Full text of DOI:10.1525/si.2002.25.3.289

Spiritual Gatekeepers: Time and the Rite
of Christian Initiation of Adults
Michael J. McCallion
David R. Maines
Oakland University
This article addresses the process of initiation into the Catholic Church by
analyzing in-depth interviews with parish-based professional initiation
coordinators. The formal title given to this process of initiation by the
Church since Vatican II is the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA).
Since the RCIA’s promulgation, the Church has hired a host of lay and reli-
gious professionals to coordinate its implementation at the parish level.
Our analysis focuses on the temporal sequencing and the problem of dura-
tion of initiation. The data show that both city and suburban coordinators
adapted the Church’s mandated length of time for initiation in different
ways as they negotiated covenantal and contractual social relations among
RCIA participants.
Status passages, as Glaser and Strauss (1968, 1971) analyzed so well, “take time” in
at least two ways: they require duration because they are processes rather than
events, and persons involved in the passages must attend to time as a social object.
Accordingly, we can conceptualize status passages generically as temporal activities
designed to transform persons undergoing movement from one status to another.
In some instances, a status passage involves the formal participation of a
“
coach,” or “someone [who] seeks to move someone else along a series of steps”
(
Strauss 1969:112). Our analysis focuses on the activities of one type of coach who
works to move people through a series of rituals designed to transform non-Catholic
adults into Catholics. The set of rituals is known as the Rite of Christian Initiation
of Adults (RCIA), and the coaches are parish-level professionals known as RCIA
coordinators who in many ways function as spiritual gatekeepers. In the course of
conducting our study, we discovered early on that these coordinators inevitably
faced a problem of time—how to organize, deŽne, and coordinate the duration of
event sequences for those going through the RCIA.
Direct all correspondenceto David R. Maines, DepartmentSociology/Anthropology,Oakland University,
Rochester, MI 48309; e-mail: maines@oakland.edu.
Symbolic Interaction,Volume 25, Number 3, pages 289–302, ISSN 0195-6086; online ISSN 1533-8665.
©
2002 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press,
Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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Symbolic Interaction Volume 25, Number 3, 2002
THE STRUCTURE OF THE INITIATION
The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is an initiation process of some duration
designed for adults who want to become Catholic, and thus it is an initiation process
into a particular group. As the introduction to the RCIA guidelines states:
The rite of Christian initiation presented here is designed for adults who, after
hearing the mystery of Christ proclaimed, consciously and freely seek the liv-
ing God and enter the way of faith and conversion as the Holy Spirit opens
their hearts. By God’s help they will be strengthened spiritually during their
preparation and at the proper time will receive the sacraments (baptism,
conŽrmation, and eucharist at the same time) fruitfully. . . . This rite includes
not simply the celebration of the sacraments of baptism, conŽrmation [mem-
bership status], and eucharist [receiving communion], but also all the rites be-
longing to the catechumenate. Endorsed by the ancient practice of the Church,
a catechumenate [one period of initiation] that would be suited to contempo-
rary missionary activity in all regions was so widely requested that the Second
Vatican Council decreed its restoration, revision, and adaptation to local tradi-
tions. (RCIA 1988:3)
The Church understands this initiation as an ongoing process, rather than an in-
stantaneous event, that occurs in steps and allows candidates ample time to reect
on their experiences.As paragraph 4 of the introduction to the RCIA (1988) states,
“
[T]he initiation of catechumens takes place step by step in the midst of the com-
munity of faithful.” The RCIA, therefore, delineates several periods and steps
through which one must pass in order to be initiated into the Church. The periods
are as follows: (1) precatechumenate, (2) catechumenate, (3) enlightenment, and
(
4) mystagogia. The steps are (1) Rite of Acceptance into the Catechumenate, (2)
Rite of Election, and (3) Rites of Initiation (baptism, conŽrmation, eucharist—the
original sequence of initiation sacraments). These periods and steps constitute the
Church’s ofŽcial model of initiation. Each period intensiŽes the conversion process
and allows the initiate to discern his or her calling to faith. Each step in the process
involves a public liturgical ritual that takes place in the midst of the community,
1
publicly marking the initiate’s progress.
