand any longer because I came to the conclusion that Lutheranism is false. I  wanted an affirmation of all the things that Catholicism offers that other religions, and Christian heresies do not: the Presence of Christ's Body, Soul and Divinity in the Elements of Communion, the salvation offered by the sacrament of Reconciliation, the trust that we have in the Teaching of the Church, which has never been subtracted from, but only enriched over time. (When you think of it, that is a very good reason to believe Christianity and Catholicism in particular are true, given the improbability that over twenty centuries the Church has never universally defined anything that was later redefined to be false. It seems fairly implausible given how fickle Man is, and how fashions change.)

The problem, I believe, is that RCIA has become little more than a mechanism for one to bring their Protestant spouse or spouse-to-be into the Catholic Church, for reasons of social convenience. After all, one would not say, " No matter what tradition you come from, whether you're Atheist or Agnostic or Whatever, you'll always be an Atheist, you'll always be an Agnostic. We just want to broaden your experience and welcome you." Unlikely.

And indeed, I believe there is good in the Atheist perspective (usually distorted and disfigured by their habitual mockery and pride) that Christian heretics and even many Catholics today lack. You should not uncritically accept something to be true just because it feels right. Your feelings can lead you astray. You are a rational being, and God doesn't want you to be blind, but as an informed person to willingly accept him as the ruler of Creation and of your life. Atheists reject blind faith. But blind faith is no Faith at all.

The Reason and Faith are the two wings on which the human spirit rises up to God, as Pope St. John Paul the Great said while he dwelt among us. As I've written here before, Jesus was disappointed in Thomas' doubt not because Thomas was unwilling to set aside his rationality: "Dead men don't rise from the dead. Jesus is dead, therefore he cannot have visited us." Jesus was disappointed primarily because Thomas had seen Jesus' miracles, knew his character, and yet could not take the rational step beyond his five senses, using the sense of Reason drawing of the evidence he already had of Jesus' character, to conclude that what the other disciples told him must be true. The eyes of faith are the eyes of logic, the eyes that recognize a pattern and move beyond what they see with their eyes, the mere objects, to what is behind the mere objects or confirmed facts and underlies them. How do you know your mother loves you? Can you deduce it? Can you prove it in a step-wise fashion that would satisfy a mathematician? No. Of course not. But the pattern of nurturing behavior and care that your mother has (hopefully) taken to raise you and provide for your needs leads you toward the conclusion, the inference, that your mother does indeed love you. Faith in God is the same way. But we have given up the ground of Reason, of reasonableness, to atheists and agnostics in exchange for a weak and irrational feel-good religion.

In short, we have lost the drive and motivation for evangelization. We have lost the conviction--must we call it Triumphalism? Isn't it just common sense?--that when people hold mutually exclusive positions, one or both of them must be wrong.

Catholics in America, and increasingly abroad, have lost their confidence that the Church is Right, and her opponents are wrong. And that's why we're dying. That's why there are so few vocations: people don't really believe that being called means anything. That's why there are so many divorces in the Church: the marriage no longer felt right. And that's why there are so few educated Catholics in existence: contraception was what felt like the right thing to do, given our desire to keep up with the Joneses and maintain our standard of living.

Incidentally, the African priest who led the RCIA class I was in was great. He was much more diplomatic than I, but he did not surrender the Truth in the name of Diplomacy. His teaching made the class bearable, although he only taught a few of the lessons over the several-week course. I wish RCIA would become a break-away point where people of many different backgrounds could be convinced and convicted that they need to join, not because they were in love with Mary Sue, but because they are and will always be in love with Jesus Christ.



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