Things You Should Know Before You Are Confirmed as an Adult

Brief Overview

• Adult confirmation is not a ceremony you complete to check a box on your Catholic record; it is the sacrament that perfects your baptismal grace, seals you with the Holy Spirit, and formally binds you to the full mission of Catholic life in a way that baptism alone does not.
• The fact that you were never confirmed as a teenager does not make you a deficient Catholic, but it does mean your initiation into the Church remains incomplete, and the Church takes that incompleteness seriously enough to have a specific process for addressing it.
• The preparation process for adult confirmation typically involves OCIA or a specific adult confirmation program, and depending on your diocese and your specific circumstances, the length and format of that preparation will vary significantly from parish to parish.
• Confirmation leaves a permanent spiritual mark on your soul, called a character, which means you can only receive it once, so approaching it with genuine intention and serious preparation matters in a way that cannot be revisited or corrected afterward.
• The bishop is the ordinary minister of confirmation, and most adult confirmations outside of OCIA are celebrated at a diocesan Mass or at a parish event where the bishop presides, which means your confirmation will almost certainly not feel like a quiet, private affair.
• The gifts of the Holy Spirit conferred in confirmation are not automatic spiritual upgrades that you feel immediately; they are real and permanent but require your cooperation through prayer, practice, and ongoing formation to become operative in your daily life.

Why So Many Baptized Catholics Were Never Confirmed

Before getting into what confirmation actually is and what receiving it as an adult involves, it is worth understanding how such a significant number of baptized Catholics arrive at adulthood without having received one of the three sacraments of initiation. The reasons are varied and they matter, because the path to adult confirmation looks different depending on which of these applies to your situation. Some people were baptized Catholic as infants but grew up in families where practice of the faith was irregular or eventually ceased altogether, and they simply never reached the confirmation preparation stage before the family drifted away from the Church. Others went through First Communion preparation but then left the parish community before their year or two of confirmation preparation began, often during early adolescence when other interests competed with religious education. Some adults were baptized Catholic but spent their entire childhood in a household where the faith was present in name only, and no one ever explained to them that confirmation was both expected and incomplete without it. A smaller group belongs to the specific demographic of people who were actively preparing for confirmation but had it postponed or cancelled due to personal circumstances, illness, a move to a new diocese, or a family crisis. Others avoided confirmation deliberately as teenagers, either out of indifference or out of a conscientious reluctance to make a commitment they did not yet believe in, and are now returning to the faith with a genuine desire to complete what they started. The Church’s position is clear on all of these situations. Whatever the reason for the delay, confirmation is one of the three sacraments of Christian initiation whose unity must be safeguarded, and an unconfirmed Catholic has not yet received the fullness of the sacramental initiation Christ intended for his followers (CCC 1285). There is no judgment in that statement, only an honest description of the theological situation.

What Confirmation Actually Is and Why It Is Not Optional

The most important thing to get straight before you pursue adult confirmation is what the sacrament actually is, because the popular understanding of it is often seriously incomplete. Confirmation is not the sacrament by which you become an adult in the Church. It is not a graduation ceremony at the end of religious education. It is not a formal public declaration of a faith you chose for yourself rather than a faith chosen for you at baptism. All of these popular descriptions contain a partial truth, but none of them captures what the Church actually teaches about the nature and purpose of the sacrament. The Catechism teaches that confirmation perfects the baptismal grace, that it is the sacrament which gives the Holy Spirit in order to root and ground us more firmly in the divine life, and that it strengthens the confirmed person to live and defend the faith more fully as a member of the Church and in the world (CCC 1285, CCC 1303). The sacrament confers an increase of the gifts of baptism and a deeper configuration to Christ and to the Church (CCC 1302-1303). The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord, are specifically associated with confirmation in the Church’s theological tradition (CCC 1831). The sacrament also binds the confirmed person more firmly to the Church and gives them a special strength of the Holy Spirit to spread and defend the faith as true witnesses of Christ. That binding and that strengthening carry real obligations. They are not simply spiritual enhancements that improve your interior life without demanding anything new from your exterior life. Approaching confirmation with an understanding of what it actually confers, rather than what popular culture says it means, is the difference between receiving a sacrament with genuine intention and receiving it with a vague and somewhat passive participation.

