Evangelization, Inculturation and the RCIA

Mark E. Wedig, O.P.

Barry University

 

One of the principal measures of the success of Christian evangelization always has been the degree to which the worship of the church was adapted to local culture. Some of the best modern historical studies of the liturgy demonstrate the evolving interplay between Christianity’s public prayer and cultural forms.(1) For instance, the liturgical historian, Josef Jungmann, narrated the development of early medieval worship in Europe as a pastoral success story because the Roman rite was malleable to Franco-Germanic culture and piety. A people were evangelized by the way a Roman imperial Christian ordo was adapted and assimilated by Teutonic cultures.(2)

The cultural adaptation of Catholic worship, however, remained fundamentally a European cultural development for well over a thousand years. In the last century and, especially since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has undergone a radical shift from an essentially North Atlantic synthesis of faith and culture to a more complex worldwide ecclesial phenomenon. In this context, worship evangelizes when it authentically embodies multiple and diverse ecclesial expressions. It has been emphasized that the genius and success of the revised Roman liturgy lies particularly in its adaptability to manifold local cultures.(3)

Since Vatican II the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults has become a foundational method for Christian evangelization in the Roman Catholic Church. Its developing rituals embody the Christian formation process for a local church. They reveal, both implicitly and explicitly, the programmatic schemata for the evangelization of a local culture through liturgical means. The RCIA must bridge church tradition and culture. In as much as its rituals embody the complexities of inculturation, they function as effective modes of evangelization. Accordingly, failure to embody culture-specific ritual processes relates to the RCIA’s failure to evangelize.

In the postmodern and global world Christian faithful witness is confronted by an even greater cultural and social complexity than existed even a few decades ago. Religious claims are undermined by increasingly complicated and competitive social, economic, philosophical and religious factors. If the RCIA remains a source for continued evangelization in the church, it bears an ever-greater burden of adaptation, integration and even resistance to complex postmodern cultural factors. Finally, it is in that milieu that this paper will examine the relationship between evangelization and the liturgical inculturation of the RCIA.

Evangelization as Inculturation

How is it that evangelization can be understood primarily as inculturation and more explicitly as liturgical inculturation? It is most basically related to a paradigm shift that occurred in the church’s self-understanding and practice concerning mission. Since Vatican II, the entire church itself is conceived of essentially as missionary. Ecclesiology does not precede missiology but both church and mission belong together from the beginning. Instead of church mission going out from a perfect society, the most basic missionary activity stems from the church’s integral alignment to the world.(4)

Therefore the traditional purposes and objectives of mission are radically altered by a new consciousness about the church-world relationship. Theological foundations set in both Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, and later in Evangelii Nuntiandi no longer pit the church against the world, but place the church squarely in the midst of global struggles for justice, reconciliation and peace. Consequently, mission is viewed primarily in terms of God’s involvement in the world and not as a hostile retreat from it.

Mission is interpreted fundamentally as the work of a local church. The innovation rests on an ecclesial reorientation whereby the universal church actually finds its true existence in the local or particular churches.(5) The church universal remains but an ecclesial abstraction or conceptualization whereby the local church is the realized and manifest church body. Consequently, Christianity’s most basic missionary objective becomes the recovery of the cultural integrity of its particular ecclesial communities.(6)

The rediscovery of the local church as the primary agent of mission changes the traditional conception of evangelization as well. No longer is evangelization seen as church extension but as the ministry of the local church.(7) Evangelization relates to the integration of the gospel with a particular cultural context. The church is converted through its contextualization efforts; through its work to be all the more an authentic culture-specific expression of Christ’s body. Evangelization never exits except as adapted and integrated by a local culture and therefore can be best understood as inculturation.

Evangelization as inculturation involves more than a mere translation of the faith to a local church. Instead it involves what David Bosch suggests as a "double movement" between the faith and culture. Both Christianity and the local culture are changed or altered in order to become a new reality. This double movement suggests that the church embodies a new history in the local context. Bosch explains that

Here evangelization is best understood as a new creative formulation of the faith, whereby the Christian tradition, grafted onto a new culture, gives way to an altogether new entity.

