We wonder why youth don’t stick around after their confirmation, but my son’s first communion was yesterday, and I notice that the final religious education meeting was the week before it. Not only for the grades receiving sacraments, but for the whole program, even the preschool class. I wonder why young people might feel like now that they have their sacrament, it’s all done?
All prep and no mystagogy is like all Lent and no Easter!
All prep and no mystagogy is like all Lent and no Easter!
I think we have a lot of work to do if we want children to think like that. When I was going through religious education as a kid, most of them were thrilled to be done with it.
@Jeffrey Pinyan – comment #1:
Sure, but isn’t that in part because we have the whole sacramental sequence structured as a set of “goals” during grammar school years–2nd grade First Holy Communion and 8th grade Confirmation. The sacraments are the finish line; once you’ve crossed over, why would you keep going? If we did as the Orthodox did and had baptism/chrismation/eucharist at once for infants, how would that change things? Or even combine baptism/chrismation and have the 2nd grade First Holy Communion, so that after that, there could be teaching & learning that wasn’t so explicitly goal-focused.
(n.b. I have no idea what the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic experience is like as actually lived, so I’m almost certainly idealizing it.)
In the Belleville Diocese, all confirmations are scheduled during the Easter season. In the parish where I minister confirmation typically ends up close to the time of 8th grade graduation, occasionally even in the same week. It’s no wonder they get the idea that they’re graduating from church.
In my home parish in St. Louis, my daughter will be confirmed in October of her 6th grade year. This provides a more seamless transition from her PSR program into the youth ministry program. This seems to be a very wise arrangement, though I haven’t yet seen whether it bears fruit in keeping students coming around after confirmation.
Agreed! Here at Ascension, Oak Park (Chicago) for years now we have celebrated confirmation in the fall of the 8th grade year. Some parents and some teachers had resisted because, of course “every body knows” that you celebrate confirmation in the Spring, preferably with enough time before 8th-grade graduation–even if that means during Lent. (Acknowledging here–yet setting aside for another discussion–the whole age of confirmation issue.) The young people begin their preparation then in the 7th grade, and of course, “every body knows” that you never do anything over the summer. It gave us–theoretically at least–the opportunity for mystagogy. (Most kids quit religious ed after being confirmed.) The new youth minister wants more time with the eight graders. The music director and I persuaded her not to move confirmation to the spring exactly to avoid making it look like a graduation exercise. She saw a great pastoral benefit to gathering the young people together as they begin high school, too. We worried about making confirmation a “carrot” with required participation the “stick.” But we had to make a choice. So far, parents of kids in the parish grade school are the most opposed. I respect the struggle of getting young teens to do things. Yet some of the attitude seems to be “I’m paying all this tuition to get things all sewn up before high school–and don’t even think of interfering with sports / music / arts / clubs / job. My kid needs all that extracurricular activity to get into college.” I’d welcome a return to baptism-confirmation-eucharist regardless of age as in the Eastern churches. We’re looking at T. Gabrielli’s book Confirmation: How A Sacrament of God’s Grace Became All About Us for help forward. http://www.litpress.org/Products/3522/confirmation.aspx
Confirmation, in particular, is a huge problem area. My eldest has just been through a somewhat trying Confirmation programme, which, on the face of it, seemed to have a lot going for it: small group, good input, intelligently led. But a clear sense from some of the other confirmandi that this was just a hoop to jump through. So much of what the Church (or should I say ‘individual local churches’) provides in sacramental preparation programmes is formulaic, and this applies to ‘progressives’ as much as to ‘traditionalists’. A formation in the faith that carries conviction and authority, that is courageously open to the questionings of teenagers, but also firm in its understanding of what faith in Jesus Christ entails – wow, that’s hard to come by!
Thanks, everybody. Gabrielli’s book is a great one; we just used it in my sacramental theology class. I’m sure it will lead to great conversations.
Just wondering out loud, we have difficulty keeping youth beyond confirmation, as well as RCIA for mystagogy. With confirmation would something be gained in connecting it with baptism, regardless of age, and then putting more honest efforts into youth ministry thus avoiding the carrot/stick model?
Victor, I think so. If confirmandi were put into my care – something I don’t recommend! – I would spend absolutely all their sacramental prep time doing mystagogy about what their baptism means and what our common communion means. Then I would try to make the youth group express the joy and responsibility and joy-in-responsibility of the Gospel, and their call to make the church better serve the needs of the world.
Gabrielli argues, quite compellingly, that the way we structure confirmation suggests to confirmation candidates that they cannot be Catholic unless they are willing to make a choice and personal commitment to the faith, which, in our current ecclesial and cultural climate, means, unless they personally agree with everything they have ever been told the church teaches. Since this is very unlikely (at 14 no less!) they quite reasonably conclude that they are not Catholic and exit.
Kimberly, thanks. I often wonder why we have not done more mystagogy with younger ones, especially because it seems to be particularly amenable to their way of learning–guided reflection on (sacramental) experience.
We’re fighting an uphill battle with sacramental formation. In a cultural climate that encourages enclaves of the like-minded and narrowly constructed identities we end up with many “spiritual not religious” folks and few “evangelical Catholic” folks. The last thing we need to do it to play into the cultural dynamics that eviscerate thick traditions with our religious ed.! Perhaps the most important point that I learned in doing that research was that, at least in this case, matching the culture-wide emphasis on choice with our own moment of choice not only betrayed Confirmation, but, as you describe, had the opposite effect than intended.
Tim, thanks for joining the conversation. I found your research very persuasive.
I wonder about mystagogy too. Is it largely because the vast majority of catechists have no experience of mystagogy themselves? But I think also it must have to do with our “all-or-nothing” thinking: either baptism was effective (goes the modern syllogism), in which case there’s no need to reflect on it, or it wasn’t, in which case there’s no point!
Going back to the early Church, we find a much better understanding of the sacraments as an effective call to an identity one always needed to live out. I think there is a road back, but it might take a whole generation to implement properly.
Kimberly,
Sacramental theology undoubtedly plays a role, but there’s also our wider inability to soak up celebrations to the full. With your analogy to Lent and Easter, I’m reminded that we’re not very good at celebrating the octave of solemnities, much less the full 50 day Easter season, while even less interested Catholics are generally pretty good at abstaining from meat on Fridays in Lent (whether as an identity marker, as a religious discipline, or both). Easter egg hunts and basket blessings, though, always seem to drift into holy week! We need to get better at feasting!
Mystagogy necessitates a kind of “soaking-in” of that sacramental celebration.
The delicate dialectic–the already and not yet–of Christian identity is indeed hard to maintain. As I mentioned before, our cultural matrix lends itself to own’s own identity piecemeal construction (often the “spiritual not religious” folks) or a strong assertion of a particular, “pure” identity (e.g. the “evangelical Catholic” folks), but doesn’t offer much support for a complex identity, rooted in one’s inheritance that has characterized the Catholic vision for so long.
Your book lays helpful theological groundwork for getting us to see this once again. Thank you for it!
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