Are you getting ready to initiate the Elect in your parish at the Easter Vigil? Make sure they (and you) know what they are signing up for. In his book, The People’s Work, Frank Senn says:

The purpose of proclaiming the word and celebrating baptism and the Lord’s Supper is to form a community of priests who will offer a sacrifice of praise and prayer for the life of the world.

He notes that the worship of God is the purpose for which all other things are done in the church and that the mission of the church is to go find more worshipers who will perform true worship.

Is that message getting across to the Elect? Well, yes and no. According to the U.S. bishops’ report on the implementation of the the RCIA, Journey to the Fullness of Life, 54 percent of those who are initiated through the catechumenate process continue to regularly participate in Mass and in parish life after Easter. The good news is that is much higher than the participation rate for the average Catholic. The bad news is almost half of those who go through the process stop participating. While we are doing well, there is lots of room for improvement.

So how is your parish doing?

Improve next year’s Triduum by evaluating this year’s celebration with this easy-to-use process.

1. Remembering
The first step in evaluating is to remember what happened. In the catechumenate process, this is called mystagogy. What did you see? What did you hear? What emotion did you feel? What was especially powerful? Negative responses are as valid as positive ones. It is more helpful to use the phrase “I felt ____.” It is less helpful to use the phrase “I liked (didn’t like) ______.”

2. Theologizing
What we remember about our worship shapes how we believe. Choose two to four particularly powerful memories. It could be a memory of a symbol, a song, an action, a phrase or a sound. Then, for each memory, ask these questions:

• What did (the thing I’m remembering) tell us about God?
• What did (the thing I’m remembering) tell us about Jesus?
• What did (the thing I’m remembering) tell us about the church?
• What did (the thing I’m remembering) tell us about our community?
• What did (the thing I’m remembering) tell us about myself?

The collective memory of our celebration and what we believe about our memory is how we, as a parish, are “teaching” theology.

3. Evaluating
Our liturgy then, can be evaluated on how well it spoke about each of these areas:

• Were we satisfied with how this liturgy spoke to us of who God is? What was said clearly that we want to keep? What needs to be improved?
• Were we satisfied with how this liturgy spoke to us of who Jesus is? What was said clearly that we want to keep? What needs to be improved?
• Were we satisfied with how this liturgy spoke to us of what we believe about church? What was said clearly that we want to keep? What needs to be improved?
• Were we satisfied with how this liturgy spoke to us of what we believe about community? What was said clearly that we want to keep? What needs to be improved?
• Were we satisfied with how this liturgy spoke of who I am? What was said clearly that we want to keep? What needs to be improved?

Our final evaluation of the overall Triduum might look at these questions:

• How did this year’s Triduum make us different as a parish?
• What goal will we set for ourselves to achieve as a parish next year?
• How did this year’s Triduum make the world a better place?
• What goal will we set for making the world a better place next year?

I’m writing this on the First Sunday of Lent. Today is typically a hectic day in many catechumenate ministries. The candidates for election are stressed and may show up late for the parish Mass and the Rite of Sending. The catechumenate director or liturgist has a thousand details to attend to. There are friends and families of the candidates wandering around, perhaps sitting in the wrong pews. The pastor got an emergency call right before last week’s rehearsal and may be doing the rite “blind” today. And then, after it’s all over, you’ve got to get everyone together again at the cathedral for the Rite of Election, find the right seats, remember how the ritual goes, and not let your nervousness show. It can be like herding cats in a rainstorm.

So today might seem like an odd day to call to our attention the vision of the rite. On the other hand what better time than Lent to refocus and renew ourselves in what the RCIA—and the Spirit of God—call us to as catechumenate ministers?

Today, all those who will write their names in the Book of Life will move to a new stage in their journey. In a sense, you and the catechumenate team are handing them over to their godparents who will be their primary spiritual guides from now on. You might be thinking the godparents just flew in yesterday and have no clue how to continue the formation of the elect. Nevertheless, your discernment that these catechumens are now competent to live the Gospel means they are moving beyond your maternal care. It is time to look forward, to the future, to what the Spirit is asking of us.

I’d like to encourage you to look forward to Easter Sunday. If stress or fatigue or insecurity ever causes you to question what it is we do and why we do it, look forward to the day St. Augustine describes as the day the newly baptized “who a little while ago were called competentes—are now called infantes. They were called competentes because they were thumping in their mother’s womb, begging to be born; now they are called infantes because they—who had first been born to the world—are now born to Christ.” (Harmless, 314)

Augustine, weary from the Vigil the night before, would often drastically abbreviate his usual three-hour homily and simply point to the neophytes standing in their white robes. If you want to see the scriptures enfleshed, he would tell them, look there. Augustine made clear to his parishioners that the neophytes were a living enfleshment of the Word.

The vision of the RCIA is that day, that moment, that miracle, when we can point to the newly baptized and say, “There is Christ made flesh.”