The RCIA is formally regarded as a kind of sacred temporal order involving con-
venantal relations (Bromley and Busching 1988) designed to produce either iden-
tity conversions or alternations, in Travisano’s (1981) terms, depending on the prior
religious faith of the person involved.The primary metaphor of the RCIA is that of
a journey, with the stages representing points of passage along its course and the
destination being a new Catholic who is able to experience and articulate the pres-
ence of Christ in the spiritual community. Considering this metaphor and the goal
of spiritual absorption, the Church has recognized the difŽculty in assessing
progress and movement through the RCIA. In 1974 the Church developed the min-
istry of the RCIA coordinator as a way to help guarantee the integrity of the RCIA.
These coordinators are in charge of implementing the RCIA at the parish level and
in interpreting and managing the periods and steps of the initiation process. As the

Spiritual Gatekeepers
291
RCIA is inherently a temporal phenomenon, the work of these coordinators ac-
cordingly entails dealing with the problematics of time.
Such problematics cut across a number of arenas of activity. Coordinators are re-
sponsible for scheduling the many and varied events of the RCIA in the context of
the liturgical year. These events need to be scheduled according to the overall par-
ish calendar, which at times can be difŽcult because the RCIA is not always a top
priority in many parishes. They must prepare and execute the major liturgical rites
of the RCIA, which involves organizing and choreographing the liturgical celebra-
tions. They also are educators.They must help a variety of associated people such as
priests, deacons, family members, and other parishioners to become aware of the
conversion process by describing and explaining the RCIA (Morris 1989). In short,
RCIA coordinators may well be regarded as “time workers” insofar as they se-
quence events, interpret the meaning of those events and how they are related to
one another, and monitor the movement of people through the steps and stages of
the RCIA as it unfolds.
In conceptualizing status passages and their temporal properties as activity, as
would Mead (1932), we focus our analysis on the relationships coordinators have
with RCIA participants and the contexts of those relationships. We describe below
the data and analytic categories for this analysis that establish the grounds for our
focus on suburban and city coordinators and on the negotiation processes found to
inhere in RCIA implementation.
METHODS AND DATA
We conducted forty-six, one-and-a-half-hour, taped interviews with RCIA coordi-
nators in the Detroit Archdiocese. At Žrst we attempted to draw a random sample
of coordinators; however, we soon changed to purposive sampling when we noticed
the importance of the geographic location of parishes—namely, whether they are in
cities or suburbs. Suburban coordinators, we discovered, were white, whereas city
coordinators were black or brown. These differences did not merely reect ecologi-
cal location; they also pertained to implementation strategies of the RCIA.
In comparing city and suburban coordinator data, several differences in overall
implementation strategies surfaced.At this point we began to construct social types
of coordinators based on the strategies they used to implement the RCIA.Two cod-
ing categories, RCIA text adherers and text adapters, became master categories for
identifying the various kinds of implementation strategies. Four basic social types of
coordinators emerged: (1) text adherers, or suburban coordinators who imple-
mented the RCIA according to the ritual book (for example, they maintained the
yearlong process of initiation as the text recommends); (2) text adapters, or city co-
ordinators who did not rely on the ritual book or adapted it radically (for example,
they found the yearlong process an obstacle to initiation); and two other social
types that steered a middle road, (3) moderate text adherers, or suburban coordina-
tors who adapted the rite when possible but nevertheless maintained a certain faith-

292
Symbolic Interaction Volume 25, Number 3, 2002
fulness to the ritual book (for example, they reduced the time line for initiation to
six to nine months), and (4) moderate text adapters, or city coordinators who had
little problem adapting the ritual text quite freely and broadly but realized, never-
theless, that certain aspects of the text were worth implementing at the parish level
(
for example, they maintained a one- to three-month time line for initiation).
About a quarter of the way through the interviews, we realized that suburban co-
ordinators implemented the RCIA more rigidly than did city coordinators. When
we investigated the coordinators’ backgrounds further, two very interesting factors
stood out. First, suburban coordinators had strong liturgical backgrounds, and sec-
ond, the social and communal context of the city differed radically from the per-
ceived individualistic suburban context. Combining a city coordinator with little li-
turgical background with a strong communal context, one Žnds extreme deviations
from the ritual book in terms of the implementation of the RCIA. And combining a
suburban coordinator with a strong liturgical background, along with the percep-
tion of suburbia as an individualistic context, one Žnds extreme embracement or
adherence to the ritual book as a means of implementation. Consequently, all text
adherers and moderate text adherers were suburban coordinators, and all text
adapters and moderate text adapters were city coordinators. Regardless of the so-
cial type, however, they all expressed concerns of one sort or another about the
time line for initiation. The distribution of these social types of RCIA coordinators
is shown in Table 1.
