After ten hard years of soul-searching and study, my wife and I had just made the difficult decision to join the Catholic Church. We both had backgrounds in Protestant Evangelicalism — but, no, let me take that back. We had much more than mere “backgrounds.” We were convinced, informed, active, and intelligent Evangelicals, with long histories of involvement and commitment, in everything from pro-life work to foreign missions. Our recent decision then, was costing us friends, and creating strife in our families. We undertook it for one reason only: because we felt that it was our duty before God. If Jesus Christ really had established one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church on earth — something that our long study convinced us of — then it was our obligation, under vows of obedience to Him made long ago, to join it.
We submitted ourselves to a priest and were told, as a matter of routine, that we needed to attend, once a week for seven months, a mysterious program called “RCIA” (or, more correctly, OCIA). Knowing almost nothing about Catholicism’s rites and ceremonies, we asked no questions. If that’s really the drill, we thought, well, then “it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.” We signed up on the spot and dutifully reported for the first session a few weeks later.
I’m pretty sure we weren’t expecting everyone in the class to have gone through quite such an arduous search as ours. Nevertheless, it did startle us a bit to find ourselves in a program made up almost exclusively of engaged couples. We felt like two old married people who’d just mistakenly wandered into a Pre-Cana class. In fact, we were repeatedly asked “which one of us was converting,” as if it were simply inconceivable that anyone would do so for any reason other than marriage. We weren’t, of course, opposed to Catholic conversions for reasons of family harmony and the like. Provided these conversions are genuine (and not merely the substitution of one meaningless denominational label for another one equally meaningless) then they are obviously a cause for legitimate rejoicing. But as this particular season of RCIA got underway one enormous, unspoken truth stood up in the center of the room, like that cold black monolith in the movie 2001. And that was the fact that without the Church’s restrictions on mixed weddings, or the stigma of mixed-faith marriage, most of these folks wouldn’t have come within a hundred miles of this crazy RCIA business.
There was one startling exception, however. One of the couples we met was already married, and definitely cut from a different bolt of cloth. Middle-aged, dressed in a counter-cultural style, they announced themselves as “atheists and former communists,” as people who had tried just about every school of thought available and had not found peace. They had noticed the sign out in front of the church — “Come Learn What Catholics Believe” — and decided that they really owed it to themselves, as a matter of sheer intellectual honesty, to show up and “hear what the Catholic Church had to say for herself.”
Well, to someone like myself this last statement was nothing less than electrifying. Here it was again! — that ancient sound, the sound of the poor, weary world coming once more to sit at the feet of the Savior. “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Sir, give me your everlasting water to drink, that I may thirst no more.” “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me!” I wanted to rush forward and take these people into my arms and swear to sit with them until every question was answered, no matter how long it might take. And, indeed, I suspected that it might not take long. I saw the Spirit at work in them as I had seldom seen it before; truly, these two were not far from the Kingdom already.
And yet I held my tongue. I was their classmate, not their teacher. In fact, I wasn’t even a Catholic yet myself, for crying out loud! And so I resolved to sit quietly, trust in the Church, in the RCIA, and leave the job to the professionals.
The first session began … and it was mainly about birth control. You needn’t worry about it, we were told. The decision had been made by celibate old men, based on faulty medieval philosophy, and would be reversed as soon as a more enlightened generation of churchmen rose to power. No kidding, this was the first session. Not the existence of God, or the nature of man, or original sin, or even a Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger. No, the single most important thing to get out of the way at the start was to reassure the engaged couples that we weren’t going to do or say anything here to upset their wedding plans. After all, these people had already graciously submitted to seven months (!) of jumping through our silly RCIA hoop. The least we could do was to meet them halfway, don’t you think?
The second session was the same only worse. A priest got up and told us that just because some of us might disagree with Catholic teaching, well, we shouldn’t let that slow us down a bit. The only two things you really have to believe, he solemnly assured us, were the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. Everything else is up for grabs.
At this point, even though I was still a mere Protestant, I had to timidly raise my hand. “Uh, Father, don’t you really mean that those are the only two things that we must believe on the Pope’s own authority? The ex cathedra pronouncements?” “No, no,” he insisted. “Those are the only two things.” And then, just to make his point clear, he dropped the following casual bombshell:
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got a lot of problems with the Nicene Creed myself.”
What could I say to that? It had been my understanding, up to this point, that a priest who stands up and publicly denies the Nicene Creed has just excommunicated himself. After all, that’s what people like Nestorius and Arius and Donatus had done. Wars had been fought over such things, and whole nations lost to the Catholic faith. And yet our instructor went blithely on that night, contradicted by no one, teaching a class that had been advertised with the slogan, “Come Hear What Catholics Believe.”
Which reminds me to bring you up to date on our hippie/communist friends. The third session … took place without them. As did the fourth, and the fifth. As did the remaining six and a half months. And I never saw either one of them again.
I promise you, my friends, that I personally don’t intend to make that mistake again. Next time, I assure you that I will exercise what Vatican II called “the right and duty of every Catholic to evangelize.” After all, I have a soul to save, and on Judgment Day I don’t want to hear our Lord say, as He did to the Pharisees, “Woe unto you, lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge: you entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering you hindered” (Luke 11:52).
Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, has prayed for a miracle that he calls “the new springtime of evangelization.” Until that springtime comes, let’s stand up together, in the spirit of Vatican II, and remind our pastors, DRE’s, and RCIA Directors that evangelization is at the very core of who we are as Catholics. And let’s insist on it being done, and being done faithfully, in accordance with the authentic teachings of the Church. Let’s settle for nothing less. And when it comes to these little lost lambs who show up at our doorsteps, let’s send our leaders one simple message, easily understood:
Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way.
