During a retreat with a group of students in their last year of high school, a girl, Simona [author’s note: this name and all others changed to respect privacy] who has been part of our group for young people for many years, approached me and said: “I want to tell you something that I have never had the courage to say: I actually have never been baptized.” She was full of shame and perhaps was fearing a strong reaction from me. She was thinking that I would have gotten angry. “Why did you not tell me earlier, given that you have been with us for four years?” I responded immediately. In the meanwhile, I began to think of all of the times that I had seen her sing at Mass, during our retreats, or times I had seen her praying and doing silence. “I was scared to tell you, I felt different. Now that I am about to finish high school, I understand that something different that I found here with you all is God Himself who is calling me. I want to be baptised so I can be even more a part of this community.”
Simona was then added to Enzo, who was invited to our meetings by a friend and has participated with interest and curiosity for two years. Enzo too spoke to me in private, asking to receive baptism, after our catechesis on Jesus. He was convinced when he heard one of us say: “And if instead of reasoning as if God did not exist, we began to reason as if He was present? And if behind everything that happens to us, instead of chance, it was He who was speaking?”.
And so, Enzo and Simona were added to three other young people who already the year before had begun to ask for a path to enter to become part of the Church. The motives that brought them there were all different. One of them, finding love for his girlfriend, also discovered the love of God for his life; another was in search of inner peace, and since he began to pray, he has experienced it. Soon he will get married to his partner and already asked for baptism for the son they are expecting. Another felt the need to approach the Church to find meaning before the evil that has struck her life. They are all young, under thirty years old. During the summer, we spoke with other of our brothers in the Fraternity and we were struck: five catechumens is not something you find everyday. But perhaps the Lord wants to make us participants in something new.
Five catechumens: perhaps the Lord wants to make us participants in something new.
During these episodes, in fact, we received a series of request, one after the other: one email from a foreign girl who, entering our church, understood that God was calling her and asking her to begin a path; one of our parishioners then presented us with a young man who was his student and was entrusting him to us; a storeowner of the neighborhood who knocked on the door of our home and asked: “What do I need to do to receive baptism?”. Finally, a young girl from abroad whose heart the Lord had touched years earlier but who, due to discrimination in her country of origin, was never able to receive baptism. She came to the church after Mass to ask to take up again the spiritual path that had been interrupted.
Nine catechumens in one year, and the last six in just a few months. All of these stories, here just hinted at for reasons of discretion, have had in common one word: calling. The persons told us that they felt called by God, fascinated by a word, by an encounter, by an internal experience. They turned to the Church, to be accompanied. Did it not happen this way as well in the times of Jessu of Nazareth? Is it not this way also today, among us who are members of His Body? Christ continues to touch hearts, it is He who is the true missionary who calls people to Himself. Christ calls us, He continues to do so, every day, at times, in an imperceptible way. He calls us to follow Him and to remain with Him. And He asks us to live this experience of following with the entire Church, with the brothers He has placed beside us.