THE ECOLOGY OF THE RCIA
All of the RCIA coordinators we interviewed told stories of conicts over time; sto-
ries about not having enough time to implement the RCIA fully, time going too fast
during the initiation process, and conicting church and initiate calendars. We
found a basic difference, however, between suburban and city coordinators, which
we think of as the ecology of the RCIA. This difference turned on whether initiates
already held contractual or covenantal social relationships. Suburban coordinators
desired that initiates establish covenantal social relations during the initiation pro-
cess but dealt primarily with initiates embedded in contractual social relations. In
contrast, city coordinators faced initiates who were already embedded in covenan-
TABLE 1. RCIA Coordinator Social Types
Moderate
Text
Moderate
Text
Parish
Text
Text
Location
Adherer
Adapter
Adherer
Adapter
Total
Suburb
City
Total
15
0
15
0
13
13
10
0
10
0
8
8
25
21
46

Spiritual Gatekeepers
293
tal social relations. This critical difference in our understanding of the RCIA
emerged when city and suburban RCIA coordinators commented on or discussed
the idea of community and the temporal requirements of the RCIA.
Suburban Coordinators
Suburban coordinators generally took for granted that people wishing to join
their parishes were devoid of a sense of community (see Capps and Fenn 1992;
Hudnut-Beumler 1994). They grounded this assumption in part in their belief that
suburbia was individualistic and anomic. These coordinators regard Church theol-
ogy and ideology as communally oriented and as an institutional force capable of
countering individualism.Moreover, the RCIA is designed to initiate persons into a
communal, sacramental reality, not into cultural individualism. Given this commu-
nal void in suburbia, suburban coordinators perceived the RCIA as the means for
creating community and demarcating a crisp Catholic identity. The RCIA, they felt,
would be the antidote to a pervasive individualism they saw as generally rampant in
suburbia and particularly in their parishes.
Although coordinators blamed individualism for creating difŽculties in imple-
menting the RCIA, they especially blamed it for altering the temporal dimension of
the RCIA and thus the very essence of the initiation process. The following com-
ments about the RCIA’s temporal requirements reect the standard position of
many suburban coordinators:
Of course, the problem is with the people coming in.They are used to the school
year calendar and so they come in September and we accept them, but we sel-
dom get anyone like in January or May or something. So people are geared to
the secular school calendar, but we are introducing them to the Church, which is
on a liturgical calendar not the secular calendar. And so here is a major battle
between these calendars. How do you initiate them not only into the Church but
into the liturgical calendar’s rhythms. Indeed, I try to show them from the start
the liturgical calendar and our high seasons and the most important dates and
that they must schedule their calendars according to the liturgical calendar if
they want to be Catholic.You know I don’t say it like that, but that is the motive
or intent of what I am trying to say. The calendar represents the Catholic pat-
terns of behavior in some ways. These are the days we do things together, it has
this communal dimension to it and that is important to get across because of the
tremendous individualism we face as ministers. I mean many scholars working
in the Church have said that the number one problem we face as a Church is
American individualism and the calendar speaks of the communal dimension
and so I bring that out. It’s just that most don’t get it, but we keep trying.
This coordinator’s interpretation of parishioners and initiates “not getting it” as an
outcome of the anti-Catholic ideology of individualism serves as his rationale for
adhering to the yearlong RCIA process.
Another suburban coordinator, liturgically trained, believed in getting tougher
about initiation in terms of the liturgical year because individualism was causing
temporal problems for her and the Church.

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Symbolic Interaction Volume 25, Number 3, 2002
We have it set up so that people wishing to enter the Church can come in any
time, but most come in September and are baptized at Easter. Now we even end
up doing the catechumens because of the strong group process but not always.We
are beginning to get much tougher about this. I really shouldn’t say tougher. Not
tougher but more adamant about the liturgical year process especially given the
suburbs and the pervasive lack of community and the abundance of individualism.
