I recall some years ago reading with great fascination about the existence of catechumenate houses in a footnote in Paul Turner’s Hallelujah Highway: A History of the Catechumenate (LTP 2000). While such catechumenate houses that existed in seventeenth-century Rome make a brief and less-than-complimentary appearance in PBS‘s Secret Files of the Inquisition, I was intrigued to know that many of these had been founded by Ignatius of Loyola in the previous century. While revisiting some of my notes about this illustrious founder of the Jesuits on his feast this past Saturday and the foundations his followers established in every corner of the earth, such as the famous Jesuit reductions of Paraguay depicted in The Mission, the phantasmic image of catechumenate houses kept coming back to me. Perhaps all of this is simply because I have a romanticized image of what a Christian domestic environment can be—be they fourth-century Basilian foundations, thirteenth-century Cistercian monasteries in the woods, the eighteenth-century Franciscan missions that line the coast of California where I grew up, Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker farms that fed the urban poor in Dorothy Day’s House of Hospitality, or the neo-monastic intentional Christian communities springing up among contemporary evangelicals. But part of me senses that if we are serious about apprenticing people in the Christian way of life such that it permeates every aspect of their lives this formation must be done in an all encompassing environment of faith from dawn to dusk of every day (such as a family or a seminary) and not just on Sundays.
All this left me wondering: could I establish a House for Catechumens in our parish? Sure many of our catechumens have families and it would of course be inappropriate to divorce them from these domestic churches which God has already established as the proper locus of their sanctification. But many of our catechumens also are single young men and women, many of whom in a college town like Chapel Hill are recently graduated and looking for someplace to find their vocation, to contribute, and to learn. What would happen if I opened the door to my house and invited these young men and women to live here, join us in Christian prayer, meals, work around the farm, and included lessons (one might even say conferences) on the faith throughout the day? Would such a school of service to the Lord
(RB Prologue) work? Is this something our contemporary world could handle? Should every parish have a couple of Houses of Catechumens akin to the Houses of Hospitality Blessed Dorothy Day suggested every parish should be supporting?
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