Sacramental preparation shouldn't be an empty ritual.

I remember almost nothing about the day that I received my First Holy Communion. I wonder, when I look at the pictures that were taken that day, why no one told me to turn the scapular that hung around my neck. There I stand in my lace-trimmed white dress, my long dark curls veiled in white - and the black reverse of the scapular blotting my chest.

I remember that, while walking two-by-two down the center aisle of the church with my classmates, I refused to acknowledge my embarrassment with my veil, which, unlike the crisp, shoulder-length froth that my classmates wore, was too long and somewhat limp from having been handed down from an earlier generation.

For months, the class had been immersed in "sacramental preparation," as it wasn't called back then. Sister Mary Timothy conducted the daily drill and Msgr. Spiegel dropped into the classroom at odd intervals and gave pop quizzes. I can still spout automatic answers to Baltimore Catechism questions such as, Why did God make you?'

Nevertheless, those childhood classes and sacramental events seem far removed from my adult understanding of Eucharist. They seem an exercise whose purpose is easily lost and ultimately characterized as jumping through hoops, something that the church makes you do to "get" the sacraments.

Is that what it was? Is that what sacramental preparation is in its contemporary form? A test to study for, pass, and forget as we get on with real life?

Sacramental preparation programs have passed through several incarnations since the 1950s, when nuns and priests ensured that masses of Catholic kids memorized the answers to the First Communion or Confirmation quiz. Each incarnation has been debated - and generally reaches out to encircle yet another family member or entire generation in what was once a relatively simple teach-and-dispense procedure.

Scripturally, sacrament would seem to be so fundamental, so simple:

* Eucharist: "Take and eat. This is my Body."

* Reconciliation: "Go, and do not sin again."

* Matrimony: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh."

But scripture verses that describe the hours following the Last Supper make it abundantly clear that, to those on the scene, there was nothing simple, nothing easy about this new life that hadn't even been defined as sacramental. Up until Sunday, the weekend seemed to witness nothing but disaster. Pentecost and the Gift of the Spirit were only conferred after the agony of lost love and bitter disappointment had been endured.

From the beginning, then, sacrament was Real Presence to which one could entrust one's entire being with childlike faith and simplicity, as well as Presence that would be entwined with the deepest isolation and most profound introspection that life would foist on the human spirit. Was there a way to prepare?

The sacramental life of the church of the 1950s was one that had been largely defined by the Council of Trent's response to the Protestant Reformation. For more than four centuries, the celebration of sacrament - particularly Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Matrimony, and Holy Orders - was marked by a certain church-centered splendor, pageantry, festivity, and mystery.

In the United States, the Baltimore Catechism spelled out what an educated clergy had been preaching to a largely uneducated Catholic populace for generations.

The heritage of the church's vast middle class was largely German and Irish and anchored solidly in a highly organized parochial system, where rules and schools dictated how sacraments would be dispensed. Yes, the immigrant phase was passing and educated Catholics were quickly taking their place as leaders of the private, public, and nonprofit sectors of the country. True, growth in sacramental faith often ended in adolescence when teenagers got their "paper" and left. Even so, for generations of American Catholics, the flaws in the sacramental-preparation system seemed - and still seem to many - to be insignificant compared to the effectiveness with which that system defined matters of faith for children, established understandable criteria for receiving the sacraments, and processed and recorded the dispensation of sacraments to countless thousands of Catholics.

Winds of change

But irreversible change swirled through the 1960s. Among myriad other things, the Second Vatican Council set forth official teaching on the role of the layperson in the world. In the "Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity" and other council documents, an awareness and sensitivity to the adult lay-Christian vocation in the world revealed itself in a call for education and training that would genuinely prepare people to live a sacramental life in a secular world. The church as the People of God was defined in a revitalizing way, but one that swept away forever the simplicity and clarity of old sacramental-preparation programs.

The council pulled no punches. Laypeople were to assume their rightful place as active, responsible members of Christ's church, infusing the marketplace and the world with faith, hope, and love, "according to the gift that each has received..." Since the spiritual force of sacrament was central to the Catholic Christian concept of the People of God, the council ushered in an era of rewriting the sacramental preparation script.

