The Catechumenal School

The Catechumenal School

The Christian mystery is centered on the historical and human event of the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, his suffering, death and resurrection.

            The paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, patterned after the paschal sacrifice of the Exodus event, celebrated yearly as the Jewish Passover feast, is his way of realizing in his own flesh and in human history, that is, within the concrete history of the Jewish nation, that vestige of ancient Israel, the Universal law of love of God, which is the supreme law of sacrifice pictured in the Tree of Life said to have been placed in an archetypal garden of Eden, in order to perpetually remind man about the staff of life which will bring about the perfection of the immutable natural law of Hierarchy or Evolution.

            The Christian mystery is the re-living of that paschal mystery by the individual Christian, and by the Christian Church as a whole, on the practical and concrete level in the world.

            It is the Christian’s way of serving the God of life, by faithfully worshiping Him daily through the sacramental life of the Church of God.

            What are the Christian sacraments of serving the living God through worship?  They are the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.

            The sacrament of Baptism is the Christian way by which one becomes truly a Christian, not only nominally but functionally, by discovering the meaning and true essence of the Christian faith, following the gospel injunction, “Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” (Mt. 28:19 ).

            The sacrament of the Eucharist is the Christian way by which, after becoming a Christian by means of baptism, one shares the Christian life by “observing all that the Lord commands” together with the rest of the Christian community in a life of communion with the universal Church, as a way of implementing the second part of the evangelical injunction, “teach them to observe everything that I have commanded you”.

            The work of initiation into the Christian mystery, copying the school of faith during the Exodus period and of the school of faith which Jesus Christ himself have undergone in the desert, is the apostolic work mandated by the above-mentioned injunction of making the members of the Church from the stage of conception and giving birth, from an  infantile up to the attainment of a  mature stage of Christian faith. It is actually the work of  separating the “chaff from the grain” (Mt. 3:12),  where those members who have less mature faith are separated from those who have matured by the grace of God through their discovery of His Personal Presence by means of the daily living out and submitting themselves in obedience to the Word of God. This selection or separation of Christians among the others is the realization of the evangelical pronouncement where it says, “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt. 22:14), as a way of calling and preparing the more mature members of the Christian Church to the more important and primary work of ministry and mission. One way of doing this is to plant now and again the seed of Christian faith through the pastoral work of evangelization, so that it will bring forth the full grain of the Christian life in the people through the pastoral work of sacramentalization.