Eighty catechists gave up a Saturday for our parish formation day, and by the end of it the people who had come to teach had learned more than the people who had come to learn.
The morning went roughly as planned: the structure of the catechumenate, the stages, the rites. It was the afternoon that was instructive. We had set aside two hours for group work on accompanying candidates whose family situations are irregular — a question we had framed rather abstractly.
The groups did not take it abstractly. They came back with names, circumstances, and a level of pastoral judgement that no course had given them. One catechist has been preparing the same family for four years and expects to continue for several more. Another described walking a woman through a situation that had no clean resolution, and simply staying with her in it.
We commissioned twelve new catechists at Evening Prayer. They are joining people who have been holding this parish together for decades, mostly without being asked how they do it.