The other day I made a podcast with the Latin that must be used in the traditional rite of baptism. Today I continue on the theme of entrance into the Church with the profession of faith of a convert.
The podcast is spurred by a snarky and yet cowardly anonymous email suggesting that I hit Jesuit Fr. Reese so hard about transubstantiation because of my own lack of faith and, hence, I took it personally.
Yes, I do take this personally. But, no. I don’t doubt the Faith. I made my personal profession of faith when I entered the Church formally and I have not wavered in it since, though I remain a sinner.
It astonishes me that priests – who make professions of faith before ordination and when they take an office – should so violate them.
So, today I describe how I was formally brought into the Catholic Church and I read the text of Profession of Faith that we used.
And the music you hear is the parish choir at the parish where I converted and was received into the Church, St. Agnes in St. Paul, under the pastorate and musical direction of Msgr. Richard Schuler. I sang in the choir for these recordings, lo those many years ago.
This was the level of liturgical worship in which I explored the Catholic Faith intellectually and within which had my slower affective conversion.
Pay attention for the part about transubstantiation.
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Thanks, Father!
All I did was say ‘I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God’, and was immediately confirmed. Very minimal.
As regards the wording used, my experience on being received into full communion with the Church was similar to Mariana2’s. I would have liked to make the Tridentine Confession of Faith with its abjuration of heresy, but I just had to go along with the ritual specified in the RCIA. Becoming a Catholic was a great leap for me but the Church wanted to treat it as a small step.
[You’ve made a good point. This is the problem with much of the “modern” Church: make X small. And if it is the “modernist” Church: reduce the supernatural to the natural. This is a major problem.]
My profession of faith was the same as your last two correspondents. Sigh. Still, we’re no less Catholic for that minimalistic formula, and that’s a comfort.
I’m intrigued (and impressed) that you took the Oath against Modernism. Would that it were still required: it might have prevented some of our current clergy from being our current clergy.
And when are you going to write your full autobiography?
Not long after becoming Catholic, I stumbled across old liturgical books in the University of Utah Library. I am a convert from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (otherwise known as the Mormons). When I stumbled across this oath, I wanted to take it, but had already by that point been baptised, confirmed and given first Holy Communion.
Looking back, even had I converted in the days before Vatican II, I am not sure that I would have been required to take the oath. The Diocese of Salt Lake City had long treated Mormon baptisms as invalid. When I went through RCIA and was baptised in 1993, I was baptised absolutely by the bishop himself and not conditionally. I am not sure that converts from non-Christian religions were expected to take the oath. Maybe they were.
I would have also loved to have added the Anti-Modernist Oath to when I took my canonical oaths in the nights before I was ordained a deacon and later as a priest. I am sure that my bishop would have permitted it. But I didn’t ask and I regret it now. Maybe next time I have to take the Oath, I will ask to also take the Anti-Modernist Oath as well.
I was blessed to be received into the RCC in Latin and will celebrate my 3rd anniversary on Sept.8, the birthday of Our Blessed Mother. The young Priest who allowed me to join this great Church (he was young enough to be my grandson) loved the TLM and had at least 2 Masses in Latin every week.
Unfortunately, at the change time of 6 years, he went to another diocese where the TLM is appreciated, and our parish received in exchange a Vatican II pharisee. The new priest told me that I was “one of those rigid old ladies in veils.”
I have been looking for an alternate parish with a TLM. It means a drive of over an hour, but I count it as worth it since I go with a family of 6, who were also “dissed” by the new priest.
When will this end? I now have to change my funeral arrangements and, probably, the church were it will be held, as I really had wanted it to be a TLM funeral. Please pray for this “rigid old lady in a veil.”
@newishconvert. Here’s a picture of another “rigid old lady in a veil” to make you smile.