Children enjoy their Confirmation day in Ballyroan parish in Rathfarnham, Dublin, at the Church of the Holy Spirit. Frank Browne
Many of our parishes across the country have been busy undertaking Confirmation ceremonies for all those young people who have been waiting for up to two years. Our parish ministry team in Ballyroan thought about how we could make the sacramental preparation meetings and ceremonies both meaningful and an enjoyable experience for our young people and their families.
To our delight over 90% of families responded positively”
We realised that we would have little or no input from our primary schools other than a contact email address, as these young people had moved on to secondary schools. So, for the first time, it really was up to our parish team to prepare our young people as best we could, while we realised that the majority may not have been to Mass or even inside our church since the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
Our parish secretary Mary McDade sent emails to over 200 families inviting them to acknowledge if they would like their children to be confirmed now that the Government restrictions were lifted. To our delight over 90% of families responded positively.
Some people outside of the parish team suggested a large outdoor ceremony where all 200 plus children could be confirmed within a simple ceremony, others suggested having two short ceremonies within our church and get the ceremonies completed quickly and then move on to the children waiting for Holy Communion.
Led by our parish priest Fr Michael Murtagh, we agreed that we wanted to have a series of preparation meetings with no more than 50 young people and their families present. We wanted to organise a preparation event that would have both parents and young people together, one that would include an opportunity for the parents of the young people to share their own experience of their Confirmation day. We also wanted to have a faith development element that included an understanding of why the Church celebrates the Sacrament of Confirmation but most importantly we wanted a prayer experience for all present.
Commitment
During each of our four preparation evenings we had prepared reading material for everyone in the audience to borrow a well-known phrase. Firstly, a Confirmation commitment certificate, asking our young people to commit to trying to pray each day and attend Sunday Mass, secondly, the Confirmation card with all the required information for our Confirmation register and finally the booklet ‘Your Child’s Confirmation’, published by Redemptorists Communications.
We took time to highlight the important parts of the Confirmation booklet such as the history behind the ceremony of Confirmation and explained that all the three special ceremonies of Baptism, Eucharist (or Holy Communion) and Confirmation are part of an initiation or journey to becoming a Christian within our faith community.
We told the young people that while we cannot see God, we can experience God’s presence at special moments in our life and we use signs or symbols called sacraments to acknowledge this. At Confirmation we are asking the Holy Spirit to be part of our lives. We also used the booklet to offer suggestions for prayers and a way for our young people to pray with some of readings from the New Testament about the life of Jesus and his message of love and forgiveness. We explained that praying is being open, from our heart or emotions to having a relationship with God, taking a moment of silence, asking the Holy Spirit to be with us, to guide us, to love us, so we can place ourselves in a position to experience God’s presence.
We used the opportunity to recruit some wonderful young people who have now become regular readers at our Sunday Mass”
The most important moment during our preparation evening was when we had a few minutes of silence after we heard the famous story from the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2:1-13, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the terrified disciples of Jesus, who were lost without him. You could hear a pin drop as the Taizé music ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus- Come Holy Spirit’ was played. We really wanted to convey to our young people that the experience of the Holy Spirit changed Jesus’s life at his Baptism by John. It was then that Jesus began his wandering ministry that would change the lives of many and the course of history. The Holy Spirit changed the lives of the early followers of Jesus after he had been executed, when they too experienced the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and this gave rise to our Christian Church community.
Confirmation ceremony
Finally, we asked for volunteers to read the Scripture readings and prayers of the Faithful at the at the Confirmation ceremony and we arranged a practice evening for those who volunteered. We used the opportunity to recruit some wonderful young people who have now become regular readers at our Sunday Mass.
All our Confirmation ceremonies were an enjoyable, meaningful, and prayerful experience for those who attended and Fr Michael’s last words to all our young people were that “Christ needs your youth so that his message will never grow old”.