Finally, several suburban coordinators believed the RCIA was the antidote or at
least a corrective to individualism.One suburban coordinator felt this strongly:
Right, the group process works. You know the interaction that occurs among the
members or the initiates is really what makes the RCIA work, I mean they be-
come like a little community and you want that because the RCIA is all about
community. That is, it is a communal process, or I should say it ultimately is
about being initiated into this community and so it is at bottom a communal ex-
perience versus a strictly individual experience.I mean you have to come to rec-
ognize Jesus in the community not just in your own individual heart although
that is very important. But anyway, if the personalities I guess click in the group
it can be a very powerful experience.I think sometimes that this is the Žrst com-
munity any of them have experienced outside their families. We live in such a
culture of individualism which tells us to stay busy and get ahead in the secular
world that we don’t have time to connect with other people to build community.
I mean I have a hard time just remaining in touch with my larger family. So I
think individualism has something to do with it and then they experience com-
munity and they say wow this is great and they really get to know one another
and to come to care for one another.
Another suburban coordinator believed as well in the potential of the RCIA to
curb individualism and induce a sense of community:
So yeah, the sharing,their getting to know one another, their sense they are becom-
ing a community, especially since many of them come from, you know, the suburbs
where there is very little community. Indeed, most Americans are highly individual-
istic and so this offers them a sense of community through the group process of
sharing and lectionary-basedcatechesis.They realize they are not alone, you know.
City Coordinators
Coordinators in city parishes did not assume that initiates or parishioners lacked
a sense of community or that individualism was surreptitiously eroding Church
community. Indeed, in the predominantly black and Hispanic parishes initiates
were really “already members” of the Church community insofar as they had been
parish members for many years. City initiates possessed “already membership sta-
tus,” in other words, but had not yet celebrated formal sacramental initiation. Con-
sequently, most city coordinators found the RCIA an obstacle to ritual initiation.
For example, a black coordinator illustrated this when he expressed a concern
about initiates being forced through “formal initiation”:
Many of the initiates come and they have been praying all their life.A number
of people were even participating at Mass, not going to Communion, I don’t

Spiritual Gatekeepers
295
think, but their children, some anyway, have gone to Catholic school, and they
have gone to church for many years, and so they have been participating at
Mass and many people think they are Catholic. And then something comes up
and like you go over the registration card and you Žnd out this person has
never been baptized and all they need is just an invitation to come in. But then
you look at the process of the RCIA that you have to form them in, you know
forming them in prayer and in the spirit and in the knowledge of scriptures.
But then I look and the people in my class had been doing scripture study,
they were acquainted with Old Testament, New Testament, prophets, gospels,
they knew the difference between them and everything, and so you just don’t
have to take them through that type of formal initiation. Because people have
been acquainted with it. The prayer Our Father they all knew, even the unbap-
tized ones. So, you know.
This coordinator refused to impose on initiates a yearlong process of initiation with
ongoing scriptural or lectionary-based catechesis when they were “already mem-
bers” in every conceivable way but institutional. Their sense of belonging legiti-
mized his allowing them to circumvent extensive initiatory ritualization.
Another city coordinator, a woman, spoke more directly about the predicament
she found herself in because of “already membership status”:
My experience in this city parish, actually situated in a neighborhood that is all
African American, is that the people coming in are from the neighborhood.
Also, they all come out of Christian traditions, you know. Mostly Baptist, one is
the Church of Christ. So as I gather together with them it is a whole different ex-
perience . . . . They are people coming to the church for some reason, usually be-
cause of someone in the neighborhood. And this year more than ever, Žve or six
people because of that.And so because of their Christian background they come
with a very rich tradition of scripture and so we do a different process than the
RCIA of sorts. . . . So because of their strong Christian background I hesitantly
approach them to ask them to receive the sacraments ofŽcially. It was out of
sorts because they had already become members in a way and so now to ask
them to do these rituals was strange kind of. So we decided not to wait till the
Easter Vigil and just initiate them now at the upcoming Sunday Mass. Because
their readiness to me was already there.And then there were several others too
who were in the same boat, you know, that is who were very active in the Church
before going through the RCIA. And so it is odd. I mean some of them are al-
ready receiving Communion and everything.