But the efficiency of the old system had fostered a certain mind-set about sacramental-preparation programs among many American Catholics, a mind-set that was not readily dismissed. Bucking 400 years of tradition and shifting the emphasis of sacramental celebration from the school and the student, for instance, to an adult and family-centered parish program and developing practical educational tools for adults proved to be difficult.

During the first stage of the transition in the 1970s, an entire generation of American Catholics endured a range of experimental programs. As one woman says with a wry smile, "At my parish, we made banners and tablecloths."

Those tentative efforts to search out the meaning of sacramental faith among contemporary lay lay Catholics clashed head-on with the overriding expectations that were less than sublime among adults influenced in large part by the workings of an American immigrant church. Parents were accustomed to "buying you an outfit and dressing you up," says an educator, and they still don't take kindly to being asked to go to class.

"I pay my tuition; you get them ready" is a classic attitude of parents whose children attend Catholic school, says Janet Schaeffler, director of religious education at St. Paul Parish in Grosse Point Farms, Michigan. The misguided notion that parents may have that they can pay for "someone else to make their kids Catholic" is, she says, a typically American response and a resistance to a more integrated approach to the workings of sacrament in individual and family life.

At another point on the cultural spectrum, many members of a growing Hispanic American can Catholic population bring a different experience and perspective to sacramental preparation programs.

In the Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, Teresa Sotos, director of the office for Hispanic ministry, meets many families who eke out a living at migrant farm labor, traveling with the crops throughout the South and Southeast. With work seasonal, life lived on the road, and access to church programs and schedules minimal, faith is something that is lived out in the family or not at all, Sotos says.

Like Hispanic Catholics who participated in the 1993 "Study of Religious Reading Needs Among U.S. Hispanic Catholics," which included more than 1,200 interviews, the families that Sotos sees have a strong commitment to pass along their religious and moral values to their children. At the same time, they place less emphasis on the practice of religion through weekly Mass attendance than those typical American Catholics who grew up in the cities, suburbs, and parochial-school systems.

"When the workers arrived late in the fall," Sotos says, "the mother of an 11-year-old girl who was bilingual asked if her daughter could join the children in the English-speaking class that was preparing for Eucharist. She was told it was too late. The class had already started.

"When they're told that their children must attend religious-education programs for two years before receiving the Eucharist," Sotos says, "they become angry."

The study of Hispanic Catholics indicated that Hispanics are less involved with the church in the United States than they were in their countries of origin. They also expressed significant dissatisfaction with the money and time that the local parish requires from them to receive the major sacraments.

Hispanic tradition, Sotos says, evolves from an experience much different from that of its American counterpart. Hispanic families often belonged to rural parishes where a priest made his way only infrequently, so education programs were unheard of and the reverence of sacrament survived within family and social circles rather than within educational parish settings.

"Where I come from," says Alvaro Davila, former associate director of lay ministry for the Archdiocese of Chicago, "it is the family that makes a [sacramental] celebration. The family defines how the celebration takes place and what goes on. Every member of the family participates."

It's contrary to the American way, Davila says, where the parish priest schedules the dispensation of sacraments and expects families to work around the parish schedule. "Imagine telling the priest that your aunts, uncles, and cousins are going to be in town on a certain date and you'd like to celebrate the Baptism of your child then," he says. "If he's locked into a calendar, he misses the whole point of the celebration."

Davila would do away with sacramental preparation programs and enable the community to do what only communities of people who have a commitment to the community's well-being can do.

"If it's a requirement, it's a requirement," he says, "not preparation. People will see it for what it really is and do what they must."

Davila's programs are grounded in the wisdom that it's within the circle of our most important relationships that we begin to sense what sacrament is and the strength that it imparts to human relationships.

Participants in the Confirmation program at his parish must be at least 15, and they must make a commitment to the program.

"Their parents can't do it for them," Davila says. "We average 70 young people a year committing themselves to a two-year preparation program."

Over the course of the program, Davila explains, several things happen. The program becomes an anchor and a family for teens, many of whom were raised on the streets of the inner city and who sometimes have only tenuous connections to a biological family. "In our meetings, people are relieved to talk about themselves. When you listen to worries, hopes, fears - this is what Baptism is about, taking the risk of life, the opportunities to make a difference."

For Davila, sacrament is bound up with loving, respectful relationships where people can discover something about themselves and each other. "One of the boys in our last class told us that being in the group helped him understand what it is to be `minority.' He's white, and he began to realize how he categorized people and how he separated himself from those who are `different.'"