Evangelization as Liturgical Inculturation

These insights about evangelization as inculturation relate directly to the church’s worship. Liturgical inculturation is the dynamic relationship between a cultic tradition and a local culture. Basic to this is that the church, realized in its local ecclesial manifestation, must culturally retrieve and situate its liturgical texts and rites in order for there to be an authentic expression of the faith. Worship without inculturation remains purely a liturgical-ecclesial conceptualization or abstraction and consequently an ineffective means of evangelization.

The insights of local church ecclesiology that reconfigure thinking about the relationship between universal and local church, also affect the way the official texts of the Roman liturgy are understood. The editio typica must be rendered concrete or local or else they remain an abstraction or conceptualization of the church’s worship. Therefore the hinge-pin of the church’s reformed worship remains its inculturation. Sacrosanctum Concilium paragraphs 37-40, underline a primary purpose of the Roman reform, directing that its typical editions necessitate cultural adaptation and integration in a local church. Without dynamic interaction with a local cultural context, the revised liturgical rites and texts of the Latin Church remain empty and lifeless forms and fail to evangelize the local church and society.

Acknowledging the double-movement of inculturation, Anscar Chupungco says that liturgical inculturation can be defined either from the standpoint of the liturgy or from the standpoint of culture.(9) From the standpoint of the liturgy, inculturation may be defined as: "The process of inserting the texts and rites of the liturgy into the framework of a local culture. As a result, the texts and rites assimilate the people’s thought, language, value, ritual, symbolic and artistic pattern."(10) Therefore from the perspective of the liturgy, the goal of inculturation is the grafting of the church’s worship tradition onto "the cultural pattern of the local church."(11) This grafting of rite to culture occurs along a continuum, ranging from mere adaptation to the creation of completely new liturgical forms.(12)

Defined from the standpoint of culture, liturgical inculturation can be identified as "the cultural components which interact, dialogue, and combine with the Christian ordo. Cultural components consist of values, patterns, and institutions that form part of the system of the rites of passage of a society."(13) Cultural components are indicative of the very social fabric of a society. They include those essential cultural characteristics that the Christian tradition cannot supplant without destroying the very identity of the local society. Examples of this might be the loyalty to clan or society and respect for its tradition, fundamental expressions or codes concerning ritual purity, and the essential role that persons play within the fabric of a society.(14)

Essential to the perspective of culture, is the realization that development of liturgical texts and rites, from their beginning, integrated cultural practices and traditions. The shape of baptism, eucharist, reconciliation, marriage, healing and funerals, was dependent on uncompromising cultural factors. From the onset, the core liturgical patterns of the church’s liturgy were enhanced and extended by the norms of cultural value, pattern and institution. Consequently, essential to the evangelical principle of Christian worship, is the continued integration of cultural components.

The RCIA: A Model for the Inculturation of Church and Modern Culture

In The Shape of Baptism, Aidan Kavanagh argues that the most creative innovation that resulted from the Vatican II liturgical reforms was the changes concerning baptism.(15) He contends that a fundamental shift in the church’s initiatory polity occurs particularly in the development of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. The shift involves a move from a conventional norm centering on infant baptism to a more traditional norm centering on adults.(16) This change reflects a dramatic change in ecclesiological self-understanding.

The reform of baptism mirrors a modern ecclesiological paradigm shift. The retrieval of adult initiation polity parallels the recovery of local church identity. The RCIA promotes and forms the intentional membership that engenders the particular ecclesia. One can make the case that fundamental to the innovations surrounding baptism and local church ecclesiology is the creation of an altogether new liturgical ordo. The RCIA helps to mediate a uniquely modern inculturation of church. Accordingly the RCIA is not viewed as a naïve or a simplistic equivalent of an ancient ordo but instead as the creative integration of both baptism and modern post-Enlightenment culture. More fundamentally, the RCIA represents a cultural and liturgical response to the crises and challenges of modern social and religious life. Attempting to bridge a chasm between church and society in the modern world, the RCIA becomes a way to balance the competing claims of modernity and the Christian ecclesial life.

As a result of its liturgical-ecclesial purpose, the RCIA represents a foundational method for Christian evangelization in the modern world. Even though the RCIA allows for a specified period of evangelization in a precatechumenate, I argue that the entire ordo of precatechumenate, catechumenate, period of purification and enlightenment, the Sacraments of Initiation, and postbaptismal catechesis, provide a way to liturgically integrate church and world, and therefore stand as a basic means of evangelization.

