A confirmation Mass is held at St. Mary’s Parish on Saturday, Sept. 21, 2024, in Franklin, Massachusetts. / Credit: St. Mary’s Parish
CNA Staff, Dec 19, 2024 / 05:15 am (CNA).
The Diocese of Baton Rouge announced it would be lowering its confirmation age, just days after the Diocese of Salt Lake City shared it would adjust its process for youth converts to ensure thorough catechesis.
These decisions indicate a growing desire to strengthen the formation of youth in the Catholic faith.
Tim Glemkowski, who heads Amazing Parish, a ministry designed to support Catholic pastors and help parishes flourish, spoke to the challenges of remaining Catholic that young adults face in the culture today.
“The pressures of the culture are away from, not toward, religious belief and practice,” Glemkowski told CNA. “It is fair to say that our culture, broadly speaking, does not lend itself to preconditions.”
As the Church strives to address how to properly form youth in such a culture, in recent years many dioceses have lowered the confirmation age from high school to middle school or even younger, including the Archdiocese of Seattle, to seventh grade; the Boston Archdiocese to eighth grade; and the Archdiocese of Denver to third grade before young people have received communion.
Requiring confirmation before communion is known as “the restored order” — a celebration of the sacraments of initiation as the Church originally instructed them to be dispensed: baptism, confirmation, and then first communion. The U.S. bishops allow reception of confirmation for youth between ages 7 and 17.
According to a study by St. Mary’s Press and the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University (CARA), the median age of those who left the Church was 13 years old. The study found that many former Catholics who reported leaving usually between ages 10 and 20, said they had questions about the faith as children but never discussed their doubts or questions with their parents or Church leaders.
“We need to ensure that youth learn how to pray with their heart, have their questions about the faith answered in robust ways, and have many opportunities to hear the Gospel and respond to God by handing over their life to him,” Glemkowski said.
“Young saints should show us that holiness and heroic mission is possible for young people; we should not underestimate what kids are capable of.”
Addressing a hostile culture
The Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, recently lowered the confirmation age to seventh grade, citing the challenges that face youth today.
“Our children are experiencing a culture which, at times, is hostile to our faith,” Bishop Michael Duca of Baton Rouge wrote in a Dec. 8 letter.
“Through social media of all forms, young people are confronted at a surprisingly younger age with challenges to their Catholic faith and morals,” Duca explained. “Given this new reality, I believe it is time to lower the age of confirmation to give our children the full grace of the Sacrament of Confirmation at an earlier age to meet these challenges.
Duca announced they would begin a transition plan to lower the age from 10th to seventh grade gradually.
“This gift of the Spirit is given to all of us in a special way in the sacrament of confirmation that fully initiates us into the Church and fills us with these gifts and the enthusiasm to take on the mission of Christ to renew the world,” he wrote.
“Many older Catholics remember that the age of confirmation was younger when we were confirmed,” Duca continued. “After the Second Vatican Council, in many places, the age was raised to high school since many leaders felt that the sacrament would be better understood at an older age. This practice has worked well, but times have changed.”
Strengthening formation
The diocese of Salt Lake City is also developing its catechetical program for youth converts who are too old for infant baptism, citing a need to strengthen catechesis within the diocese.
The diocese announced last month that children above the age of seven who are joining the Catholic Church will not receive all three sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil after the diocese temporarily paused the standard practice.
After baptism, children joining the Church in the diocese are to attend a faith formation class at their age level, rather than receiving several sacraments at once, according to the diocesan announcement. The pause is temporary as the diocese develops its faith formation plans.
The Church considers children older than seven to be at the “age of reason” and able to make some decisions of faith for themselves, so unbaptized youth are usually enrolled in the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA) adapted for children, a year-long preparation program for becoming Catholic.
The Church broadly requires that for sacramental initiation after the age of reason, recipients should receive the three sacraments of initiation at the same time, except with grave reason.
However, the diocese of Salt Lake City cites “many challenges and our limited ability to overcome them in a missionary diocese” as the reason for the temporary moratorium on OCIA for children.
Through the moratorium, the diocese hopes to ensure that catechesis is adequate and that children understand the sacraments they are participating in; the diocese is also looking to develop its programs in order to enable unbaptized children to fully assimilate into the faith, according to the announcement.
This pause will end after the diocese develops a “comprehensive faith formation plan,” according to Lorena Needham, director of the Office of Worship for the diocese.
Needham noted that OCIA generally comes with many challenges across dioceses.
