Honoring the Baptized

Let's suppose you want to honor the baptized by celebrating their reception into the Catholic Church at the first Sunday Eucharist after they are ready. How do you deal with the pastoral issue that they will feel like they are missing something in comparison with the Elect who will be baptized at the Great Easter Vigil? The key is, from the beginning of their relationship with the parish, to identify them much more closely with the Order of the Faithful than with the Order of the Catechumens. Here are several strategies.

1. Remember the Rite of Welcome is optional. As presented in the RCIA, there are a great many similarities to the Rite of Acceptance. It would help the baptized candidates for reception identify more closely with the faithful if you skipped the Rite of Welcome altogether. Instead, use an adaptation of the very simple Order for the Welcoming of New Parishioners from the Book of Blessings.
2. Separate the candidates for reception and the candidates for baptism into different catechetical groups. Every parish is supposed to have ongoing formation for its members. The baptized candidates can be integrated into that formation process while the catechumens remain in the catechumante. If your parish does not yet have ongoing adult faith formation, use the arrival of the candidates for reception as a spur to start.
3. Set up separate sponsor training. The needs of the baptized will be different than the needs of the unbaptized, and the sponsors for each group will require different skills. The ideal sponsors for the candidates for reception will be Catholics who were baptized as infants and cannot imagine any greater joy than to have Christians all their lives. Their very being should communicate what a great gift the candidates for reception have had all these many years.
4. Do not delay their reception. Baptized candidates may be, and should be, received at any Sunday liturgy. Some will require relatively little catechesis and others significantly more. However, whenever the community discerns a candidate is in fact ready, he or she may be received. If some of the other candidates are not yet ready, their reception would take place after more formation has better prepared them.
   
5. Be sure to receive all those who are ready before Ash Wednesday so the candidates for reception can participate fully in the initation of the Elect. They should understand their mission as disciples is to "go and baptize," and not to wish they could get themselves re-baptized.
6. Give these brand new Catholics a major role at the Easter Vigil. They should be right up at the font, helping the Elect into the water, handing them towels as they emerge, escorting them to their chaning rooms, assisting the presider with holding the oils or books during the chrismation, serving as communion ministers, and so on. Yes, there has to also be room for the regular ministers of the parish to serve in these roles, but they could do so as mentors and guides to the new Catholics.
7. Ask the newly received Catholics to help serve as hosts and planners for the reception for the Elect. With the help of their sponsors, the newly received Catholics should project an attitidude that says to the neophytes: "We're overjoyed that you are now one of us."

Why Baptized Candidates Should Not be Received at the Easter Vigil

When should baptized candidates be received into the Catholic Church?

Paul Turner in When Other Christians become Catholic, says, “Whenever they are ready” (p. 161).

The National Statues for the Catechumenate say, not “at the Easter Vigil lest there be any confusion of such baptized Christians with the candidates for baptism…” (33).

As I talk to folks about this issue, it seems there are several rationales in play. There are those who think of everyone as somewhat equally on a conversion journey. Believing that, there would seem to be little difference between the faith of a catechumen, a baptized candidate seeking reception into the Catholic Church, and the average Catholic who celebrates Mass every Sunday. There is something to be said for this point of view. After all, if a thousand years is as a single day to God (2 Peter 3:8), what can the meager differences in our faith lives seem like?

Another group of folks would tend to see the catechumens and the candidates for reception as people who have had a religious awakening. They have been led by the Holy Spirit to the Roman Catholic Church because they understand Roman Catholicism to the fullest expression of their newly awakened faith. The catchechumens and the baptized candidates for reception are both groups of seekers joining the Catholic Church.

And there might be a third kind of initiation team that would see the catechumens and the uncatechized baptized candidates for reception as beginners on the faith journey. Those who have been baptized and somewhat catechized (or maybe even well catechized) are different from the beginners in faith and more like the weekly-Mass Catholics.

All of the parishes that would hold any of these views would be accepting baptized Christians into the Catholic Church at the Easter vigil, although the third group might receive only the previously uncatechized Christians.

The difficulty with each of these rationales or descriptions of particular journeys of faith is that they each assumes some level of accomplishment on the part of the individual. Each position presumes the individual has come to some level (or not) of faith that would determine the ritual celebration of his or her movement from one level of status to another.

What is misunderstood in each instance is that faith is a gift—a total, free, and undeserved gift from God. Baptism is the ritual celebration of that gift, and the sacrament of baptism forever and completely changes a person into one of the chosen, a child of God.

Afterwards, one can then become a heretic, an apostate, a backslider, or the next Mother Teresa, but one can never undo God’s choice. There is an actual and real difference between the baptized and the unbaptized. There is no comparable difference between two baptized people of different denominations. Both are heirs to the kingdom and disciples of Christ. Both are bestowed with the full rights, responsibilities, duties, and privileges of those who belong to Christ.

The entire lenten process, which has its culmination in the Great Easter Vigil, is about marking and celebrating the miracle that God has chosen yet again to name another of us as son or daughter. We should not attempt to diminish the mighty act of God by seeming to ignore the fact that the baptized candidates for reception have already been chosen, “lest there be any confusion of such baptized Christians with the candidates for baptism.”