Category: Evangelization

Scenario for discussion:
Family of 5.
The father is Catholic, the 3 children ranging from under 12 month to 6 years old have been baptized. The mother is a Protestant. She would like to become Catholic, but the RCIA program in the parish calls for 2 meetings per week for 2 hours each. Catechism for the oldest happens at a different time than the RCIA classes. The father works a full time job with some travel. No nanny or other support is around. So between father, mother and 3 small kids, it’s very difficult to commit to the 12 month schedule of the RCIA program.
Question:
Should the structure/schedule of the RCIA program be flexible to accomodate the needs of a family such as this? Is it fair for a non-Catholic mom to have to attend several hours a week of RCIA classes and discussion sessions when the needs of the family are great? Should the RCIA program schedule and requirements be adjusted in order to get converts access to the sacraments sooner?
Discuss in the comments boxes, please.

Today is the day she will have the starvation process imposed on her if there’s no further legal intervention.
More info here.

The mostly black Baptist church in Louisiana that plans to pay white visitors for attending reminds me of the first time I went to a mostly black church.
When I was a catechumen, my sponsor and I visited various congregations’ services, and one of them was at a “Jesus-only” United Pentecostal church. The congregation was small, maybe 30 people: just a few extended families, it seemed. During the sermon, the black minister looked down at us amid his flock and said, “You boys: don’t think you’re saved just because you’re white!” We answered, “A-men!” and everyone laughed.

A German scholar of Near Eastern languages proposes a solution to the many incomprehensible passages of the Qu’ran. Since Syriac-Aramaic was the written language of Arabs in Mohammed’s time, and written Arabic did not yet exist, Christoph Luxenberg (a pseudonym) re-interprets the existing Qu’ran as a document originally written in Syriac and finds that this approach clarifies puzzling passages.
It took 300 years until the Qu’ran’s transcription into Arabic became stable and, as an academic reviewer puts it, one “cannot assume that the earliest Arabian commentators understood correctly the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic of the Qur’ān.”
The popular implications of this approach are enormous: some of the most controversial passages in the Arabic Qu’ran are affected by the new interpretations this theory proposes. Would Wahhabi terrorists blow themselves up if they were promised a reward of “raisins” and “juicy fruit” in paradise instead of “72 virgins”?
Even more surprisingly, Luxenberg suggests that Mohammed may have been a Christian describing himself as a “witness to the prophets” rather than the “last of the prophets”.
(Thanks to CWN for mentioning the story.)