The Arrow's Path

 I had I question posed:  I’m in OCIA right now and was assigned a sponsor. I guess I don’t understand the purpose of the sponsor. Is this a requirement and a normal part of OCIA? (Author's note for Non-Catholics: OCIA used to be called RCIA. It stands for the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults. It got rebranded and retooled a few years back . It is the process in which adults are brought into the Catholic Church. Usually it follows the pattern of an adult catechism class for a school year, with the goal of bringing in someone to join the Church at Easter through baptism or reception. Exceptions can be made, and local churches have quite a bit of discretion in altering the process to fit the needs of the would-be convert. )     My response to the question:   Think of the role of sponsor or godparent as a form of lay apostolic succession. We often think of this as only for clergy and bishops being ordained by people who were ordained by clerg...

 I moderate a Facebook group for Catholic Converts. Someone posed a question today for the ground that I thought was very good. " What was the one thing you learned in RCIA that made such an impact on you, that you knew you had made the right decision in becoming Catholic?" The following was my answer... I don't know if it was so much actually in RCIA but in my personal conversion process as I was doing serious research on what the Catholic Church actually taught. My spiritual director at the time had given me a copy of the Catechism and told me to read it through and see if there were any "deal breakers" and go from there.    There was one series of sections about Catholic social justice in the middle that honestly scared me. Coming from the Episcopal church as clergy where terms like "social justice" were code words for extreme political agenda that were used to bludgeon opponents, I very much feared that that would be the deal breaker. B...