Denver Newsroom, Apr 3, 2021 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- Despite difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic, parishes are welcoming groups of catechumens and candidates into the Catholic Church this Easter who have had to learn about the faith largely through virtual meetings.
One such parish is St. Ignatius Parish in San Francisco, which is welcoming a group of catechumens and candidates into the Church who had never convened in person until last month.
Dr. Mary Romo, a professor at the University of San Francisco and a catechist for the parish, told CNA that after convening their RCIA group online in September, she and a deacon have taught all the classes via Zoom.
“Hopefully we got the material across, but people missed the sense of community,” Romo said.
“The first time they actually saw each other [in person] was at the Rite of Election, the first Sunday of Lent.”
San Francisco has had some of the most stringent COVID-19 restrictions in place, including on places of worship, throughout the pandemic— a fact often decried by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.
For much of the pandemic, indoor religious services were not allowed in San Francisco; under current restrictions, indoor religious services are allowed at 50% maximum occupancy.
Romo said their parish church has remained closed throughout most of the pandemic, but the RCIA group is looking forward to being together in person for the Easter Vigil.
St. Ignatius, like most parishes, is still livestreaming their Masses. Don Crean, director of sacramental preparation for the parish, said they have been trying to encourage viewers to be aware of the RCIA group.
One of the ways they have done that throughout the pandemic, Crean said, is to invite people from the RCIA group, two or three at a time, to come forward at the livestreamed Masses for a blessing so the viewers get a sense of who the catechumens and candidates are.
Generally their group of catechumens and candidates includes people from all walks of life, Romo said, but this year one demographic which generally accounts for a handful of converts is notably absent from the group— students from the nearby university.
She said in typical years, students from the University of San Francisco tend to “bring a life” to the RCIA sessions with their enthusiasm and inquisitive nature. But with the university still largely closed for in-person learning, the opportunities to attract students to RCIA at the parish dried up.
Romo said she honestly does not know how well the months of catechesis will “stick,” since she found it difficult to connect with the group via Zoom.
She and her co-catechist even recently conducted a retreat over Zoom, which included a guided meditation on Holy Week. She said it remains hard to “take the pulse” of the class when the interaction is mediated through a screen.
“Are they in profound silence, or are they just texting? We don’t know,” she laughed.
But she said the joy that the group showed when they met for the first time in person in February was a promising sign, and that seeing “the Church in action” as it continues to reopen will doubtless be helpful for the new Catholics.
Deacon John Rangel, RCIA coordinator at St. Joseph Catholic Church in the Diocese of San Angelo, told CNA that they usually start their RCIA program in early August, but this year delayed their start until mid-September.
Since then, their RCIA program has been a combination of in-person and virtual, with Deacon Rangel leading an in-person group for those who feel comfortable, and others joining via Zoom.
He said they started out with 27 in their English-language RCIA program, and five in the Spanish RCIA.
Out of those 32 participants who started the program, 17 are set to join the Church at the Easter Vigil. That number is more than a typical year; eight to 12 is a typical number, Rangel said.
The group has been able to get together in person recently with masks and social distancing. Deacon Rangel said they recently held an in-person retreat with precautions at a local retreat center.
Among the catechumens are a mother and daughter who are joining the Church together, he said.
“They came not knowing much, not knowing what to expect, but throughout this process…they were hungry for something,” Rangel commented.
“God was calling them to be a part of something beyond themselves. They are probably the most vibrant out of the whole vibrant class.”
Normally, he said, RCIA meets once a week, with a potluck before each meeting. Although the lack of fellowship meals this year has been a big loss for the group, Deacon Rangel said the group has found ways to support each other in their journey to become Catholic.
He said in many ways, the experience of leading RCIA during a pandemic has strengthened St. Joseph’s program, and taught them that they are not limited to the “old way” of conducting RCIA only in person.
“The more we discovered what we could do, the more ‘normal’ it became. The people found their niche, where they fit in with everyone else. They interacted with one another” and supported each other to build a community, he said.
“And that’s the miracle part. God himself is greater than COVID. When he calls his people, he makes a way for them to become a community, one people.”
Deacon Rangel’s parish is far from the only parish in the U.S. which has seen its RCIA numbers increase this year from 2020.
