By David G. Bonagura, Jr.
The Mother Church still celebrates the record number of converts who were received into her family during Easter. Her task now, like that of every mother, is to nurture her children so that they grow in wisdom, age, and grace before God and men. As mothers with adult children know well, this task has no expiration date: the Church dispenses the gifts of salvation to each child until their last breath.
The way the Church carries out this task, in practice, has varied throughout its long life. The early Church continued the formal instruction of the newly baptized during Easter week. Before baptism, catechumens were taught about the faith; after it, they were led into the faith through guided participation in sacramental life.
This post-baptismal training was called mystagogy (from the Greek mystagogos, “to lead through the mysteries”). And it remains a model for us today. Converts, transformed by baptism into new creatures—forever different from who they were before and forever members of God’s family—now live the life of grace. That is, they practice the faith through prayer, the sacraments, the fulfillment of the commandments, the avoidance of sin, the development of virtues, and the performance of acts of charity.
But how exactly are neophytes—many of whom have come to Catholicism without a religious upbringing, without a Christian worldview, and without many practicing Catholics around them to serve as models—going to turn these Catholic actions into a coherent way of life?
Take, for example, the fulfillment of the commandments and the avoidance of sin. What the Catholic Church calls sins—consider cohabitation, pornography, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, same-sex relations—are considered good by the world and are widely practiced. How will the new faithful be educated to know the truth and realize that what they once believed to be true is, in reality, a lie?
And what about prayer, the foundation of Christian life? How do they pray consistently and habitually? What kind of prayer should they practice and for how long? What do they do when they experience dryness or when it seems that their prayers go unanswered?
Baptizing these converts and then wishing them the best on their Catholic paths without additional guidance would be akin to sowing seeds on rocky ground or among thorns. And let’s face the painful reality: most Catholics today, even if they were baptized as infants and attended Catholic schools, know almost as little as most converts, are equally malformed by our anti-Christian culture, and, tragically, their spiritual lives are equally uncultivated.
Cradle Catholics have the same need and the same hunger as neophytes: they need ongoing catechesis, a school of Catholic life, a guided progression toward union with God. And this modern mystagogy must be done in communion with others; Catholics are not meant to be lone rangers seeking salvation on their own.
A modern mystagogy requires serious investments of time, resources, and personnel, gifts that are scarce in the current Church, with its limited funds and few priests. However, God has inspired some of his children with the ingenuity and energy to make something like this happen. When done well, the fruits have been abundant.
FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) is perhaps the most prominent expression of modern mystagogy. I have had the blessing of sponsoring two FOCUS missionaries in recent years and receiving monthly updates from their respective campuses. FOCUS headquarters provide a community for college students to learn the faith and live the faith in environments often hostile to religion. Their peer-to-peer approach and the full-time efforts of the missionaries (who must raise their own funds to operate as volunteers) have made FOCUS more effective than the typical university chaplaincy or Newman club. The latter are usually valuable efforts, but often only offer Mass and perhaps some additional weekly event.
Parishes that have mystagogical discipleship groups are few, but those that do are almost invariably on fire with faith, and notably marked by families with children. In New York City, where the surge of converts has been noted by several secular media outlets, spiritual sparks fly in three parishes, all of which, not by coincidence, are staffed by religious orders with multiple priests to serve the people who fill the pews and even overflow outside the church doors.
My own parish has instituted a group of this kind this school year. It hired Five Loaves Ministries, an apostolate based on the FOCUS model (the founder is a former FOCUS missionary), to provide long-term accompaniment in family discipleship. The program, led by the director of Five Loaves, has four highlighted events spread over a month: a husbands-only discipleship meeting (with a complementary wives-only meeting), a couples’ Bible study, a monthly shared family dinner, and a family encounter night that includes a dinner followed by Eucharistic adoration with opportunities for confession.
Eight families, mine among them, have embarked on this journey. The blessings have abounded. At the start, most families are committed to Sunday Mass, but have little formation in the faith. Through the discipleship meetings, we have learned what prayer is and how to do it; we have all taken on daily prayer commitments for which our director holds us accountable. The encounter nights have brought us directly to the Lord and introduced confession as a regular practice. The shared dinners have generated friendships anchored in a shared love for Jesus Christ among us and among our children.
Jesus warns that “narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few are those who find it” (Mt 7:14). If new Catholics—and cradle Catholics as well—are to persevere on the way, parishes and chaplaincies should not skimp on efforts or expenses in founding mystagogical discipleship groups for them. The future of the Church, and the salvation of countless souls, may well depend on them.
David G. Bonagura, Jr. is the author, most recently, of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today, and translator of Jerome’s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning. Adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, he serves as religion editor of The University Bookman, a book review journal founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. His personal website is here.