Basic to its very ritual conception, the RCIA is an inculturation. It embodies self-conscious processes that build up an intentional local ecclesia in a modern world. Members of the liturgical movement believed that by retrieving the ancient model of the catechumenate for contemporary purposes, the RCIA would intentionally form the local church. Its entire ritual schemata mold liturgical "conversion therapy"(17) for modern people. Conversion itself is viewed as a process of divine-human interaction whereby grace is mediated in encounter. The church’s fundamental response to the world is reflected in what is necessary for a local church to welcome, to educate, to reconcile, to differentiate, to incorporate and to sustain a newcomer in the faith.

Weighing heavily upon the RCIA is the burden of bridging church and world. The ritual process of initiation carries the burden of the "double movement" of always linking faith to culture and culture to faith. By their design the various rituals of the RCIA require adaptation and integration to local culture.(18) To the extent that the local church is cognizant of this demand, the RCIA models effective evangelization.

The Inculturation of Adult Baptism in East Africa

Liturgical creativity especially in the developing world is challenging the church to understand explicitly how liturgical inculturation exemplifies evangelization. Helpful cases of the local ecclesial adaptation and integration of Christian adult baptism come Africa, Asia and Latin America.(19) For example, F. Kabasele Lumbala shows how in southeast Zaire the final weeks of the catechumenate and the Easter Vigil have been adapted to follow the traditional ritual patterns of passage.

For the last two weeks of Lent, catechumens in southeast Zaire are secluded from ordinary life and stay at the church, segregated by gender and follow an intensive program of the liturgy that is translated into the native language. The elect give themselves to hard work for the common good under the direction of the parish communities and are educated and trained in new skills for the good of society. Religious instruction, which began with the elders and catechists, continues in an intensive way during this seclusion by explicitly making connections between the traditional mores and ritual customs of the people and the Christian moral and liturgical life.(20)

Lumbala goes on to illustrate how the Easter Vigil begins a process of reaggregation. A ritual reenactment of the death and resurrection of Christ follows the liturgies of light, word, and renunciation of Satan. The candidates crouch on the floor and are covered with banana leaves, as if they were dead. A chant of mourning is intoned and the priest lifts up the candidate by the right arm and chants that they too rise from the tomb with Christ. After the bath and the invocation of the Trinity, the priest incenses and then calls the baptized by their new names that recall or express devotion to a Christian saint or a mystery of salvation in Christ or one of the traditional ancestors. The godparent recites the godchild’s genealogies, after which the chosen name is given as the crowning of new identity.(21)

Finally for Confirmation, the godparent dances with the articles necessary for profession. The celebrant puts white kaolin (chalk) on the arms, cheeks, and feet of the initiate, indicating that he or she is a new being and has achieved a new stature in the church. The congregation sings a joyful song and an Alleluia. Offerings are made and the eucharist follows, during which the newly baptized come to the Lord’s eucharistic table.

From Lumbala’s description, worship serves as effective evangelization in as much as there is a relationship between Christian initiation and the traditional rites of passage in southeast Zaire. Lumbala illustrates how the last weeks of the catechumenate and the Easter Vigil together follow the traditional African cultural rites of separation, transition, and reaggregation. Baptism follows the "double-movement" of inculturation, embodying some of the fundamental codes of traditional cultural passage, but at the same time maintaining both form and meaning relative to the ancient patterns of Christian initiation.

Other examples of the inculturation of adult baptism challenge us to understand the initiatory ordo itself as a primary means of evangelization. In many parts of the world where local churches have integrated the culture-specific codes that mediate the values, patterns, and institutions of a people, the liturgy thrives as an evangelical method for the Roman Catholic Church. For instance in Latin American and in the cases of the US Hispanic/Latino church, popular religiosity bridges the rite to local culture. Celebration and catechesis follow the feasts and devotions that mediate salvation to the Latin peoples in the Americas.(22) Through the adult baptismal ordo both church and local culture identify and integrate the transcendent values of the Christian tradition and those of the local culture.