Confirmation Leaves a Permanent Mark and You Only Get One Shot

This point deserves its own clear and direct treatment because it changes how seriously you should approach your preparation. The Catholic Church teaches that three sacraments, baptism, confirmation, and holy orders, imprint a permanent spiritual character on the soul that cannot be removed or repeated (CCC 1304). This means confirmation is received once and only once. There is no second confirmation if you feel your first one was inadequately prepared or insufficiently intentional. There is no re-confirmation if you drift from the faith after receiving it and then return. The character imprinted by confirmation is permanent regardless of what happens afterward, just as baptism’s mark remains even in someone who apostasizes and later returns. What this means practically is that the quality of your preparation, the genuineness of your intention, and the honesty of your commitment at the moment of confirmation are the only opportunity you will ever have to receive this particular sacrament with full awareness. Unlike confession, which you can receive repeatedly throughout your life in an ongoing process of renewal, confirmation happens once. The Church asks that candidates for confirmation be in a state of grace, have prepared through appropriate formation, have the intention to receive the sacrament and to live the faith it commits them to, and have chosen a sponsor who will support them in living that commitment (CCC 1310-1311). Meeting these requirements as an adult, when you have the full capacity for informed and free consent, is actually a significant advantage over receiving confirmation as a child or early adolescent whose understanding of the commitment was necessarily limited. Use that advantage. Be prepared. Be honest about where you are spiritually. Go to confession before your confirmation. And approach the sacrament with the full weight of what it is rather than as a formality to be completed.

The Preparation Process Varies Enormously and You Need to Know What Your Diocese Requires

One of the genuinely frustrating aspects of seeking adult confirmation as a baptized Catholic is that the preparation process is not uniform across dioceses or even across parishes within the same diocese. Some dioceses have a specific adult confirmation program that runs separately from OCIA and is designed for baptized Catholics who have already received First Communion but were never confirmed. Other dioceses route all unconfirmed adults through the full OCIA program alongside unbaptized candidates and those seeking full communion, which means you may end up spending a full year in a program designed primarily for people who need much more foundational formation than you do. Some parishes handle adult confirmation through brief individual meetings with the pastor, a few months of preparation, and reception at a diocesan confirmation Mass. Others require six months to a year of formal classes. The diversity of practice reflects a genuine pastoral judgment by local bishops about what level of preparation most adequately forms candidates for a sacrament whose obligations are serious, but it can be confusing and sometimes frustrating for an adult who knows the faith reasonably well and simply wants to complete the sacramental initiation that was not finished in childhood. Your first practical step is to contact your parish directly and explain your specific situation, including when you were baptized, whether you received First Communion, and why confirmation was never received. From that conversation, the pastor or pastoral associate can direct you to the appropriate program for your specific circumstances. Do not assume you know which program applies to you without asking, because the answer varies and the assumption that you need the full OCIA program or conversely that you can receive confirmation after a single meeting with the pastor may both be wrong depending on your specific parish and diocese.

The Bishop Is the Ordinary Minister and the Experience Will Be More Public Than You Expect

Many adults approaching confirmation for the first time imagine a quiet, intimate ceremony in a small chapel with a few witnesses. The reality in most dioceses is considerably more public and more formal than that, and knowing this ahead of time helps you arrive prepared rather than surprised. The bishop of the diocese is the ordinary minister of confirmation, meaning that the normal and preferred way to celebrate this sacrament is through the bishop personally presiding (CCC 1313). In practice, this means that most diocesan adult confirmation ceremonies are large events held at a cathedral or at a parish designated for the occasion, attended by multiple candidates from across the diocese and often by the candidates’ sponsors, families, and parish communities. The bishop delivers a homily, typically confirms a significant number of people in a single ceremony, and the entire Mass can run considerably longer than a standard Sunday liturgy. If you received confirmation through the OCIA process at the Easter Vigil, the priest who ran the program may have been delegated by the bishop to confirm you, making the experience more intimate and parish-based. But for adults completing confirmation outside of OCIA, the most common path is the diocesan confirmation Mass at which the bishop presides. This public character of the sacrament is not incidental. It reflects the Church’s understanding that confirmation is not a private spiritual transaction but a public ecclesial act that strengthens your bond with the Church and commissions you visibly for the Church’s mission in the world. Be ready for the public dimension of the event, bring your sponsor and whatever family members wish to attend, and treat the Mass with the full preparation and reverence it deserves rather than approaching it as a bureaucratic step to clear quickly.