“There is still a classroom-school year mentality in which both catechumen and directors try to work within a timeline of one year or less, instead of allowing each person to discern their journey (along with the discernment of the initiation catechist),” Needham told CNA.
Both the parents and the child must consent to joining the Church — but children “cannot adequately give [consent] if they do not know and understand what the sacraments of initiation are,” she noted in the diocesan announcement in Intermountain Catholic.
“There is little training in the seminaries on the OCIA — often it is just an optional class,” she noted, adding that other groups such as LTP, TeamInitiation, and the Association for Catechumenal Ministry offer ongoing training.
To remedy this situation, the diocese of Salt Lake City hopes to place a greater emphasis on training for Christian initiation.
“Some bishops have taken Christian Initiation to heart and made it a focus for the professional development of their priests and central to their pastoral plans,” Needham observed.
The biggest change under the temporary moratorium mandates that youth baptized above the age of seven will receive sacraments one at a time, rather than all at once. This will entail attending first communion and confirmation classes within their age groups.
Under the moratorium, the requirements for obtaining baptism for youth over age seven are unchanged. The current pastoral directives of the diocese require a parent interview at least 60 days before the baptism, as well as discernment of the parents’ readiness to help the child live a Christian life. In addition, parents must be registered in the parish or live within its boundaries, and the parish must provide baptismal preparation for the child, parents, and godparents.
“The hope for our youth, our families, and indeed for all of us in this diocese, is that we have the best possible opportunities to learn and live our faith, regardless of when the Holy Spirit moves us or our parents to take the next step of faith,” Needham said in the announcement.
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OCP’s cover art is usually lame, but that’s the least of their problems.
Should have used fr Martin or Sr semone.. OCP, the wagon wheel disaster for popcorn cafeteria catholicism..
Why apologise for a made up being by a delusional conman like Smith? A cult if there ever was one.
Me thinkest that thou hast misread the article. The apology is made to the Catholic readership BECAUSE of the reasons you state.
But, now that we’re on the subject, it’s fascinating how two very similar religious “types” diverge poles apart from the historically real Incarnation…Mormonism denies the possibility of miracles (all existence is only natural, anthropomorphic, and evolutionary, even God!), while Islam holds that all existence comes miraculously from a totally inscrutable Allah (to affirm even secondary “laws of nature” is to admit an autonomy outside of the only autonomy who is God—and this assertion is blasphemy!).
But, on so many other counts cultic Mormonism and Islam are almost replicas of each other…and almost inevitable to the human imagination—in the absence of Christian witness to the historical Incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully human and fully divine, not a hybrid but both natures fully in one Person. Now, about the similarities:
“Islam attributes a restored text—the Qur’an—to messages received by Mohammed directly from the Angel Gabriel beginning in 610 A.D. The founding prophet of Mormonism is believed to have been visited by the Angel Moroni, instead, beginning in 1823. The prophet Joseph Smith carries an exactly transcribed and untouchable text delivered on hidden tablets of gold. Islam’s untouchable Arabic script (Q 13:37, 42:5, 46:13) is duplicated for Mohammed from an identical text in heaven. Both religions (and many others) have a supplemental set of writings, respectively the Book of Mormon and the Muslim Hadith. Both religious leaders experienced initial persecution, the mystic Joseph Smith in Missouri and Illinois and Mohammed at Mecca. Both migrated to a selected new base of operations, Joseph Smith west to Salt Lake and Mohammed north to Medina. Islam is preached first to the tribes of Arabia, while Mormonism initially saw its mission among the indigenous tribes of North America. Mormons have believed that the American Indians are migrant descendants from the Israelite patriarch Lehi arriving via Arabia to the New World in 590. B.C., but do not reject possibly Asiatic origins [….] Mormonism, like Islam, claims to be a restoration rather than a new religion, and claims an option for ongoing revelation. Mormonism would restore a corrupted Christianity while Islam would restore the earlier and corrupted faith of Abraham [Israelite worship of the Golden Calf, and Christian “polytheism” of the Triune One] from the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian narrative. Mormon apologists refer to a universal apostasy by a Church extinguished under Diocletian and ravaged by later strife among Protestants. Islam is scandalized by early Byzantine Christian theological disputes of about the same period” (extract from Beaulieu, “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity,” University Press of America, 2012, Chapter 2).
SUMMARY: Probably not a bad idea to apologize for witlessly using the image of Moroni on the cover of a Catholic publication.