St. Mary and St. Michael parish in Stillwater, Minn., part of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis, reported that this year they have 25 people expected to become Catholic at the Easter Vigil, a fivefold increase from the number that joined in 2020.
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Father Patrick Desbois leads Yahad-In Unum, an organization created to the locate the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of WWII Nazi mobile killing units. / Credit: CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images
“What’s the Eucharist?” Kent Shi, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate student, asked that question when he attended eucharistic adoration for the first time. The answer put him on a path to conversion. / Julia Monaco | CNA
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Apr 16, 2022 / 09:03 am (CNA).
One convert’s journey to Catholicism began with an invitation to an ice-cream social.
Another says he instantly believed in the Real Presence the moment someone explained what the round object was that everyone was staring at during eucharistic adoration.
For a third, the poems of T.S. Eliot — and a seemingly random encounter with a priest on a public street — led to deeper questions about truth and faith.
Their paths differed but led them to the same destination: St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are among 31 people set to be fully initiated into the Catholic Church during the Easter vigil Mass on Saturday, April 16.
That number of initiates is a record high for St. Paul’s, a nearly century-old Romanesque-style brick church whose bell tower looms over Harvard Square.
A scheduling backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is partly responsible for the size of this year’s group of catechumens (non-baptized) and candidates (baptized non-Catholics.) But Father Patrick J. Fiorillo, the parochial vicar at St. Paul’s, believes there’s more to it than that.
“There’s definitely a significant segment of people who started thinking more deeply about their lives and faith during COVID-19,” Fiorillo said. “So, coming out of Covid has given them the occasion to take the next step and move forward.”
Fiorillo is the undergraduate chaplain for the Harvard Catholic Center, a chaplaincy based at St. Paul’s for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University and other academic institutions in the area. This year, 17 of the 31 initiates are Harvard students.
“Everybody assumes that, because this is the Harvard Catholic Center, that everybody here is very smart and therefore has a very highly intellectual orientation towards their faith,” Fiorillo told CNA.
“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more,” he said.
Fiorillo says welcoming converts into the Church at the Easter vigil is one of the highlights of his ministry.
“It’s an honor. It gives me hope just seeing all this new life and new faith here. So much in one place,” he said.
“When I tell other people about it, it gives them hope to hear that many young people are still converting to Catholicism, and they’re doing it in a place as secular as Cambridge.”
Prior to the Easter vigil, CNA spoke with five of St. Paul’s newest converts. Here are their stories:
‘This is what I’ve been looking for’
Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, told CNA that she was excited to experience the “transformative power of Christ through his body and blood” at Mass for the first time at the Easter vigil.
A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, she said she was baptized as a child and comes from a family of Dominican immigrants. Her father, who grew up in an extremely impoverished area, lacked a formal education, but always kept the traditions of the Catholic faith close to him in order to persevere in difficult times.
Her father’s love for her and his Catholic faith deeply inspired Cabrera, and served as an anchor for her faith throughout her life.
Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.
“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”
After she arrived at Harvard, she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started,” she told CNA.
Once she was added to the email list for the center’s events, she felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community.
Catholic doctrine about the sacraments was no hurdle for Cabrera, as she credits Fiorillo with explaining the faith well.
“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”
‘What’s the Eucharist?’
“What is that thing on the thing?”
Kent Shi laughs when he recalls how perplexed he was the first time he attended eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Cambridge.
Someone helpfully explained that what Shi was looking at was the Eucharist displayed inside a monstrance.
“What’s the Eucharist?” he wanted to know.
For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.
Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.
Shi, 25, told CNA that he considered himself an agnostic for most of his life, meaning he neither believed nor disbelieved in God.
Between his first and second years as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, however, he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.
One day in the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.
Shortly after, he accepted a friend’s invitation to attend eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant.” Unaware of what he was about to walk into, Shi asked a friend what the dress code was for adoration. His friend replied, “Respectful.”
And so, respectfully dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, Shi sat in the front row with his friend, only a few feet from the monstrance. That’s when the questions began.
It wasn’t long after that encounter that Shi began attending Mass at St. Paul’s and the parish’s RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program. Shi asked CNA readers to pray for him and his fellow RCIA classmates.
