When does a learning experience become more like a welcome spiritual retreat? When you are at the 2022 Diocese of Cheyenne September Institute for Pastoral Formation of Pastorate Leaders. Including both Pastors and also Lay Leaders in faith formation ministries, the annual Institute brings together over 150 leaders from across Wyoming. This year, the Institute was held in Sheridan and pastorate leaders drove up to 6 hours and more to attend.
Held September 20-22, 2022, the Congar Institute was asked to lead the formation experience. Bishop Biegler was clear about the goals he wanted to achieve and the means to achieve it. Through a participatory learning experience, we would help the leaders of the Diocese to begin a pastoral transformation that would help parishioners to approach the sacraments with a deeper understanding. He was particularly concerned for the sacraments of initiation, especially the Eucharist.
In this time when the Church is promoting the same transformation on a broader scale, including the Eucharistic Revival and the turn toward Synodality, Bishop Biegler wanted to promote these efforts as well, including using a synodal approach during the Institute. He also sought to instill support in the goals that had been identified as priorities for the Diocese through the Vision 2030 Pastoral Plan that had recently been developed.
Happily, these complex demands came together around 4 simple principles that the Church has identified over the last 50 years in response to its turn to evangelization as the heart of the church’s identity, or in Paul VI’s words in Evangelii Nuntiandi: “Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize…”. From this ecclesiological paradigm shift flowed the other 3 principles at the heart of the Institute. They are that adult faith formation is the chief form, that all faith formation takes the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA, soon to be promulgated as the OCIA) as its inspiration, and that this inspiration proposed faith formation as a process of learning akin to apprenticeship that implicates the whole Christian community.
Recognizing that Christian identity is the focus of the Paschal Triduum, which makes rich use of signs and actions that powerfully communicate and that form the community, culminating in the sacramental initiation of new members of the community, it made sense that these celebrations would be the focus of our reflective learning. Of course, the goal was not to repeat the complex and multifaceted liturgical experience of the Triduum, but to evoke certain aspects of it, especially those that reinforce Christian identity as being part of the Body of Christ, anointed by the Holy Spirit and sent out to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim salvation and to be an embodiment of that salvation in the way that we are with one another.
Each session began with a rich liturgical experience that evoked select moments of the paschal triduum, followed by input on that aspect and conversations in pastorate groups to explore the implications for the community and its leadership. Input included perspectives on adult learning as well as practical theology. These perspectives added depth and richness for the characteristics of pastoral ministry we were exploring and provided the opportunity for synodal listening and discernment about how to move forward.