Your Sponsor Is More Than a Formality and Choosing the Right Person Matters

The Church requires a sponsor for confirmation, and the requirements for who can serve in that role are specific (CCC 1311). A confirmation sponsor must be a confirmed and practicing Catholic who has received all three sacraments of initiation, must be at least sixteen years of age, must not be the candidate’s parent, and must be capable of helping the candidate grow in the faith after confirmation. Many adults seeking confirmation treat the sponsor requirement as a bureaucratic formality, quickly identifying a Catholic friend or relative who is willing to show up and placing one hand on the candidate’s shoulder during the anointing. This approach technically fulfills the requirement but misses the actual purpose of the sponsor relationship. The sponsor’s role is to be a witness to the candidate’s readiness for confirmation, to support them in their preparation, and to serve as a committed companion in Catholic life after the sacrament is received. For an adult who has been away from the Church for years, or who is reconnecting with the faith in a serious way for the first time, a genuinely invested sponsor can be one of the most practically useful supports available. Choosing someone who is themselves a serious and practicing Catholic, who knows the faith well enough to answer questions, who will pray for you during your preparation, and who will maintain the relationship after confirmation rather than considering their role complete at the end of the ceremony, is worth considerable thought and honest conversation. If you do not know who to ask, speak with your pastor or OCIA director about finding a suitable sponsor within the parish community. A good sponsor is too valuable to choose carelessly.

The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit Are Real Theological Realities, Not Motivational Slogans

Adult confirmation preparation almost always includes some discussion of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord, and those discussions are often superficial enough to leave candidates with the impression that the gifts are a kind of spiritual checklist of virtues rather than genuine and specific ways in which the Holy Spirit strengthens the Catholic life. The Catechism is specific about what these gifts are and where they come from (CCC 1831). They are not merely natural capacities that the sacrament enhances. They are genuine gifts of the Spirit that belong in their fullness to Christ and that are communicated to those who receive the sacrament of confirmation in order to complete and perfect the virtues of the Christian life. Wisdom allows a person to judge all things in light of God and his purposes, rather than through the narrow lens of immediate circumstances or personal preference. Understanding penetrates the truths of the faith more deeply than ordinary study alone can achieve. Counsel guides specific moral choices in complex situations where the right course of action is not immediately obvious. Fortitude gives the strength to hold to the faith and to live morally in the face of opposition, difficulty, and the temptation to compromise. Knowledge helps the confirmed person see the created world accurately in relation to God, neither overvaluing nor dismissing it. Piety cultivates the filial reverence toward God as Father that is proper to a child of God. Fear of the Lord, properly understood, is not servile fear of punishment but a reverence for God’s majesty and a genuine dread of offending him. These are real theological realities and they become operative in your life through the cooperation of your own will, your prayer, and your ongoing sacramental life. Knowing what they actually are before confirmation gives you something specific and substantive to bring into your prayer and your ongoing Catholic formation after the sacrament is received.

The Anointing With Chrism Is Brief and You Should Know What It Means

The actual moment of confirmation, the anointing with sacred chrism, is brief enough that many people experience it as almost anticlimactically short given the preparation that preceded it. The bishop or priest places his hand on the candidate’s head, anoints the forehead with sacred chrism, which is a blend of olive oil and balsam consecrated by the bishop at the Chrism Mass each year on or near Holy Thursday, and says the words “Be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit.” The candidate responds “Amen.” The exchange is done. That brevity can feel disorienting to someone who expected something more elaborate or more emotionally intense. Understanding what the anointing and the words mean helps you receive the moment with genuine attentiveness rather than feeling you missed something. The laying on of hands recalls the apostolic practice described in Acts 8:17, where Peter and John lay hands on the baptized Samaritans and they receive the Holy Spirit, and throughout the New Testament as a sign of commissioning and blessing. The anointing with chrism connects the newly confirmed to Christ, whose very name means “the anointed one,” and it signals a participation in his prophetic, priestly, and royal mission (CCC 1295). The specific words of the rite, “Be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit,” express the permanent and irrevocable character that the sacrament imprints on the soul. The sign of peace that follows is the bishop’s acknowledgment of the newly confirmed as a full soldier of Christ, a phrase the tradition has used to describe the mission that confirmation confirms. None of this requires an emotional peak at the moment of anointing. It requires an informed and attentive reception of what the Church teaches is genuinely happening in that brief and simple rite.