“There’s a lot of prodigal sons and daughters here, so we would very much appreciate that,” he said, “especially me.”
Poetry and art opened the door
For Loren Brown, choosing to attend a secular university like Harvard proved to be “providential.”
The 25-year-old junior from La Center, Washington, said he comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized.
He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when, he says, Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith.”
Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot (his favorite set of poems being “Four Quartets”) and the “Confessions” by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.
Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest also played a pivotal role.
One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.
It was Father George Salzmann, O.S.F.S., graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.
“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine,” Brown told CNA.
“You know, there’s this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul’s and you should come see it,” Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him. Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church, which was completed in 1923.
The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. He hasn’t missed a Sunday since, a routine that ultimately led him to join the RCIA program that fall.
Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.
“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed,” he said. “Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.”
‘I can’t do this alone. Please help me.’
Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard’s engineering school.
The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.
“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she told CNA.
She found herself on knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.”
She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church in Somerville, Massachusetts.
In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone,” she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough.
Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled “The hour that will change your life,” in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, known for his “Bible in a Year” podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.
Intrigued, she began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including Father Casey Cole, O.F.M., Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith.
Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Fiorillo.
When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism.” She entered the RCIA program three weeks later.
Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun.”
A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”
“I am really, really, really excited for the Easter vigil,” Kaynig-Fittkau said. “I can’t wait, I have a big smile on my face just thinking about it.”
The rosary brought him peace
Another catechumen at St. Paul’s this year is Kyle Richard, 37, who lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston and works in a technology startup company downtown.
Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating,” which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.
When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father’s yearning to return to the Church.
“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.
Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves.”
Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.
Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot,” he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.
Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.
A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s. Joining the RCIA program, he feels, was a continuation of his father’s expressed desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.
“I think he would be proud, especially because he was born on April 16th and that is the date of the Easter vigil,” he said.
Pope Francis goes to confession during a penance service in St. Peter’s Basilica on March 25, 2022. / Vatican Media.
Vatican City, Mar 26, 2022 / 05:30 am (CNA).
Pope Francis told hundreds of priests and seminarians on Friday that when they are hearing confessions, they should strive to accompany penitents along the path to greater holiness.
“The confessor always has as his goal the universal call to holiness, and to accompany discreetly to it,” the pope said on March 25, speaking about the Sacrament of Reconciliation, when a penitent Catholic discloses his or her sins to a priest or bishop, who acts in persona Christi, Latin for “in the person of Christ,” to grant God’s pardon and forgiveness.
“To accompany means to take care of the other person, walking together with him or her,” he continued. “It is not enough to indicate a goal, if you are not willing to walk even a stretch of road together.”
“However brief the confessional interview may be, from a few details you can understand the needs of the brother or sister: we are called to respond to them, accompanying them above all to the understanding and acceptance of God’s will, which is always the way of the greatest good, the way of joy and peace,” the pope stated.
Francis addressed around 800 priests and seminarians at the end of an annual course on the seal of confession and the internal forum, which is an extra-sacramental form of secrecy, or confidentiality, applied to spiritual direction.
The course, in its 32nd edition, was held in person and online. It was organized by the Apostolic Penitentiary, the office of the Roman Curia responsible for issues related to the sacrament of confession, indulgences, and the internal forum.
“Dear brothers, I thank the Lord with you for the ministry which you carry out, or which will soon be entrusted to you — for there are [transitional] deacons here — a ministry at the service of the sanctification of the faithful People of God,” Pope Francis said.
He reminded priests that though they are ministers of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, they should also receive the graces of the sacrament themselves.
“You go to ask forgiveness for your sins, do you not? This is very healthy. It is good for us confessors to do so,” he said.
Francis also advised priests to “inhabit” the confessional, always being ready to welcome, listen, and accompany those who come to seek God’s forgiveness. Everyone needs forgiveness, he said, “that is, to feel that they are loved as children by God the Father.”
“The words we say: ‘I absolve you of your sins’ also mean ‘you, brother, sister, are precious, you are precious to God; it is good that you are there.’ And this is a most powerful medicine for the soul, and also for the psyche of everyone,” he said.
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