This coordinator referred twice to the oddness of her situation because of the insti-
tutional demands of the Church about the practice of initiation. Nevertheless, she
decided to bypass the Church’s requirement of going through a lengthy process of ini-
tiation and “ofŽcially” initiate them immediately. Later in the interview she seemed
to be at greater ease about her predicament:
You just learn to take what you need from the RCIA, and if you just need to do
the sacraments you just do the sacraments and in some other cases you can do a
lengthier thing, but even then it should not be too long because of their back-
grounds, their rich scriptural and Christian backgrounds. And this I just had to
learn and let go of stuff about the RCIA in the book.

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Symbolic Interaction Volume 25, Number 3, 2002
Clearly this coordinator saw the RCIA presented in the institutional book as an ob-
stacle to ritual initiation. Her deŽnition of the situation as coordinator evolved over
time and no doubt was Žlled with personal and pastoral struggles. But in the end,
she pastorally gave priority to the people over the ritual, a priority suburban coor-
dinators had greater difŽculty acknowledging.
Another city coordinator was direct about not following the RCIA because of
the already membership status because it causes a “sticky situation”:
I am supposed to tell you I am doing everything by the book, doing everything
right, but I am not going to lie. They are initiated at the Easter Vigil, but you
have to realize a lot of these people have been coming to this parish for years but
that doesn’t necessarily mean they are ofŽcially Catholic. But they already feel
that they are a part of it. So therefore you don’t want to break the, you don’t
want to separate them with classes or rituals because it is a sticky situation some-
times and so you don’t want to make that separation because they have already
been coming here. And it might be that someone will say to me you know that
this person has never been initiated in the Church or whatever and then I might
have a discussion with them and they’ll come forward. But they feel you know as
if they are a part of it [parish community]. So it is just a matter of doing some-
thing ofŽcial and often that is all we do. You know my dad went to a Catholic
church for as long as I can remember. I’m a cradle Catholic, but my father
wasn’t, yet he went to church every Sunday, he only got baptized when he was in
his sixties [laughing]. But he felt he was part of the parish, and I guess it was
something that was done to him when he entered a church in California—he
stopped going—and then until he came back here you know he was then bap-
tized because they made him feel that he wasn’t part of that California church.
And so I guess I am very sensitive and conscious of that fact and so I try to un-
derstand that and so I often overlook much of the RCIA.
Clearly she situates her ministerial priorities with the people and not with Church
RCIA policies.
Common to all of these RCIA coordinators as they confronted the situation of
already membership status was granting priority to the people over the ritual. In their
pastoral judgment, belonging to the community outweighed any ritual requirements,
even though they respected those requirements. Indeed, they still wanted people to
be sacramentally initiated, but they perceived the many preparation rituals as well
as the catechetical and scriptural requirements as obstacles to initiation and there-
fore adapted or simply dropped them. Nevertheless, all of the coordinators strug-
gled with this already membership status, on the one hand, and the RCIA’s ritual
requirements, on the other. In the end, however, their coaching methods gave
honor to the people and the people’s sense of social solidarity while simultaneously
diminishing the emphasis on the ritual requirements of the RCIA.
NEGOTIATION AND RATIONALITY
In turning our attention to how coordinators and some candidates deal with the
prescriptive RCIA temporal order, we observe that most RCIA coordinators struc-

Spiritual Gatekeepers
297
ture the RCIA liturgical year according to contractual, secular social relations. For
example, many coordinators allow initiates to negotiate the time it takes to com-
plete the RCIA process rather than make them commit to the Church’s sequencing.
Often this led to a mutual agreement to truncate the process of initiation to Žve or
seven months in suburban parishes and often much less time in city parishes. For
example, one suburban coordinator noted:
After talking with most inquirers, I found that they are simply too busy. And it’s
a joke to think that we could get them to attend during summer months.
Another suburban coordinator said:
Many of those wanting to become Catholic told me that they had children and
that it wouldn’t be possible to attend all of the sessions. It was after hearing this
time and again that I shortened the RCIA and realized it would be better to ini-
tiate adults according to their children’s calendar. So if you ask me, what the
school demands is more important than what the church wants.