Adult Confirmation Carries Real Obligations That Change How You Should Be Living

This is the point that most adult confirmation preparation programs underemphasize, and it is the one that most consistently surprises newly confirmed Catholics when they discover it later. The Church teaches that confirmation more strictly obliges the confirmed person to spread and defend the faith by word and deed (CCC 1285). This is not a suggestion or a pious aspiration. It is a genuine obligation that confirmation places on every person who receives it. Before confirmation, a Catholic’s primary obligation regarding the faith is to practice it faithfully in their own life. After confirmation, the Church recognizes an additional obligation to be an active witness to the faith in the world, to defend it when it is challenged or misrepresented, and to contribute to its spread through both the example of a genuinely lived Catholic life and the explicit communication of the faith when circumstances call for it. This obligation does not mean you are required to become a professional apologist or a street preacher. It does mean that confirmation is not compatible with a passive, purely private form of Catholic practice in which you attend Mass and go to confession but otherwise treat your faith as a personal matter entirely separate from your public and social life. The confirmed Catholic is called to bring Catholic moral reasoning into their professional decisions, their civic engagement, their parenting, their friendships, and their cultural life in ways that make the faith visible and operative in the world. Many adults receive confirmation with no awareness of this dimension of the sacrament and are surprised when they begin to understand it. Know it before you are confirmed so that you receive the sacrament as a full and informed commitment rather than discovering its implications only after the fact.

Choosing a Confirmation Name Is Optional for Adults but Worth Thinking About Seriously

In many dioceses and parishes, confirmation candidates choose a confirmation name, the name of a saint who will serve as their patron and whose example and intercession they invoke as part of their Catholic life. For adults being confirmed, this practice is optional in the strict sense but worth serious consideration for reasons that go beyond sentiment or tradition. Choosing a confirmation name is an act of claiming a specific saint as a companion and model, and the quality of that choice reflects the quality of your engagement with the Catholic tradition of the saints. Many adults receive confirmation using their baptismal name, which is entirely acceptable, particularly when that name is itself a saint’s name. Others choose a name specifically for confirmation, selecting a saint whose life intersects with their own story, whose spiritual charism resonates with where they are in their faith, or whose intercession they feel they particularly need. The process of choosing a confirmation name honestly, meaning actually reading the life of the saint you are considering, engaging with their writing if they left any, and making the choice with genuine knowledge of who you are claiming as your patron rather than simply picking a name that sounds pleasing, is one of the most productive spiritual exercises of the confirmation preparation period. If you choose a confirmation name, the saint whose name you take becomes a permanent part of your spiritual identity in a specific way. Picking that saint casually is a missed opportunity. Picking that saint thoughtfully, after prayer and honest consideration of where you are in your faith and what kind of Catholic you are being called to become, is one of the small choices that genuinely shapes Catholic life over the long term.

The State of Grace Is Required Before Confirmation, Which Means Going to Confession First

The Church teaches clearly that to receive confirmation worthily, a candidate must be in a state of grace, meaning free from mortal sin, and that reception of the sacrament of penance in preparation is recommended as a means of cleansing the soul for the gift of the Holy Spirit (CCC 1310). For an adult who has been away from regular practice of the faith, this means that going to confession before confirmation is not merely advisable but genuinely important. If you have been away from the sacraments for a significant period, you will need to make a general confession covering serious sins committed during that period before you present yourself for confirmation. That general confession does not need to be exhaustive in every detail, but it does need to be honest and complete in naming the serious sins you are aware of, with genuine contrition and a sincere purpose of amendment. Many adults who are preparing for confirmation have not been to confession in years, and the prospect of that confession can feel more daunting than the confirmation itself. The honest advice is to approach it directly and early in your preparation rather than leaving it until the day before. Arriving at confirmation with a recently cleansed conscience and a renewed reception of God’s grace in confession changes your disposition for the sacrament itself in ways that are spiritually real, even if they are not always emotionally perceptible. A good confessor who is experienced with returning Catholics will help you make the confession you need to make without turning it into a humiliating experience. Ask your pastor or OCIA director for a referral if you are uncertain who to approach.

The Emotional Experience of Confirmation May Not Be What You Expected

Adults preparing for confirmation often arrive with significant expectations about what the experience of the sacrament will feel like. They may expect a clear sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence, a feeling of peace or joy or spiritual clarity, a decisive interior shift that marks the moment of anointing as unmistakably significant. Some people do report a genuine sense of peace or consolation during or after their confirmation. Many others report an experience that is quiet, ordinary, and emotionally unremarkable, with the significance of the sacrament becoming clearer over weeks and months rather than in the moment itself. The Church’s teaching is clear that sacraments are efficacious, meaning they accomplish what they signify, regardless of the emotional experience of the recipient at the moment of reception (CCC 1127-1128). The grace of confirmation is real whether or not you feel it immediately. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are genuinely given whether or not you notice them working in you on the day you receive the anointing. This is important to know before confirmation because unrealistic emotional expectations, when not met, can produce a confusing kind of spiritual deflation in the days after the sacrament. If your confirmation feels quiet, do not interpret that quietness as a sign that something went wrong, that your faith is insufficient, or that the sacrament did not take. Trust the theology. Live the commitment you made. Pay attention over the following months to how the gifts of wisdom, counsel, and fortitude begin to shape your responses to situations where they are needed. The evidence of confirmation’s grace often shows up most clearly not in the moment of the anointing but in the moments afterward when you act differently than you would have before.

