A few weeks ago, I was beginning to think we would not have anyone in our RCIA class this year. There were no prospects on the horizon. I was disappointed but also somewhat relieved that I might get a little break after doing this for a number of years. Nevertheless, I posted an announcement on the sign in front of the church inviting people to explore the Catholic Faith and that classes would begin soon.
Fast forward to the present and we have six people attending our weekly sessions. That may not sound like a large number to most people, but for our small parish, it’s a record! Calls began coming into the parish office from a variety of people from various backgrounds and circumstances. We have a young mother who was baptized Catholic, but never raised in the faith. We have a married couple, the wife who was raised Catholic some sixty years ago but fell away, and her husband who was raised Lutheran but has not practiced. We have a widow who was raised Methodist and now has a grandson who is a Catholic priest. We have a woman with a Baptist background who has many questions. And we have a young college-age woman who has no faith background at all.
I have never considered myself a good teacher and having to facilitate a group with such diverse experiences is especially challenging. My wife has been a public school educator for some fifty years so I recruited her to help me. She has never taught religious education, but she certainly knows how to organize a lesson plan better than I do. Between the two of us, we hope to meet the needs of everyone in the class.
One of the problems we face is how to make our sessions interesting for everyone involved when their faith backgrounds are so different. Some are quite familiar with Jesus and the scriptures while others have very little knowledge of God at all. We risk boring some or losing others. I encourage everyone to stop me and ask questions at any time. It is easy to assume someone is familiar with certain terminology when in fact they may not be.
Although I have worked with RCIA for many years, I have never done it the same way twice. It has been a constantly evolving process depending on the needs of those in the group, resources available, and my own experimentation. Last year, I used the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I might have done the same thing this year but I suddenly found copies hard to come by. I did find a couple of used books on Amazon, but I needed six. What I did have in abundant supply was Trent Horn’s book Why we’re Catholic. Using it as a starting point for the inquiry phase is working well so far.
Even the name of the program is actually different now. RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, is now called OCIA, the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults. This was apparently done to improve the English translation from the Latin word Ordo. Aside from the name change, there is really no difference for us working in the trenches. In fact, we tend to continue using the old term since it is common in much of our materials. Old habits are hard to break.