David Power encourages us to see how those examples can help us recognize the necessary relationship of cult to culture. He says: "Innovations found serviceable in any church provide models for other churches as they endeavor to assess their own developments."(23) Therefore the study of many of the innovations of liturgical inculturation throughout the world help to raise significant questions about the dynamics of faith and culture in our own particular churches.

Often the weight of liturgical inculturation, however, does not press down on those who live in the dominant cultures of the West. The majority of peoples in the North Atlantic, global, industrialized societies are not forced to reconcile overtly competing claims of faith and culture in ways people do who are disenfranchised in the West or who are outside North Atlantic societies altogether. Inculturation can be interpreted as the work of non-Western churches.(24) Very often the typical editions are understood to be only in need of simple translation and the norms for adaptation and integration of culture applying only to local churches marginalized by the global world.

This study challenges that view, however, by suggesting ways to examine the culture-specific codes of the North Atlantic, global world that effect liturgy, especially the RCIA. Despite some important academic insights into the field, the work of liturgical inculturation for postmodern society remains incipient. Nevertheless, for Roman Catholics, especially in the US, the challenges of observing and understanding the contemporary cultural forces that affect Christian worship remain necessary for authentic Christian witness. What are the central issues which can shape the inculturation of the RCIA for the US and global societies and how might they affect a new level of approach to the Christian ordo?

Postmodernity and Inculturation

Like the creative impetus behind the ritual reform that engendered the RCIA, the great pastoral and academic achievements in twentieth century Roman Catholicism can be seen as critical responses to a post-Enlightenment, subject-centered, secular, scientific-empirical, and technological life commonly referred to as modernity. Even though these forces continue to shape the Western world, it is nevertheless recognized that since the end of the Second World War, there have arisen critiques of modern life, that attempt to undermine the fundamental claims of the social and intellectual project itself. Even though the modern-postmodern debate has been at heightened cue in literary, artistic, and social-scientific discussion for over twenty years, only in the last few years has that debate met up with serious Roman Catholic theological reflection.(25)

Recognizing that the critiques of modernity are far from settled, particularly in religious circles, and that there remains a modern-postmodern continuum of thought and social practice, it is still helpful and necessary to situate the church’s projects for mission and evangelization within the confines of these new definitions of culture. For those who teach and minister on the frontlines of US social and religious institutions, there is a daily encounter with a new generation shaped and molded by globalization and postmodern concerns.

As stated above, postmodernism is a social and intellectual critique. It recognizes that politically and economically the modern project continues to plunge ahead, but despite its momentum, the modern world renders its own demise as a social, philosophical, and religious solution. Much of what fuels that conviction is that an aggressive, methodical, and ambiguous extension of modernity has created, what we might call, "hypermodernism."(26) Political, social and economic globalization efforts engender a "technologically sophisticated and glamorously unreal universe."(27)

This complex but alluring supermodern world is capable extending the efforts of modernity to the entire world, and compressing time and space so as to occur at the same time. Under the category of globalization, it is characterized by its ability to ignore national boundaries, especially in its objectives to move capital quickly and maximize the profit margins. A single world economy and new communications technologies create powerful homogenizing forces that threaten local cultural and social identities.(28)

Postmodern critics point out that these forces render individuals and societies either deeply pessimistic or overly confident about economic and technological "advancement." Therefore it is necessary to examine how the hyperactivity of postmodern culture can lead to a joyless and artificial culture of aggressive individualism and feverish consumption, both which threaten Christian ritual and symbol, morality, and community.

Nevertheless, this study emphasizes that postmodernity offers alternatives to that perilous portrait of contemporary life. For the purposes of understanding the contemporary horizon of Christian worship and evangelization, we examine another face of postmodernity that offers ways to welcome, educate, reconcile, and incorporate the neophyte. We will see how a postmodern resistance to the hyperactivity, results in ways to critically assess formation for the Christian church. Alternatively, postmodern realism helps us to recognize how the Christian ecclesial tradition can redeem the local culture.

