Things You Should Know Before You Are Received Into Full Communion

Brief Overview

• Being received into full communion is the specific process by which an already-baptized Christian formally enters the Catholic Church, and it is categorically different from the baptism received by someone who has never been baptized before.
• You are not being re-baptized, you are not starting your Christian life over, and the Church explicitly recognizes the validity of your prior baptism and the genuine Christian life you lived before this moment.
• The rite itself involves a public profession of faith, confirmation, and your first reception of the Eucharist, and understanding what each of those three acts actually means is essential before you stand in front of the congregation to make them.
• Full communion carries the full weight of Catholic moral teaching, the full obligation of sacramental practice, and the full set of canonical rights and responsibilities of a Catholic, and you carry all of that from the moment you are received, not gradually over time.
• The practical life changes that follow reception into full communion are real and sometimes surprising, particularly in areas like marriage law, Sunday obligation, and the regular use of the sacrament of reconciliation.
• Many people who are received into full communion later say they wished someone had told them that the moment of reception is not the end of a formation process but the formal beginning of a sacramental life that requires ongoing investment and deliberate practice.

Full Communion Is Not the Same as Baptism and the Difference Matters

The first thing you need to understand clearly before you are received into full communion is what the rite actually is and what it is not. Reception into full communion is the formal process by which an already-baptized Christian enters into the complete sacramental and institutional life of the Catholic Church. It is not a second baptism. It is not a conversion in the sense of a first commitment to Christ. It is not a declaration that everything you believed and practiced before was false or worthless. The Church teaches that baptism incorporates a person into Christ and confers a permanent spiritual character that can never be removed or repeated (CCC 1272). Because your baptism in another Christian community was valid, the Church regards you as already incorporated into Christ, already bearing the mark of baptism on your soul, and already in a real, though incomplete, form of communion with the Catholic Church (CCC 1271). What you are doing when you are received is not beginning the Christian life but completing your initiation into the fullness of what the Church offers, specifically confirmation and the Eucharist, which together with baptism constitute the three sacraments of Christian initiation (CCC 1212). This distinction is important for your own self-understanding. Many people who come through the OCIA process alongside unbaptized catechumens find that their formation experience blurs this distinction, treating everyone in the group as though they are in the same situation. The Church’s own ritual documents are clear that the reception of baptized candidates should be distinguished from the initiation of catechumens, precisely because the two groups are not in the same situation before God. Knowing that you are completing initiation rather than beginning it changes how you approach the rite and what you expect it to mean.

What You Are Publicly Committing to in the Profession of Faith

The profession of faith is the central act of the rite of reception into full communion, and its significance is easy to underestimate if no one explains it clearly beforehand. In the rite, you publicly declare your belief in the Catholic faith as the Church teaches it, including the specific doctrines and moral teachings that define Catholic Christianity. This is not a general statement of faith in Christ, the kind you may have made at your confirmation in another tradition or at an altar call in an Evangelical church. It is a specific commitment to the Catholic understanding of Scripture and Tradition together as the sources of revelation, to the authority of the Magisterium to interpret that revelation, to the seven sacraments and their specific theological meanings, to the Catholic understanding of the Church as the body of Christ founded by Christ himself, and to the moral teaching of the Church as binding on your life (CCC 837). The profession of faith is made publicly, in front of the congregation, and that public character is not incidental. You are not making a private spiritual decision. You are making a formal commitment before the Church, which will hold you accountable to what you have said. Many candidates arrive at the profession of faith having worked through much of the theology intellectually but without having honestly examined whether they accept every element of Catholic teaching in the areas that will actually change how they live. Before you make the profession, go through the Nicene Creed and the Church’s core moral teaching carefully and honestly, and be certain that you are not simply hoping that certain difficult teachings will become acceptable once you are fully inside the Church. The profession you are making is not conditional or partial. It is complete and it is public.

Confirmation Is a Sacrament, Not a Ceremony, and You Need to Prepare for It Properly

Most people being received into full communion in adulthood come from traditions where confirmation either does not exist at all or is treated as a graduation ceremony at the end of childhood religious education. In the Catholic Church, confirmation is one of the three sacraments of initiation, and its theological significance is specific and serious. The Church teaches that confirmation perfects the grace of baptism, seals the recipient with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and strengthens the confirmed person for the mission of living and witnessing the faith in the world (CCC 1285, CCC 1303). This is not ceremonial language. It describes a real sacramental action that the Church believes accomplishes something genuine in the soul of the recipient. Like baptism, confirmation leaves a permanent spiritual mark or character on the soul, which is why it can only be received once (CCC 1304-1305). The sacrament is administered through the anointing of the forehead with sacred chrism oil and the laying on of hands by the confirming minister, accompanied by the specific words of the rite. At the Easter Vigil or at the rite of reception, the pastor of the parish is typically delegated by the bishop to confirm, so in most cases you will receive confirmation from your parish priest. What this means practically is that you should arrive at the moment of confirmation with a genuine understanding of what the sacrament is and does, not simply as a step to complete before you can receive communion. The Holy Spirit does not require that you feel anything in particular at the moment of anointing, and the absence of dramatic emotional experience does not mean the sacrament did not work. What it does require is that you approach it with faith, preparation, and genuine openness to what the Church teaches the sacrament accomplishes.