One suburban coordinator apologized for the time line after seeing the shocked
look on initiates’ (inquirers) faces—a nonverbal means of negotiation. Another co-
ordinator understood the import of the liturgical year but found that many of the
college student initiates were locked into other calendars.
We might have a few preevangelization sessions, you know, a couple of sharing
sessions with the group and then subsequent to that the regular formal sessions
begin in mid-October and continue throughout until Easter time. And we don’t
go after Easter time, no no, I wouldn’t say. You know there are a lot of young
people involved and they have their things to do, for example, their classes, not
so much their classes but their times for study and so forth, and there are
conicts here and there but they are fairly good about advising us of those occa-
sions when they come up and fairly faithful I would say in their attendance. But
year round, no.
Yet another suburban coordinator believed in the liturgical year as well but
through pastoral practice discovered it did not work. As she explained it, people are
just too busy today:
Making it more than one year is hard. I think you do well getting them in August
and September and preparing them for the Easter, the coming Easter Vigil. We
had in all the years that I have been doing it, we have had a couple of people
who stayed over for more than one year. But now—that is a rarity. People today
have extremely busy lives and if you tell them going in—I mean if you tell them
going in that its going to be nine to twelve months they look at you like “you’ve
got to be kidding.” Now ideally I agree wholeheartedly with the premise that it
should take a longer time. But.
This coordinator still believed in the liturgical year and a lengthier process of initia-
tion but adjusted to the situation of people’s lives and adapted the rite.
Another suburban coordinator based her pastoral adjustments on the needs of
the group:

298
Symbolic Interaction Volume 25, Number 3, 2002
The liturgical year, the full thing, depends on the group again. Usually with all
the groups we go through till Pentecost and then depending on the group I will
continue if it is their desire. I have some groups that, you know, say hey I need
some time off. But there are other groups who say no this is Žne and we would
like to come back again. So the invitation is always open.
Overall, the coordinator framed the RCIA process in the liturgical year but did not
insist on it. She accommodated her groups whether they wanted a summer break or
not. Her comments illustrate the attempt to maintain a liturgical year framework
and at the same time remain exible. She went on to say:
Once again, it depends on your group whether or not more or less time is
needed with them. The dynamics of every group is so different. It is mind-
boggling. I have notes from year to year and I say wow this worked great last
year and so I will use this again this year and then Žnd that this doesn’t suit the
dynamics of that particular group. So you have to change.
With that statement, she gave priority to the people over the text but not to the ex-
tent that city coordinators do. The next coordinator also was conŽdent in not fol-
lowing the year-round approach because it was not practical for initiates:
Well, the calendar. September through May is our process. And even after read-
ing commentaries and reections by people who steer away from that and promote
the liturgical year, year-round approach, from a practical point of view people’s
lives revolve around (1) their school—when their kids are in school—and (2)
most people take time off during the summer to play. And I think people in the
church need to do that and so that is my response to all those commentaries.
Although strict about implementing certain aspects of the RCIA, such as lectionary-
based catechesis, she was willing to adapt to people’s secular calendars.A city coor-
dinator, in contrast, summed up the city perspective this way:
I think that, because of the culture of the people and their “already” kind of be-
longing, that for them to say I’ve got to wait that long we have to take seriously.
I mean really, that is a long time to them, especially since they feel they already
belong. A year process is an obstacle here. So we don’t do it.
As a result of people already belonging to the community (city initiates), being
too busy, adhering to school calendars, or experiencing initial shock at the length of
time required (suburban initiates), coordinators adjusted to and accommodated the
initiates’ social situations, resulting in a temporal patterning of initiation different
from the Church’s mandate.
Some suburban coordinators, however, did not change the Church’s stance on
the one-year minimum time line after negotiating with initiates. For example, a co-
ordinator in a middle-class, white, suburban parish reported:
In talking with inquirers I don’t apologize for what the RCIA is or the length of
time it requires. I believe in it and I think it is just Žne. People will follow what
the Church asks if you stick to your guns. If I begin apologizing the people will
think it is unjust. So I go with it.