Therefore the postmodern condition remains a mixed bag of both the perils and promises of an extremely complex social environment. Sorting out the weeds from the wheat in this contemporary situation is as problematic as the biblical proverb warns. Nonetheless, the difficult work of the contemporary church demands resistance to the perils and integration of the promises of a world before it. Using Albert Borgmann’s categories of hyperreality, hyperactivity and hyperintelligence we explore the perils of postmodern life so as to identify a typology for Christian resistance.(29) Yet ultimately Borgmann’s alternative categories of focal realism, patient vigor and communal celebration are suggestive of possible solutions for the contemporary inculturation of Christian faith and the postmodern condition.(30) Moreover, these categories are helpful especially to those interested in integrating liturgy and postmodern culture.

Hypermodernism

Critics of the contemporary global society tell us that the world’s unqualified trust in the computer and telephonic industry has swallowed up our capacity for abstract knowing.(31) All the fine-tuning and ultra-designing of technology has produced its own epistemology. The computer and the tube reconfigure what is considered real and true. Rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs are subverted by artificially sequenced bits of information and the titillation of entertainment. At its worse, the postmodern world feeds off of what Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard call "hyperreality."(32)

The hyperreal renders not only an epistemological crisis, but an ontological crisis. In a recent trip to the Grand Canyon, my eight year-old nephew commented: "It’s like Disney!" The brilliant and all-encompassing simulation of the real becomes the "final causality" of what we see and know. This reality is virtual as Borgmann explains:

Simulated information reorients symbolic knowing. Both the human appreciation and fear of metaphorical meanings are disoriented by the glamour of the hyperreal.

What is real is as lasting as the flicker of an eye. The economic and technological supermodern highway leaves us in the dust. Time is an antique commodity. The restless and impatient competition of the global world is characterized by its hyperactive impulses. All the while, like the allurement and glamour of a simulated hyperreality, we are awed by the compression of time. The speed and frenzy of the task at hand transcends even the quickest human mind. Hyperreality begets hyperactivity. Simulation and technological accomplishment render time consuming processes obsolete. What once could only be achieved through vigilance and patient endurance, can now be simulated instantly.

Hyperactivity defies the underlying time and space needed for acquiring virtue; the moral vision that results from the time and rhythm of daily life. Hypermodernity’s criteria for economic and technological life subvert the cycle, flow, and even the monotony of time necessary for the making of ritual, narrative, and the moral life. The timeless character of the global setting blurs the boundaries between work and leisure and transmutes the environment into a game.

Finally, the hypermodern setting creates social infrastructures of hyperintelligence. Basic to our societies, are those who are responsible for passing on the information. Also how information is disseminated is crucial for the well-being of institutions. Yet the means and the methods by which we come to know and share these essentials are altered radically by the hyperintelligent network of computer and attendant telephonic enterprise.

Much has been said about the erasure of the public square and the public discourses that constituted the traditional means of social communication; how telephone and television have fostered a detached and disconnected way of life. Yet technology as a way of life disembodies the intelligence factor of societal living. With all the glories of mega information systems at our reach, the children of the global environment are rendered deprived. As Borgmann illustrates:

The ways in which individuals traditionally were invited into the public arena to celebrate a common purpose and heritage are replaced by the web. Voyeurism stands in for presence.

The RCIA as Resistance to Hypermodernism

What does all this about hypermodernism have to do with the church and its initiation polity? How must the local Christian community respond to the challenges of hypereality, hyperactivity, and hyperintelligence, especially in organizing its RCIA? How do these postmodern factors affect the catechumenate, the elect, and the liturgies of initiation? First, pastors, catechists, and liturgists, especially in the US and other North Atlantic societies, need to see their role in the discernment of culture. One of the functions of that discernment in the postmodern world, should be a certain resistance to culture. Chunpungco reminds us:

A simulated and virtual reality, a compression of time and space, and an infrastructure of disembodied intelligence all undermine the realism, the morality, and the praxis of church as community. Christian conversion requires the identification of cultural forces that are incompatible with the sacramental, moral, and ecclesial imagination. Catechumens, the elect and the initiates, with the help of their pastors, catechists, and liturgists, must be able to know that the mark of their baptism is the mark against certain epistemologies of the hypermodern environment.

Resistance to what is "real," "true," and "good" in hypermodernity does not mean a simplistic rejection of the modern and postmodern project. A proper Christian catechesis is not characterized by a romantic and naïve return to a pre-modern ecclesial inculturation. Teaching and ministering a contemporary epistemology of the sacred, conversion to moral life, and a proper understanding of church in the postmodern world, necessitates an articulate and clear understanding of what is erroneous and what is helpful and good for the Christian way in postmodern societies.