Life After Confirmation Still Requires Active Investment in Your Formation

A mistake many newly confirmed Catholics make is treating confirmation as the completion of their formation rather than as a new stage within an ongoing process of growth. Because confirmation is the final sacrament of initiation and because it is often treated in popular Catholic culture as a graduation, there is a persistent tendency to feel that receiving it has completed the required religious work and that no further sustained effort at formation is necessary. The Church teaches the opposite. Confirmation strengthens the confirmed person for the ongoing mission of Christian life, but the sacrament does not substitute for the daily practice of prayer, the regular reception of the Eucharist and confession, ongoing theological and spiritual reading, and the active engagement with Catholic community that sustains and deepens the faith over a lifetime (CCC 1428). The gifts of the Holy Spirit given in confirmation do not operate automatically or without cooperation. Wisdom requires you to actually seek understanding and to bring faith to bear on your judgments. Fortitude requires you to act on the strength it gives rather than leaving it latent. Counsel requires you to actually pray for guidance when facing moral complexity rather than relying solely on your own instincts. The newly confirmed adult who wants to make the most of what the sacrament confers will invest in ongoing formation through regular spiritual reading, through finding a spiritual director, through active participation in a parish community that takes the faith seriously, and through the daily practice of prayer that keeps the relationship with God genuinely alive rather than merely officially registered. Confirmation begins something. What comes after is shaped by the choices you make about how seriously you take the obligation it places on you.

The Sacrament Connects You to a Long History of Confirmed Catholics Who Changed the World

One of the consoling and genuinely motivating realities of receiving adult confirmation is entering into the full company of confirmed Catholics whose lives were shaped by the same sacrament you are about to receive. Every martyr of the early Church who died rather than deny the faith was a confirmed Catholic. Every doctor of the Church whose writing has shaped Catholic theology for centuries was confirmed. Every saint whose life is honored in the Church’s liturgical calendar, from Francis of Assisi to Teresa of Avila to Thomas More to Edith Stein, received the same anointing you are preparing to receive, and the same Holy Spirit whose gifts were conferred on them is the Spirit who will be given to you. This is not mere religious sentiment. It is a claim about the communion of the Church, the unbroken chain of confirmed believers whose lives in the Spirit have been sustained by the same sacrament across twenty centuries. You are not doing something new when you are confirmed as an adult. You are completing something that connects you to the entire living body of Christ in a way that baptism begins and the Eucharist sustains but confirmation specifically seals and strengthens. Many adults who receive confirmation with genuine preparation and genuine intention report that the most significant change in their Catholic life is not dramatic or sudden but shows up gradually over months and years in a greater capacity to hold to the faith under pressure, to bring Catholic wisdom to difficult situations, to pray with more focus and less distraction, and to feel genuinely at home in the Church in a way they had not quite felt before. That gradual deepening is the sacrament working in you through your cooperation, and it is exactly what the Church intends when it confirms adults with the full understanding of what they are receiving.

Confirmation Is a Beginning, Not a Completion, and You Should Approach It That Way

Everything discussed in this article points toward the same honest conclusion. Adult confirmation is one of the most theologically significant moments of your Catholic life precisely because you are receiving it as an adult with the full capacity for informed and free commitment. That capacity is both a gift and a responsibility. It means your yes to this sacrament is a genuinely adult yes, made with whatever understanding and intention your honest preparation produced. It means the obligations it places on you, to spread and defend the faith, to cooperate with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to live the full Catholic moral life with greater seriousness and consistency, are obligations you are accepting with open eyes rather than with the limited understanding of a child or adolescent. And it means the grace it confers is received into a soul that can respond to it with a maturity and deliberateness that a younger recipient may not yet have. The Church does not guarantee that adult confirmation will produce a dramatic transformation in your spiritual life in the weeks after the anointing. What it does guarantee, on the basis of Christ’s own institution of this sacrament and the Holy Spirit’s fidelity to the Church’s sacramental life, is that the grace is given, the gifts are conferred, and the permanent mark of a confirmed Catholic is placed on your soul as a reality that will shape your entire remaining Catholic life. Come prepared. Come honestly. Come having made your confession and having thought seriously about the commitment you are making. Come with a sponsor who takes the role seriously and a confirmation name chosen with genuine reflection. And come knowing that what you are receiving is not a certificate of completion but a commissioning for everything that comes after.