RCIA stands for “Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults”. It is basically a class people go through who want to learn more about the faith. During the period of this class, which usually meets once a week during the fall semester or from September-April, you learn about the Catholic faith. You learn about the history behind the Catholic Church, what the Church believes, and what all the sacraments are.
Do you have to become Catholic?
No! RCIA is for anyone who just wants to learn about the Catholic faith. At the end of the class, you can go through the sacraments and enter officially into the Catholic Church, or you can decline. One of the girls in my RCIA class had gone through it twice before and just wanted to do it again because she was interested and wanted to learn more. Some people will go through RCIA if they are interested in supporting a friend or a spouse and want to learn along with them.
What was it like?
It was a very friendly environment. Most of the time, RCIA is a great place to make some new friends around where you live. They often will go to pretty Churches together or have breakfast together as a group after Mass. During this process, teaching others about the faith is called Catechesis and the person going through RCIA is called a Catechumen. During this whole time, you also have a sponsor, who is like a buddy that you can always ask questions to. I really enjoyed getting to know my sponsor and spend time with her and her family. She and her husband were super nice and very involved in the Church, so it gave me a good starting friendship that invited me into the community. Also, I could ask her questions that maybe I didn’t want to ask in front of the whole class.
What did I like?
I really liked getting to know about the history of the traditions that we have as Catholics, like the Eucharist or the Saints and feast days. Learning about why we celebrated all of these things to honor God made me more excited to go into the world and do it. Learning about the why behind things and not just doing them because I’m told to actually made me a million times more passionate about my faith. I loved being able to explain to my family why we believed certain things or why we did things the way we did. There were a lot of different resources I used aside from RCIA when I was trying to learn about complicated concepts like the Trinity or the Eucharist. I will link some of those awesome resources below!
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