The RCIA as the Integration of Postmodern Realism

If resistance to hypermodernism characterizes the first task of the local church in postmodernity, the second task requires the integration of what is compatible and good between the church tradition and the contemporary culture. This approach has to do with teaching and ritualizing what Albert Borgmann names as "postmodern realism."(36) Amid the noisy criticism of modernity, and the glamour, the restless whirl, and the disinterest of the supermodern highway, restrained and deceptively quiet voices offer interpretations of the postmodern condition that give new energy and strength to Christian claims. In conjunction with those voices, we learn that the categories of focal realism, patient vigor and communal celebration, help us to make connections between Christian initiation and the contemporary society.

Rosemary Haughton suggests that the edifices and systems of the hypermodern environment have created clefts and fissures that provide access to Christian transformation.(37) The role of the preacher in postmodern environments is to identify the eloquent reality that the new architecture and superstructure has unintentionally created. Globalization and postmodern critiques have created interesting and unique associations of persons, ideas and things. The juxtaposition of these unlikely associates makes for a new social realism.

The church instructs according a contemporary mystagogy of focal realism.(38) The catechist shapes a new typology whereby connections are made between curious and even daunting social forces and the mysteries of Christian salvation. The gospel, the mysteries of the faith, the moral life, and the church are revealed in the contrast and underside of experience. The assurance and confidence in correlating sign and reality, are born out of a communal imaginative realism that sees a commanding presence of God’s work in the clefts and crevices that the global world emits. The res is the residue of the environment. The focal realism of those who teach and preach is embodied in dangerous remembrance of the Christian tradition.(39)

A postmodern interpretation of the Christian moral life is exemplified in patient endurance that believes what is real and true will be revealed only over time. The moral virtues are constructed through unwearied staying power. The instantaneity and quick fix of the hyperactive society are representative of a spurious morality. Such solutions embody a "counterfeit vigor and joy."(40) They are furthermore antithetical to habitual skills of concentration and contemplation, which capture the realism that lies under the burden of complex situations.

The postmodern church teaches its catechumens and neophytes about a morality born out of patient vigor; a morality derived from the constraints, not the excesses, of human living. It scrutinizes the quick fix answers to human suffering and helps others to turn away from the temptation to trust in power over patience. The RCIA teaches newcomers to the faith that it is possible to shape a moral life derived from the beauty and contradiction of the cross; to recognize the moral life in the great saints who endured the realism of the crucifixion. And finally to see that morality in present contradictions is revealed through " the duress of reality" evident in a world that witnesses the limits of the land, the hostility of people, and the frailty of the body.(41)

The fissures, crevices, and clefts created by the hypermodern environment provide opening and access that become the bases for new communities. People meet under the duress of the hyperreal, hyperactive, and hyperintelligent global village, giving them ways to fashion a new inclusive communal order. The excitement and entertainment generated by technology impinges on realization of public life in festive celebration. But, there must be real reasons to celebrate. Eloquence must emerge from communities of resistance to dominant cultural forces.

Postmodernity teaches us about the religious communities that are born out of patience instead of power; that appropriate the real from the shards of modern life. It points to ecclesial formation in places where reality, community, and divinity are joined in celebration; where the most unlikely associations of people gather for festive purposes. The contemporary church collects and assembles a new urban stational liturgy. Giving a face to the religious diaspora, the RCIA becomes the new nexus for those wearied by hyperreal, hyperactive and hyperintelligent solutions to contemporary life. The global environment gives new insight to the passage, "Come to me who are weary and find life burdensome."

Those of us who have ministered the RCIA in US society are constantly amazed by the eloquent but unusual assortment of people who make up the communities of catechumens and candidates. We are aware of how these communities reflect the social, economic, and, religious pluralism of contemporary cultural identity. Aware that the changing demographics of the global US society forecast radical shifts in the fundamental linguistic, ethnic, and religious makeup of our land, we brace ourselves for the challenges of inculturation. Nevertheless, we ask ourselves: From where do these people come? Knowing that old Catholic adage of grace building on nature, it gives us confidence to relish in God’s rare and curious plans for the future.