But, more important, Davila says, is that the boy recognized that he hadn't figured this out on his own. In a human encounter, the boy glimpsed spiritual values. "That's what sacrament is about. Outside of relationship, you have only ritual without meaning."

Making the grade

Examples abound of parish and diocesan sites where there's a wide gap between what sacrament should be and what it is.

"I've had people tell me they were denied Baptism or Matrimony to a family member because they hadn't made weekly financial contributions for six months," says Catherine Paul, pastoral associate at a large, multicultural city parish in Michigan.

"I can show you a diocese in the Southwest that encompasses a huge reservation but makes no effort to sponsor sacramental-preparation programs that include Native Americans," says Sister Kay Sheskaitis, I.H.M., executive director of the United States Catholic Conference Commission on Certification and Accreditation.

"Unfortunately I know of priests who expect a couple to be a combination of Mother Teresa and Saint Paul before they'll marry them," says Msgr. John Wolsey, who oversees marriage preparation in the Archdiocese of New York. "If their requirements were applied to all the sacraments, these men would never have made it to ordination."

In many instances, of course, priests are only following forms that they've been taught. "We created a form of sacramental preparation that is very sophisticated," says Father Thomas Faucher of McCall, Idaho, currently a student of canon law at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. In doing so, however, emphasis falls on preparation. We quickly forget that the "value lies not in preparation, but in sacrament."

Fortunately, Faucher adds, the clerical church doesn't need to take full responsibility for educating lay adults to practice and demonstrate mature sacramental faith. "On the level of lived experience of church," he says, "the church is very healthy and very orthodox. The sacraments are being increasingly seen as a reality that belongs to the people of the church, not to the clergy. When I was a child, we learned about the sacraments from Father and from Sister. Today, children must learn about sacrament within family and community."

In parish after parish, people are coming to that realization, and the struggle is continuous to give substance to sacramental preparation within the context of family experience and community celebration.

In the Saginaw diocese in Michigan, 10 percent of the parishes are now managed by lay administrators and only visited by priests. In informal meetings in living rooms, says one pastoral administrator, Nancy Ayotte, parents are talking to each other about what it means to raise their children in the faith and about how the community works together to pass on values.

"The answers are within the hearts of the people," she says. "They just need a structure to share them. What people want more than classes is to know if life is meaningful."

That understanding is growing. In the Diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which recently initiated a new family-centered program, Joyce Kelleher, director of the office of initiation and spiritual formation, talks about what preparation for the sacrament of Matrimony means in her own family.

"When our daughter got engaged, I didn't give her fiance a book about the family - the idiosyncrasies, the skeletons, the birthdays," she says. "We invited him to dinner. Little by little, by being with us, he learned and we learned. It becomes a sacramental thing. We become members of each other's families by being with them, not by passing a test."

At St. Joseph Parish in Sylvania, Ohio, pastoral associate Susan Mahalik says that sacramental-preparation programs "don't rag on adults about rules." When the class meets for the first time, Mahalik says, there may be a reluctance to talk about scripture, so she begins. The gospel passages, which are the starting point for discussion, speak of Jesus, asleep on a boat during a violent storm. "I turn that around and ask about the 'storm of violence' that we see around us today. Is Jesus asleep? Are we frightened?"

In Catherine Paul's city parish, which encompasses welfare recipients and business owners alike, the sacra-mental-preparation programs are geared to make "big, wide exceptions." In a recent issue of the newsletter Overview: A Continuing Survey of Issues Affecting Catholics, Faucher says that the "poor do not fit into the middle-class categories the church has created. They are poor financially, socially, educationally and lack stability. They are the modern poor with many marriages, kids by different partners, fuzzy relationships, and no schedules." Their response to structured programs isn't always positive.

"We have a pastor and two lay administrators," says Paul, "so we're able to do the kind of one-on-one work that is often necessary." This, she says, is especially important when working with people who may not be used to making a commitment to carry on past the first meeting.

"We can bend t6 where they are," Paul says, while somehow conveying the value of participating.

"If they haven't learned how to follow a schedule and prioritize, we can be flexible. But another part of me says we do them no favor if we don't call them to make an effort. If parents tell us they can't attend a class at 9 a.m. on Sunday, we ask the group to choose another time. In the group, people listen to each other describe the demands made on their time all week. They usually conclude that getting here at 9 a.m. on Sunday might be the best alternative."

