Evangelization Outreach / Father James Brockmeier

A season for mystagogy and evangelization for our new Catholics

The Church is full of new Catholics! As we move into the Easter season and continue to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, all our new Catholics, or neophytes, are continuing their formation through mystagogy, a time of reflection on the sacraments they have received and how they have experienced God’s grace through baptism, confirmation and the Eucharist.

The practice of mystagogy dates to the early Church. St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote five lessons for those who had just received the sacraments for the first time.

To those who have received the Eucharist for the first time, he wrote, “Don’t judge from the taste, but from faith be fully assured without doubt, that the Body and Blood of Christ have been given to you.”

Learning to see the sacraments through the lens of faith takes time and reflection. But through this reflection, we can begin to see not only the sacraments but the whole of our lives through the lens of God’s saving grace, not just what we can see or taste.

From the time of St. Cyril until now, using this season to reflect on the great gifts of God’s grace in the sacraments helps new Catholics and can help us to grow in our understanding and love for God’s unseen graces.

As we continue to celebrate the gift of so many new Catholics in our parishes, we should not forget the call to continue to invite more people to meet Christ and his Church.

A few weeks ago, my parish, SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Indianapolis, had a discussion after Mass about Lenten almsgiving.

While everyone was getting coffee and settling in, a parishioner came up to me and introduced me to a woman who had come to our parish for the first time. As our morning of discussion continued, more and more parishioners stopped me to introduce me to her. By the end of the morning, we had been “introduced” five times. I could see that she was touched by this hospitality.

Often, evangelization begins with what can be seen and felt. When we have conversations with our friends and neighbors about our faith or when we invite someone to go with us to Mass, their interest in coming back may not be based on the intricacies of the Church’s teaching or our theology of sacraments. It will be because they have seen our joy and peace, or they have heard the conviction in our voices when talking about Christ, or they have experienced the beauty of the church building and the Mass.

Then, you can invite them to learn more about the faith in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) and you can go with them, perhaps becoming their sponsor.

If you ask the new Catholics around you, they will tell you how an invitation helped them to go from appreciating what can be seen to believing in God’s invisible grace, how the bread they saw their first time coming to a Catholic Mass is the body and blood of Christ.

Evangelize now, invite your friends and neighbors to Mass, so that this time next year, we can rejoice again in more lives transformed by the sacraments.
 

(Father James Brockmeier is the director of the Office of Worship within the archdiocesan Secretariat for Evangelizing Catechesis. He can be reached at jbrockmeier@archindy.org.) †