New Converts and Ancient Mystagogy

Mother Church is still celebrating the record number of converts who were  received into her family at Easter. Her task now, like that of all mothers, is to nourish her children so they grow in wisdom, age, and grace before God and man. As mothers with adult children know well, this task has no expiration date: the Church dispenses the gifts of salvation to each child until his final breath.

How the Church performs this task, practically speaking, has varied over her long life. The early Church continued formal instruction of the newly baptized during Easter week. Before baptism, catechumens were taught about the faith; after it, they were led into faith via guided participation in the sacramental life.

This post-baptismal training was called mystagogy (from the Greek mystagogos, “leading through the mysteries”). And it remains a model for us today. The converts, transformed by baptism into new creations – forever different from their former selves and forever members of God’s family – now live the life of grace. That is, they practice the faith through prayer, sacraments, keeping the commandments, avoiding sin, developing virtues, and performing acts of charity.

But how exactly are the neophytes, so 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, to turn these Catholic actions into a coherent way of life? 

Take, for example, keeping the Commandments and avoiding sin. What the Catholic Church calls sins – consider cohabitation, pornography, IVF, surrogacy, same-sex relationships – are considered good by the world and are widely practiced. How will the new faithful be educated to know the truth and to realize what they once thought true is, in fact, a lie?

And what about prayer, the bedrock of Christian life? How do they pray in a consistent, habitual way? What kinds of prayer should they practice, and for how long? What do they do when they experience dryness or when it seems their prayers go unanswered? 

To baptize these converts and then wish them well on their Catholic journeys 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 went to Catholic schools, know almost as little as do most converts, are equally malformed by our anti-Christian culture, and, tragically, their spiritual lives are just as uncultivated.

Cradle Catholics have the same need and same hunger as the neophytes: they need ongoing catechesis, a school of Catholic living, a guided progression into union with God. And this modern mystagogy should 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 in short supply in today’s Church with her limited funds and few priests. Yet 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, or Fellowship of Catholic University Students, is perhaps the most prominent expression of modern mystagogy. I have been blessed to sponsor two FOCUS missionaries in recent years and receive monthly updates from their respective campuses. FOCUS chapters offer a community for college students to learn the faith and live the faith in environments often hostile to religion. Its peer-to-peer approach and the full-time efforts of missionaries (who have to raise their own funds to operate as volunteers) have made FOCUS more effective than the typical college chaplaincy or Newman club. The latter are often worthy efforts, but often only offer Mass and perhaps an additional weekly event of some kind.

Parishes that have mystagogy discipleship groups are few in number, but those that do are almost invariably on fire for the faith – and notably marked by families with children. In New York City, where the convert boom has been noted by several secular news outlets, spiritual sparks fly at three parishes, all of which, not coincidentally, are staffed by religious orders with multiple priests to minister to the people packing the pews – and even spilling outside Church doors.

My own parish has instituted such a group this school year. It hired Five Loaves Ministries, an apostolate modeled on FOCUS (the founder is a former FOCUS missionary), to provide long-term accompaniment in discipleship for families. The program, led by the Five Loaves director, has four featured events spread over a month: a husbands-only discipleship meeting (with a complementary wives-only discipleship meeting), a Bible study for couples, a monthly potluck for families, and an encounter night for families that features dinner followed by Eucharistic adoration with opportunities for Confession. 

Eight families, mine among them, have embarked on this journey. The blessings have abounded. Going in, 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 made daily prayer commitments to which our director keeps us accountable. The encounter nights have brought us directly to the Lord and introduced Confession as a regular practice. The potlucks have generated friendships anchored in a shared love of Jesus Christ among us and among our children. 

Jesus cautions that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matt 7:14) If new Catholics – and cradle Catholics too – are to persevere on the way, parishes and chaplaincies should spare neither effort nor expense in founding mystagogy discipleship groups for them. The future of the Church, and the salvation of countless souls, may well depend on them.