Can sacramental preparation be as free and open-ended as some of the newest programs seem to suggest? Kelleher, one of a handful of women to earn a master's degree in theology from St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, insists that sacrament "is a free gift of God. `Knowledge-based' sacramental preparation is heresy. Theologically speaking, you can't know enough, especially to receive the Eucharist. You can't earn it by going to class."

Why, then, impose requirements and guidelines - which is done in even the most free-flowing programs? Are guidelines a throwback to the way that worked for our parents and that too many of us don't want to dismiss, despite the pain and anger that they cause in an increasingly diverse society?

Take responsibility

The key ingredient of any program is basic human dignity, Davila says. Teachers bring to sacramental-preparation programs their fear that they don't know enough, but he has learned that "you don't need to be afraid of not knowing." To educate in the fullest sense, he says, we simply enrich each other's life by sharing the truth that each member of the community holds.

While Kelleher rejects the notion of book-based sacramental preparation, she maintains that the church does owe its members opportunities to prepare.

"Sacrament isn't a magic act," she says. "It's a commitment to the community of the church. We owe it to' each other to explore what that means. The family dimension is critical because it's in the family that children see what commitment means. We can't herd people through programs.

"We are expecting more from people than they ever thought we would expect. They might feel let down or abandoned by a system that they thought would take care of their kids in a way that I don't do. There may be hostility and a what-are-you-going-to-make-me-do? attitude.

"We are asking people to take responsibility for themselves as Christians in a world that's not hearing the Good News. And the parish must be available, it must be adequate to the task of helping people to take that responsibility."

In Doors to the Sacred, A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Doubleday, 1982), Joseph Martos reminds us that "sacramental religious experience is a genuine human experience. It is not an aberration or distortion of consciousness which somehow removes one from reality."

For the migrant worker's child, the Catholic-school student's parent, the single mother who sells newspapers after Mass to earn a few extra dollars, and to the master of canon law, sacrament, says Martos, is as real as what we fear and as important as what we love. If it's that real and that important, it may not fit into a program. But it won't go out of style.

Sensitivity keeps Catholics in the fold

How many of the estimated 15 million U.S. Catholics who are alienated from the church were driven to depart over differences with pastors over sacramental preparation? One North Carolina man, who prefers not to be identified, reports that he was asked to resign from the diaconate in his parish when his teenage daughter chose not to participate in a Confirmation-preparation program.

A Pittsburgh couple - one of many to tell the tale - were refused the sacrament of Matrimony because the woman was pregnant. "The priest didn't believe the marriage would survive, so he wouldn't marry us, says the woman who is celebrating the fifth anniversary of her wedding in another denomination's church.

In rural Pennsylvania, says another woman, a fearful priest refused to come to her home and anoint her husband, who had suddenly fallen gravely ill and who died a few days later.

The above incidents, related by Hispanic, African American, and Anglo individuals, demonstrate the democratic quality of insensitivity though ignorance in some clerical circles about minority cultures seem, according to some polls, to exacerbate already tenuous relationships.

Refusing to defend or ignore ignorance or insensitivity in his own diocese, Bishop John McCarthy of Austin, Texas issued a five-page directive to all "brother priests, deacons, lay ministers and parish support staff."

In his letter, McCarthy asks for reflection on the "growing gulf between `active' catholics who participate in the structures of the parish and `nominal' Catholics who tend to feel more and more alienated." He asks, "When educational and formational programs are presented as unconditional and legalistic demands, should we be amazed that people see them as merely going through the hoops?"

McCarthy issues a challenge: Are we making policies to enforce our personal preferences and protect our personal convenience" rather than fulfilling the duty to the baptized person who has the radical right to receive the sacraments of the Church?"

"Why, when `nominal' Catholics approach the parish for the sacraments, is this situation treated as a `problem' rather than as an `opportunity for evangelization?'" McCarthy asks.

McCarthy insists that all parish secretaries be sensitive about the bridge they build or break between priests and callers. "The secretarial role is to facilitate communication, not to be a dam or a wall," responding to cold calls with a list of demands and requirements.

