Chai Brady
Kurtis Hemphill receives the Sacraments after
completing the RCIA programme this year. For many young people, a journey of doubt leads them to the Church, writes Chai Brady
Despite the decrease in Mass attendance across western Europe and fewer young people engaging with religion, there are still those who feel the call of the Church in later life and decide to wholeheartedly engage with the Catholic Faith.
The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is a process that allows people to learn about and potentially convert to Catholicism. Kurtis Hemphill (23) and Jack Smith (20) took part in the process in Belfast, they completed it this year and received the sacraments.
Both come from very different backgrounds but, like many others, went on the same journey, discovering more about their faith and what it means to be Catholic.
Kurtis, brought up Presbyterian in Antrim, was actively engaged in his Protestant faith, even studying to become a minister. Speaking to The Irish Catholic, he says: “I was planning to go into the ministry so I was reading up on theology and scriptural studies more because if I was preaching things it was more important that I had a better grasp of what I was talking about.
“So essentially by going down the road of trying to have a better grasp and a better understanding of Presbyterian, or Protestant, doctrine, I started to have a few little niggles in my brain about various aspects of the doctrine which I had previously thought was very solid but then was beginning to have second thoughts.”
The second thoughts he was having about his faith “alarmed” him, over a period of a few weeks Kurtis began thinking about his doubts daily. These revolved around some fundamental doctrinal differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.
He says: “It made me feel, if we’re wrong, if Protestants are wrong on these things, this changes everything. There are so many other doctrines that are built upon these really fundamental ones. So I essentially was moved over to Catholicism through trying to have a better understanding of Protestant doctrine.”
Doubts
Kurtis raised his doubts to authorities in the Presbyterian church and had several meetings, but none changed how he was feeling. It came down to one day, when he went to a minister’s house to “give it one last go”. After that meeting his mind was made up and he felt he had to change his faith.
“There were maybe three major things in particular,” he explains, “the very first one that started to niggle at me was the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, the Bible alone being the ultimate authority on the faith and that was the very first one because I remember thinking I felt personally that I could give stronger scriptural proofs and things and arguments for sort of more secondary Protestant doctrines, things like predestination or whatever, than I could for things like sola scriptura, and it really occurred to me: I thought that we’re wrong about sola scriptura, it’s not solely the Bible that has the ultimate authority on faith and practice and there’s so many other things we believe in because we believe sola scriptura.
“That was the first one, after that I’d probably say it was sola fide, or justification by grace through faith alone. Looking more into what the Bible had to say about that I began to feel that maybe you’re not justified by grace through faith alone, but through faith and works.
“Even with those two I kind of thought well, you could not believe those two and don’t necessarily have to be a Catholic, you could be an orthodox Christian. But then the real nail in the coffin there that made me think it must be Catholicism is the primacy of Peter and that Christ instituted the Church of Rome and that is the one true Church.
“Therefore with those three things together I came to the conclusion it’s not possible for me to be a Protestant anymore because I’ve actually unravelled so many things that I believed, so many things that I have preached myself in sermons.”
Kurtis went to see Fr James O’Reilly in Antrim parish, who told him about the RCIA which put him on the road to conversion. During his time in the RCIA programme, Kurtis says he never felt any pressure to become Catholic during the discernment process, but everyone who did it with him ended up receiving the sacraments.
“There’s no pressure on someone that once you start the programme you must follow it through to completion and you must get Confirmed,” Kurtis says, “it was a very friendly and helpful environment in that sense because there’s no pressure on you.
“It was the same in the classes themselves, you were perfectly welcome to ask questions and to contribute, but you were not expected to, no one was forcing you to give answers or no one was forcing you to say things if you didn’t feel comfortable giving your opinion or whatever.
“We came from a lot of different backgrounds, different ages, we came from different churches or maybe no churches beforehand and we did all get on quite well together and you sort of became a nice little family group whilst you’re all moving through the process together.”
From Kurtis’s experience, there are still a lot of young people interested and involved in religious practices, both when he was Presbyterian and now in Catholicism. There were many people his age that went to church, although not all of them would have been Presbyterian, they were actively engaged in their faith.
Speaking of his friends he said: “All were active in different activities the Church had then. Now that I have converted to Catholicism, I’ve been to a few of the different events run by Youth 2000 and I see in Youth 2000 there are loads of people my age, in their 20s and early 30s, that are still very actively involved in their faith so I would say it does seem like there are lots of young people that are willing to express their faith and want to follow and glorify God.”
Although Kurtis is from Antrim, he spent four years in Cork studying for his degree. He noticed there was a significant difference in the number of people who had active faith lives compared to his class in school. He says there was only one other person who would attend church regularly, “so that was a bit surprising”.
