JANUARY 2024 “W


hat do you mean we’re just going to sing a few measures of music here and there? Why not sing a whole song?”


Decades ago, that’s what I told our music director who said our choir would be adding some extra bits of music to our usual Mass parts and four-song lineup for a special ritual that Sunday. “Weird,” my impertinent teenage self huffed. Tat was my first reaction to the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Little did I know that I was echoing a similar sentiment by other pastoral ministers from a decade earlier. “Most clergy regard [the] implementation [of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults] as problematic if not impossible,” wrote Benedictine monk Aidan Kavanagh in a 1977 report describing a brand-new ritual book. “Tey are right,” Kavanagh said:


For what the Roman documents contain are not merely specific changes in liturgical rubrics, but a restored and unified vision of the Church . . . [O]ne cannot set an adult catechumenate in motion without becoming necessarily involved with renewal in the ways a local church lives its faith from top to bottom. For . . . there must be something to initiate them into that will be correlative to the expectations built up in them through their whole initiatory process. Tis last means a community of lively faith in Jesus Christ dead, risen, and present actually among his People. In this area, when one change occurs, all changes.1


A different paradigm


After thirty-five years of use in the United States since its promulgation in 1988, some still think the catechumenate rites don’t work. For Kavanagh, these naysayers, including my younger self, miss what makes this new ordo of rites so different from our commonly held paradigms. Tis is not just another ritual book with more “changes in liturgical rubrics” or add-ons that make Mass longer and more complex. Te catechumenate is supposed to be “problematic,” because it disrupts the maintenance-mode mentality that encrusts much of parish life. For if we actually did what it asks, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults would change how we understand ourselves as Church and everything we do as the baptized. It would shake us out of our apathy and rouse our desire for God with unexpected beauty and glimpses of who we could be as Christ’s Body.


I know this because I’ve experienced it happen, and I know many of you have, too. I think of those moments when, in the middle of singing one of those acclamations I thought “weird,” a lump rises in my throat and I begin to get in my bones the meaning of a rite. I start to understand why the rubrics for the Rite of Acceptance direct an assembly—often glued to their pews and reticent toward strangers—to get up, go outside, embrace the seeker, mark them with the Sign of the Cross, and accompany them through the church doors, singing praise to God. I notice the slow melting of hearts in cradle Catholics who Sunday by Sunday witness the catechumens fall deeper in love with the Gospel, as they remember again the taste of God’s Word, sweeter than honey from the comb. And who among us has not been broken open with love at the sight and sound of an adult immersed into the baptismal waters as an assembly sings its full-throated Easter joy?


We music ministers already know how to help the assembly learn that true Christian spirit through their full and conscious musical participation in the liturgy. And with some focus, creativity, and courage, we can do even more with the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (and its upcoming new U.S. English and Spanish translations) to collaborate with the Spirit to transform our parishes into communities “of lively faith in Jesus Christ dead, risen, and present actually among his People.” Here are some steps to keep moving ever closer to that new paradigm.


Know each rite’s focus


and focal points Te catechumenate process is a “way [journey]2


of faith


and conversion” that gradually moves a seeker from no faith to belief in Christ. Along the way are liturgical landmarks that lead a seeker toward its culmination in the celebration of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist.3


Each of the principal rites of the catechumenate recognizes, affirms, and effects the conversion it seeks in the person desiring to follow Christ. Terefore, to prepare music well for each of these rites, we need to


15


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36