Spiritual Gatekeepers
299
Another coordinator in an upper-class suburban neighborhood said:
We abide by the yearlong catechumenate. Once, a couple living together com-
plained about this cutting into their work time.At that point we challenged them
about their priorities by asking them about their standard of living and that
maybe they needed to reconsider that standard.
Although these coordinators followed the Church’s mandate, their stories reveal
problems that center on the issue of time. But they used their understanding of
the RCIA to uphold rather than change the time order of initiation set down by
the Church.
Rationality, which we understand in Blumer’s (1965) terms as a social construct,
is also a major interaction component in contractual, secular social relations. Speci-
Ž
cally, relationships dominated by rationality entail the priorities of self-interest,
logic, calculation, and reason. In covenantal social relations, however, people ex-
press and convey connection, involvement, and identiŽcation with one another
(
Bromely and Busching 1988). So in contractual relations employers and employ-
ees routinely negotiate work schedules, task responsibilities, performance, and
money. Conversely, in covenantal social relations the covenant is communicated
through the language of commitment, tradition, and enduring bonds.
As already noted, suburban RCIA coordinators shortened the initiation process
to accommodate initiates’ time constraints, sequenced initiation according to the
school calendar to accommodate initiates’ children, and sometimes apologized for
the length of time required and then proceeded to shorten it. City coordinators, on
the other hand, often bypassed the entire initiation process. Initiates rationally ne-
gotiated their timetables according to their self-interest. And coordinators ration-
ally negotiated a time frame more in accord with the secular time frame of the ini-
tiates. Even suburban coordinators who did not change the yearlong time line still
had to rationally negotiate for their position. City coordinators, however, faced with
people who were “already members,” disregarded the RCIA because initiation into
covenantal social relations were already established. Only the formal, public ritual
needed to be enacted for these initiates. In the city parish, where covenantal bonds
are already evident, coordinators deemed it “rational” to conclude that a lengthy
initiation process was unnecessary.
The initiates themselves often rationally negotiated with RCIA coordinators
about the temporal ordering of initiation.As one suburban coordinator said, “Most
people want to know what is required, and then after I tell them they want to know
if there is a quicker way.” Another suburban coordinator logically and rationally
concluded that having “Žfteen-minute zinger sessions” was the best way to imple-
ment the RCIA. As she noted: “I realize that initiates’ schedules are chuck full, es-
pecially if they are parents, so I try to at least zap them with something—so I have
Ž
fteen-minute zinger sessions.”
Another way inquirers rationally negotiate is by asking about other parishes
where they might pursue the RCIA because the time lines at their parishes do not

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meet their needs. Some coordinators are upset by this. For example, one suburban
coordinator commented:
I understand that people don’t have a lot of time, but we are talking about being
initiated into the church, into faith, and into faith in a local community, not the
amorphous reality of the universal Catholic Church. So when people come to
me from another parish to attend our sessions because it is more convenient for
them and their schedules, I just get frustrated, even annoyed. I mean initiation is
about entering this community and forming relationships in the community
where you will be baptized, and so not to be involved with that community from
the beginning really makes no theological sense. So I tell them no. I have,
though, for people in this parish changed the time frame so they could get bap-
tized in this church, you know like having sessions at another time and in some
cases having a much shorter time line.
Here again is someone rationally negotiating different avenues to becoming Catho-
lic besides the one afforded by his parish. The interview went on to reveal that the
candidate actually hoped that this coordinator’s RCIA was not as lengthy as that at
his parish or have as many requirements. A similar situation occurred with the fol-
lowing suburban coordinator:
Honestly, I couldn’t believe the nerve of this woman. She simply pranced in and
wanted to know how long our RCIA program was and what were the require-
ments. And before I could answer her, she went on in a very derogatory tone
about her parish and the unrealistic expectations of the person in charge of the
program there. She just wanted it her way, never giving what the Church might
expect a moment’s thought. It just makes you mad.
These last few quotes reveal how candidates can give little credence to the insti-
tutional Church and want an initiation process that Žts their needs. Sociologists of
religion have noted again and again the shift in the locus of religious authority from
the institution to the individual. It appears to be no different in matters of initiation.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Problems of time can be lodged in a number of processes, including differences in
temporal experiences (Flaherty 1987), multiple meanings of the past (Katovich and
Couch 1992), cultural conŽgurations (Maines 1989), and degrees of temporal ration-
ality (Zerubavel 1981). The problematics of time for the RCIA coordinators we
studied, however, rested in the tensions between a prescriptive, sacred temporal
order and enacted, secular temporal orders.