Nor does McCarthy hold with those who insist they are "protecting the sacraments" from those judged "not worthy." "This attitude is quite different from the attitude of the Good Shepherd who searches for the stray and cares for them."

McCarthy criticizes pastoral policies and practices that are stricter than the church itself. "Some clergy don't distinguish between policy and law. Pastors can't make laws," he says. "Those are made by the National Council of Catholic Bishops and by the universal church.

Any requirement should be interpreted in a relaxed manner. Tensions can be reconciled. You use horse sense and be kind to people."

Are catechists prepared to teach?

"I was going through a very idealistic stage, I guess," the woman said with a sigh. "I considered myself relatively bright, educated, comfortable, and I wanted to help. I had a deep faith and a lot of interest in helping young people grow in their own faith. So I volunteered to teach in the parish Confirmation program for junior-high students who attended public school. They came to the parish center on Sunday morning for class."

The parish took the woman's name but the next contact with the program didn't come until several months later when the program director called on a Saturday evening and asked if she could full in the next morning for one of the regulars.

"I entered that classroom full of energy and enthusiasm and that was about all I was equipped with," she remembers. "I was met by that stone wall of silence and apathy that substitute teachers tell me they deal with every time they walk into a classroom. After a half hour, I was on the brink of tears and stepped outside the classroom to get myself under control. The program director was walking by and asked me what was wrong, and when I told her I was trying to stay on top of a difficult situation, she dismissed me and took over the class herself. I was devastated. I felt like an utter failure and haven't been back to help in a classroom since."

Unfortunately her experience is a common one. Marilyn Wisniewski, a catechist with 25 years of experience in parishes in several states, is working in a parish near Pittsburgh to redesign sacramental preparation for junior-high students who are preparing for Confirmation. She says that teacher preparation is the point at which sacramental-preparation programs break down and the point where the church could do much more than it does. "The fact that we have so many poorly trained teachers is related directly to the poor expectations that laity have for sacramental-preparation programs."

"It always boils down to money," she says. When budgets are figured, sacramental preparation for those not enrolled in the parish school gets what's left over. Diocesan certification programs address only part of the problem, she says. "They cover about 30 topics, and they help in the beginning. But in the classroom, you need a practical, how-to bag of tricks, not high theology. You need to know what happens in a classroom and you need activities designed to reinforce what you're talking about. In one parish where I taught, there was nothing. They handed me a book and said, `See you at the end of the year.'"

Wisniewski took the problem to the pastor. "He was miffed," she says, and he refused to assign resources because he thought parents should send their kids to the parish school where they'd get all the preparation for sacraments that they needed.

"If you want to have a good program, you must hire qualified people and pay them. You can't just throw a few bucks at someone and ask them to 'do the best you can.' Pastors have to see that," Wisniewski says.

If sacramental-preparation programs for public-school children are given short shrift in many parishes, what is the situation with adult education? Pretty bleak, says Beatrice Adler, who works primarily with Hispanic couples in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan who are preparing for marriage.

To begin with, "people don't expect to be taught anything. They think they know everything," she says. This she accepts as normal. Adler's frustration is with the church. "I don't improvise for the college classes that I teach. Why would I do that here? But the church doesn't give much importance to teacher training. We don't have enough people to do it. Many aren't well prepared and some are incompetent."

"The church has a problem recognizing leadership among laypeople, and we'll not see change for the next five years," says Alvaro Davila, former associate director of lay ministry in the Archodiocese of Chicago.

Davila chalks up the situation to a lack of imagination and creativity in the church, a competitive attitude among clergy toward a laity that is increasingly capable of leadership in the church, and a lack of understanding of ministry and education. "Ministry is not a job. It's about living with people, not doing for them. And education is about enriching each other's lives, enjoying the privilege of listening to each other, discovering the truth that resides in the community," rather than guidelines that are enforced and classes that are required.

"I want more, but more will come," says Sister Mary Catherine Hamilton, I.H.M., who is working with the Murray Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota to create a national model for addressing educational issues in the church. "This is a key moment. There is a growing awareness that our future depends on the preparation of the people who minister."

Training is not merely an academic issue nor does it point to a lack of resources, she says. "It means dialogue among dioceses. It means creating a network for sharing and strengthening resources. We are parochial. We'd rather die than reach beyond our own diocese. But those are artificial boundaries that we have to get rid of in order to connect people."