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Mar
26
What is a Priest’s Duty Here?
Posted By Augustine | Filed Under Augustine
I’m a little concerned for the future of the Church when I hear stories like this…
Recently, I received an e-mail from an e-quaintence asking if I had time to help him with an urgent problem. I responded as quickly as I could, and within an hour, my interlocutor had written back with his issue. His explanation was involved, revolving around his RCIA, the teacher thereof and some concerns about his pending baptism into the Faith.
It doesn’t surprise me that someone so close to receiving that unique absolution and the incredible graces that flow forth from it, would be having doubts. To me, as to most of my Catholic friends, the source of these doubts are clear. The Master of Lies uses every little thing he can to carry us away from the Truth.
I’m not, therefore, remotely upset with him for being confused and concern. Although he expressed to me that he isn’t so much concerned about becoming Catholic, his concern centers over being far from his home and family; being baptized in another town with other people. My take on this is simply that he has a desire to share this moment, but that the Great Deceiver is using an honest desire in him to create a crisis.
Since I’m not a priest, and I don’t teach RCIA, I can’t address the specifics of the Rite. That is, I can’t answer, in a manner any more enlightened than his own Monsignor, what is necessary for him to be baptized elsewhere. According to his priest, he would have to start RCIA all over again. This is probably the case, and I won’t argue it. In fact, this isn’t even what bothers me about the whole situation.
What bothers me is how, according to this young man eager to enter Catholic communion, his priest and the nun who taught RCIA responded.
The nun who has been guiding the RCIA, a nun to whom he says he had grown close, informed his fellow converts of his concern about being baptized this Easter at that Church. She has taken his reservations and turned them into a personal sleight. I know we’re all human, but when it comes to a person’s faith formation, our ego really needs to take a backseat to the role of God and the convert in the process.
Christ tells us that only those to whom God chooses to give knowledge, will knowledge of Christ and the truth come. How often in the Gospels does He speak about the “hardness of the heart” with which God sometimes afflicts us? But, isn’t our greatest responsibility, we to whom the grace to know Him has come, to cultivate the fruits of that grace in others? Should we not make every effort to bring our brothers to the Lord? Don’t we risk turning them away when we inject ourselves into the conversation?
I informed my concerned friend, as quickly as I could type my usual verbose response, that I was concerned that he was putting too much emphasis on the “rite” and not enough of the underlying meaning. I believe that concern about “where” and “with whom” was the wedge with which The Dark One was trying to drive a wedge between Christ and him. I suggested that he should pray for guidance (as I have prayed for his guidance) and seek the will of God.
I just think all of that would be better if both priest and nun were less interested in dismissing his concerns out of hand (and advertising them to the parish) than in guiding a lost soul in danger of tripping, down the path to communion. With reactions like that, I wonder who is the bigger collaborator to the one who despises all things good: his ego, or his advisors?
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Its a very difficult situation and discerning i think about this matter is as hard. On one hand we have the administrative aspect and on the other the personal. But suffice it to say truly that the one who despises all things good uses everything he can get his hands on to get as much as he can.
Prompts me to finish my long-overdue reading of Screwtape and Wormwood’s correspondence.