There are moments in the life of the church that pass almost unnoticed by the world yet speak with unmistakable clarity to those who have learned how to listen. The Rite of Election is such a moment.
As the church gathers this year, a record number of women and men step forward across the Archdiocese of Sydney, just over 450 people in total.
Each responds to a call that did not originate in personal resolve but in the patient and persistent initiative of God. They come not as spiritual achievers, nor as those who have mastered belief, but as those who have awakened to a presence already at work in their lives – echoing St Augustine’s confession that God was already within him, long before he learned how to seek.
This moment, then, is not an increase to be tallied nor a ‘success’ to be explained. More truthfully, it is a sign of grace, and of something decisively taking shape in the life of the church.
St John Paul II spoke often of conversion as a radical reorientation of one’s entire life, a turning of heart and mind toward God that is both decisive and lifelong. Yet this turning is rarely dramatic. More often, it takes the form of an awakening – a sudden recognition that one has been facing the wrong horizon, and that the true direction of life has been quietly calling all along.
Those who present themselves at the Rite of Election often speak in precisely these terms. They describe not an argument resolved or a puzzle solved but a restlessness eased and a discovery embraced in freedom. In my experience, their stories are marked less by conquest than by surrender. Conversion is not loud or self-assured; it is usually interior, fragile, and yet unmistakably real.
The Church, in her wisdom, does not claim authorship of this transformation. In the Rite of Election, she listens for the voice of the Holy Spirit, discerns the work already underway, and names what God has begun. The elect are not chosen because they are complete, but because they have allowed themselves to be claimed by Christ and shaped by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Yet conversion is never simply a change of direction. It is also a being drawn into communion – into the life of Christ, into the Body of the Church, and ultimately into the Eucharistic self-gift that stands at the centre of Christian existence.
This is why the Rite of Election is irreducibly ecclesial. The catechumens (and candidates present) do not come forward alone. They are presented, affirmed and entrusted to the church, as their personal desire is taken up into a communal act of recognition and hope. What has begun in the hidden depths of conscience is now named publicly, not as a private achievement, but as a gift received on behalf of the whole Body.
The church Fathers understood this well. For St Augustine – and, in his theological inheritance, Pope Leo XIV – conversion is the reordering of love, a gathering of scattered desires into the unity of charity. St Augustine’s near-contemporary, St Cyril of Jerusalem, describes the catechumen as already standing in the light, undergoing illumination even before entering the waters of rebirth. The church’s contemporary rites stand firmly within this shared tradition, marking conversion as a process of awakening, purification and incorporation.
What unites the witness of the tradition is the conviction that faith begins not with explanation, but with encounter. Faith is born not when every question is answered but when one realises that truth is not merely an idea to be grasped but a new life to be received. As Lumen Fidei reminds us, “Faith is not an idea, but a way of life. It is not something which we possess, but something which possesses us” (LF 34).
This is why the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults cannot be reduced to a program or curriculum. It is a pilgrimage of listening, prayer, silence, and gradual trust, sustained by the faithful accompaniment of families, sponsors, teams, and parish communities.
Finally, we can recognise that this year’s record number of catechumens does not stand in isolation. It belongs within a wider movement quietly taking shape across the church: a growing seriousness about evangelisation, a renewed confidence in witness, and the slow consolidation of a culture in which faith is proposed with clarity and lived with bold integrity.
The “Second Spring” now being experienced in Sydney, and in other parts of the West, is not an overnight phenomenon but the emergence of new life after long seasons of hidden growth, prayer, and faithful effort. As the spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton reminds us, the most decisive transformations are often the least visible. We are not converted by what we do, but by what we allow God to do in us – a work that unfolds patiently, and necessarily, over time.
What we are witnessing, then, is not a forceful strategy bearing fruit, but a culture slowly consolidating: a Church learning again how to listen and invite, trusting that the Gospel still speaks to the deepest longings of the human heart, and acting with renewed confidence on that faith. People are encountering Christ because parishes and communities are becoming ever anew places of reverence and meaning; because ordinary Catholics are living their faith with quiet coherence; because the Eucharist is being celebrated not as routine, but as the act by which the Church continually becomes herself.
As these men and women now enter the final stages of preparation, the Church entrusts them to prayer and patient accompaniment. The scrutinies that lie ahead are not tests to be passed but moments of purification that create space for grace to complete what God has begun.
The Rite of Election invites the whole Church to pause and recognise what is happening among us: lives being reoriented, scattered desires being gathered, communion being patiently formed. It is, unmistakably, a moment of joy and thanksgiving, and a call to renewed faith in the God who continues to draw people to himself through the Paschal Mystery, into the death and resurrection of his Son, and therefore into the new life of Easter.