Schools
From his times in schools, he says: “I’d gone from all Christian and we all went to church and we all did various activities and we all had a strong faith, to then in university it being far fewer people that were of that mindset”.
The need for Christian Churches to work together is more important than ever, according to Kurtis, who says: “We definitely need to be working together because certainly in western Europe we are on the decline, Mass attendance is going down, service attendance is going down… the general influence of Christian thought is on the decline in the political and social spectrum.
“More than ever I think we need to work together, yes we may have differences, but we have many commonalities.”
Despite the change in faith Kurtis’s parents were very supportive, although they were initially quite shocked. Now, he says, he’s got use to Mass as well as many other differences in worship and would feel comfortable in any Catholic Church.
For Jack Smith, who had been Baptised when he was younger but had never received the other sacraments, it is an entirely different story.
Raised in England and born in Donegal, Jack now goes to university in Belfast. In England, he says, Communion and Confirmation preparation didn’t happen in his school and it was only when he returned to Ireland that he felt it was something he needed to rectify.
Growing up
He says: “It was something growing up that I was aware I hadn’t done, but obviously again being over in England it was something I was aware I hadn’t done but I also wasn’t really in a position or a place where I would carry out with it.
“Then when I came back to Ireland the opportunity was there, the environment was there. Again growing up, whenever we were in Ireland going to Mass was just a regular normal thing but that same practice wasn’t in England so it was more time and place all fell into one category.”
The RCIA process for him was “fantastic”, with Jack saying he got a real insight into what his faith and the Church.
Young people are still interested in religion, he attests, “a lot of my friends of my friends would regularly attend Mass, a lot of my friends who are Catholic do regularly attend Mass and I have a few that come with me every now and then”.
“Your parents are no longer telling you to go or not, it’s really down to you. So the people that are up in Belfast, at Queens, those that are going are going by choice, my mother and father never told me to start going when I came back. It was something I did myself and I know a lot of my friends they do it themselves, they’re at that stage now that if they do go home they don’t have to go with their parents but they still do. Because I think it part of the family day, for a lot of families it is a family morning.”
Jack received his First Communion and Confirmation in September of this year, after engaging in a more informal RCIA process with Fr Martin Graham, the administrator of St Peter’s Cathedral in Belfast.
In the last five years 77 people have gone through the official RCIA process in the cathedral. So far in 2020, 12 people completed the process, compared to 16 in 2019, 18 in 2018 and 22 in 2017. Just six completed it in 2016. The numbers dipped slightly this year compared the previous four years due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Fr Graham believes more people are opting to do the course in their parish instead.
“Those figures are literally just for those who went through the official RCIA it doesn’t include all of those who were received over the year, it would definitely be twice that number,” he tells this paper.
“There’s probably almost as many again who would have been privately instructed in their parishes.”
Fr Graham says that there are many other young people who decide to take on the RCIA as they are looking for answers to difficult questions, all of which he says he’s been able to answer.
“Modern culture will try to dismiss religion full stop, that’s the big thing. One of the issues that I’ve always seen is people talk about kids – kids don’t like to be lectured they never did – so whenever they’re learning RE in school, it’s a subject, it’s something to learn but as they get older maturity kicks in, plus they it might also be the case of where they see family members begin to die and it causes them to start re-evaluating things in their own lives and they begin to have a more mature understanding and they begin to start asking questions,” he says.
Process
“That’s the one thing I say to anyone I take through the process, never stop asking questions. One thing that I’ve found is there’s never been a question I’ve been asked that I haven’t been able to find an answer to, I mightn’t have the answer straight away but Catholicism is a reasonable faith. We can find a reason for what we believe.”
While there’s much to learn within the teaching of the Church, many young people are looking to discuss and get to the heart of issues that they are currently grappling with.
Fr Graham says: “I suppose in the different circumstances that I’ve come across with young people in RCIA they will ask questions that are relevant to them whereas there’s a lot of the Faith that probably doesn’t, if we’re discussing the Immaculate Conception – well that doesn’t really impact on the day to day life of a person.
“Whenever we start talking about death, or another one that has come up with me with people I know is abortion, divorce, remarriage, there are so many things. They are questions that are personal to them at that time and they’re looking for an answer.”
Discerning whether to become part of a faith that may be alien and seem strange to those who have no past experience – even within the other Christian traditions – is a big step but to this day men and women, young and old, of all ethnicities, sexualities and more decide it is the right one. Although people decide to go on the RCIA journey for a plethora of reasons and from a host of different backgrounds, in the end, they are welcomed into the Catholic family with open arms.