From the point of view of the Church, the establishment of convenantal relations
and the full absorption of persons into the spiritual community of Catholics was at
issue. To accomplish the Church’s goals, the RCIA, constituted of various steps and
a one-year time frame, was to guide coordinators’ activities as they sought to move
persons through the status passage process. The only aspect of this process that was
consistent across all cases in our data appears to be the desire for and focus on the

Spiritual Gatekeepers
301
end product of baptism during the Easter Vigil. That is the point at which candi-
dates become “Catholics.” How coordinators accomplished that desired end point,
though, varied a great deal in response to local contingencies (see Warner 1993).
City coordinators were very likely to feel that a convenant already existed with
their RCIA candidates because of their “already membership status.” Many of
them had been parishioners for years and for all practical purposes were practicing
Catholics. These coordinators, therefore, quite willingly shortened the RCIA pro-
cess to only a few months. Moreover, because few of these coordinators had formal
liturgical training, they felt it appropriate to adapt the prescriptive texts to the level
of theological knowledge of the candidates before them. This adaptation coupled
with the “already membership status” legitimized for coordinators altering the
mandated duration and sequencing of activities.
Suburban coordinators seemed to struggle if not suffer more than did the city co-
ordinators as they adapted the RCIA. They usually had liturgical training and be-
lieved that the new liturgical texts were indispensable for covenantal relations (Mc-
Callion and Maines 2000; McCallion, Maines, and Wolfel 1996). Accordingly, they
tended to adhere to strict and full interpretations of those texts and to insist on full
educational experiences for the RCIA candidates. This factor in itself extended the
time frame beyond that typically found in city parishes. Suburban candidates, fur-
thermore, came to the RCIA as nonmembers, which conŽrmed in their coordina-
tors’ views the candidates’ individualistic attitudes and noncommunal lifestyles.Yet
the challenges of school schedules, weekend activities, work demands, and social
calendars that candidates brought to the RCIA induced coordinators to negotiate
reduced time commitments. In the process, the suburban coordinators ironically be-
came the ones less convinced that the covenant was really present at baptism even
though they more fully implemented the prescriptive temporal order of the RCIA.
Kavanagh (1990) argues that RCIA coordinators, more than other ministers in
the Church, are constantly patrolling the borders of Catholic identity. They appear
to have a heightened awareness of identity issues because they are constantly being
confronted with what a “Catholic” is and whether RCIA candidates are becoming
one. Patrolling these borders is a catch-22 situation. If coordinators let people into
the Church too easily, are they compromising Catholic identity? If they are too de-
manding and candidates quit the RCIA, are they being inhospitable and unwelcom-
ing? So these coordinators live in a fragile world of opening and closing the borders
of the Church, at the heart of which are the adjustments to the sacred temporal or-
der of the RCIA.
NOTE
1
. The period of the precatechumenate is when the individual begins to respond to the stirrings of
faith. This is a period of searching and asking questions. There are no liturgical celebrations
during this time. The Church’s primary emphasis is on evangelization. The Rite of Acceptance
follows, which is the Žrst public ritual celebrated. During the ritual, the inquirers declare their
intention to become Catholic. This ritual bestows on them the title “catechumen.” Then follows

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the period of the catechumenate, a prolonged period of catechetical, spiritual, liturgical, and
apostolic formation. There are many liturgical celebrations during this time, the most notable
being that the catechumens are dismissed every Sunday after the scripture readings that make
up the Žrst part of the eucharist or Mass. The rite of election follows the catechumenate period,
at which the catechumens go to the cathedral for the bishop’s blessing and calling them to the
status of “elect.” A six-week period of enlightenment or puriŽcation follows during Lent. This is
a more spiritual time of preparation. The celebration of the sacraments of initiation occurs at
the end of the Lenten season and during the Easter Vigil. After this celebration the elect are
considered part of the faithful, full members of the Catholic communion. The Žnal period of
initiation is called mystagogy. This is a period that allows the newly faithful to reect on the
mysteries they have received at Easter.
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