Finally, we know that making connections between the demands of church in postmodern life are as complex and pluralistic as culture itself. Therefore the continued inculturation of the RCIA becomes a precarious endeavor. However a contemporary evangelization rests on making these connections. US and global societies, where little is being done to understand the connection between Christian worship and the complex task of cultural discernment, beg for a task and method in mediating cult to culture.

Endnotes

1. David N. Power, "Cult to Culture: The Mediating Role of Theology," in Worship: Culture and Theology (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1990) , 3-24.

2. Josef Jungmann, "The Defeat of Teutonic Arianism and the Revolution in Religious Culture in the Early Middle Ages," in Pastoral Liturgy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1962), 1-101.

3. Anscar J. Chupungco, Liturgies of the Future: The Process and Methods of Inculturation, (New York: Paulist, 1989), 3-55.

4. Ad Gentes # 23

5, Lumen Gentium, # 26

6. David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 378-389.

7. Ibid, 380.

8. Ibid, 454.

9. Anscar J. Chupungco, Liturgical Inculturation: Sacramentals, Religiosity, and Catechesis (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 30.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 37.

12. Ibid., 37-54. Here Chupungco delineates four methods by which the liturgy is grafted to cultural patterns: dynamic equivalence, creative assimilation, organic progression, and liturgical creativity.

13. Anscar J. Chupungco, "Baptism, Marriage, and Funeral Rites: Principle and Criteria for Inculturation," in Baptism, Rites of Passage, and Culture, edited by S. Anita Stauffer (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1998), 51.

14. Chupungco, "Baptism, Marriage, and Funeral Rites," 51-52; "Liturgy and Components of Culture," in Worship and Culture in Dialogue, edited by S. Anita Stauffer (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1994), 153-166.

15. Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christian Initiation (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1978/1991), 102-106.

16. Ibid. 106.

17. Here I borrow a term used by Aidan Kavanagh to describe the purpose of the catechemenate, in order to describe, what I understand to be the entire purpose of the RCIA. See: The Shape of Baptism, 128, 186.

18. Rita Ferrone, Forum Essays: On the Rite of Election, (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1994), 51-58.

19. Becoming a Christian: The Ecumenical Implications of Our Common Baptism, edited by Thomas F. Best and Dagmar Heller, Faith and Order No. 184 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1999); Baptism, Rites of Passage, and Culture, edited by S. Anita Stauffer (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1998); Doce Articulos y Otros Recursos Sobre El Rito Iniciacion Cristiana de Adultos, traducido por Rosa María Icaza (San Antonio: MACC, 1989).

20. F. Kabasele Lumbala, Celebrating Jesus Christ in Africa: Liturgy and Inculturation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), 15-18; "Black Africa and Baptismal Rites," in Becoming a Christian, 36-37. .

21. Celebrating Jesus in Africa., 16; "Black Africa and Baptismal Rites," 37.

22. Jaci Maraschin, "Baptism in Latin America and its Cultural Settings," in Becoming a Christian, 51-53; Pablo A Sicilia, "Adaptar el RICA en la parroquia hispana," in Doce Articulos y Otros Recursos Sobre El Rito de Iniciacion Cristiana de Adultos, 19-24.

23. David N. Power, Foreward to Celebarating Jesus Christ in Africa: Liturgy and Inculturation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), ix..

24. Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985), 22-38

25. Thomas Guarino, "Postmodernity and Five Fundamental Theological Issues," Theological Studies 57:4 (December 1996), 654-689.

26. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6.

27. Ibid.

28. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), 4-14.

29. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 78-109.

30. Ibid., 110-147.

31. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985)

32. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 3-58; Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166-84.

33. Borgmann, Crosssing the Postmodern Divide, 95.

34. Ibid., 106.

35. Chupungco, "Baptism, Marriage, Healing, and Funerals: Principles and Criteria for Inculturation," 50.

36. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 110-116.

37. Rosemary Haughton, Images for Change: The Transformation of Society (New York: Paulist, 1997), 45-84.

38. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 116-122

39. Bruce T. Morill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 189-212.

40. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 123.

41. Ibid., 124.