Receiving the Eucharist for the First Time as a Catholic Is More Significant Than It May Feel

For most candidates being received into full communion, the reception of first Eucharist at the Easter Vigil or at the rite of reception is the moment they have been anticipating throughout their formation. If you come from a Protestant tradition that celebrates communion regularly, you have been receiving what your tradition believes communion to be for years. What changes at reception is that you are now receiving what the Catholic Church believes the Eucharist to be, which is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ truly and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine (CCC 1374). This is not the same thing as receiving a symbolic memorial of the Last Supper. It is not the same as receiving communion in a sense that varies by denomination. It is receiving the actual Christ, whole and entire, in the consecrated host. That is a categorical difference, and approaching first communion with that understanding changes everything about how you receive. The Church requires that you be in a state of grace, meaning free from unconfessed mortal sin, before you receive (CCC 1385), which is why a good confession before the Easter Vigil is essential for candidates who have reached the age of reason. The Church also asks that you observe the eucharistic fast, abstaining from food and drink except for water and medicine for at least one hour before reception (CCC 1387). For many candidates, the emotional experience of first communion is significant and memorable. For others, it is quieter and more interior than they expected, and there is nothing wrong with that. What matters is the theological reality of what you received, not the intensity of your feelings about it. Let the experience be whatever it is honestly, and trust that the sacrament accomplished what the Church says it accomplishes regardless of how you felt in the moment.

You Are Taking on the Full Obligations of Catholic Practice From Day One

This is one of the areas where honest formation programs do a genuine service to candidates by being direct, and where less thorough programs leave people surprised after the fact. The moment you are received into full communion, you bear the full obligations of Catholic practice. The Sunday obligation, which requires attending Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation under pain of serious moral failure, applies to you immediately and completely (CCC 2181). The obligation to receive communion at least once a year during the Easter season, and to receive the sacrament of reconciliation at least once a year if you are aware of mortal sin, applies to you from reception onward (CCC 1457). If you marry, you marry under Catholic marriage law, which means a Catholic marriage is presumed to be valid and permanent and that the Church’s law governs what happens if your marriage encounters serious difficulty. If you have children after reception, you take on the obligation to raise them in the Catholic faith (CCC 2225). These obligations are not phased in gradually over a period of adjustment. They come with reception itself, all of them at once, and the Church does not offer a grace period during which you are considered still in formation and therefore exempt. Most people who are well-formed in OCIA are prepared for this, because a good program covers the obligations of Catholic life as part of standard formation. But it is worth stating directly because some programs spend so much time on the spiritual and theological content of the faith that they underemphasize the practical and canonical obligations that come with membership. Know what you are taking on before you stand in the sanctuary to make your profession, not as a burden to dread but as a clear commitment you are making with full knowledge.

Your Prior Marriage History Is a Legal Matter for the Church and Needs to Be Addressed Before Reception

If you were married before, the circumstances of that prior marriage will affect your ability to be received into full communion and to receive the Eucharist. This is the area that most surprises people who are not fully formed on Catholic marriage law, and it is one that can delay or complicate reception if it is not addressed early in the OCIA process. When a validly baptized Christian is received into full communion, any marriage they contracted before reception is also brought under scrutiny by the Church. If your prior marriage was between a baptized person and another baptized person, celebrated in a proper form, the Church regards it as a valid sacramental marriage that cannot be dissolved. If you are still in that marriage, your situation is straightforward. If that marriage ended in divorce and you have since entered another civil union or marriage, you are in an irregular situation that prevents you from receiving the sacraments until it is resolved (CCC 1650). The resolution typically involves pursuing a declaration of nullity, commonly called an annulment, which is a formal investigation by a Church tribunal into whether the conditions for a valid sacramental marriage were present at the time of the original ceremony. This process takes time, sometimes six months to a year or more, and it requires documentation and personal testimony. The important thing is to bring your full marriage history to your OCIA director or pastor at the very beginning of your formation process, not at the end when Easter is approaching and there is no time to address it properly. Many candidates discover too late that their marital situation needs resolution, and they end up postponing reception not because of anything in their spiritual formation but because of a practical canonical issue that could have been addressed months earlier if anyone had asked the right questions upfront.

The Rite of Reception Itself Is Brief and Can Feel Anticlimactic, and That Is Worth Knowing

Many candidates spend a year or more in OCIA formation, building toward a moment of reception that they have imagined as a culminating and emotionally significant event. The rite of reception into full communion, in its actual liturgical form, is relatively brief. It typically includes the profession of faith, the act of reception by the priest who places his hand on the candidate’s shoulder and formally declares them received into full communion, then confirmation through anointing with sacred chrism, and then participation in the Mass leading to first Eucharist. The entire sequence within the Mass takes only a few minutes in a liturgical sense, even if the surrounding Mass is the Easter Vigil, which is itself a lengthy celebration. Some candidates find the moment genuinely significant and emotionally moving. Others find it quieter and less intense than they expected, and that gap between expectation and experience can leave people feeling confused or wondering whether they did something wrong or whether their faith is less real than they thought. The honest answer is that sacramental reality and emotional experience are not the same thing. The sacraments accomplish what they signify regardless of how you feel at the moment of reception, because sacramental efficacy depends on Christ’s action through the Church, not on the intensity of the recipient’s emotional response (CCC 1127-1128). If your reception feels quiet or ordinary, that is not a spiritual problem. It is simply the gap between the invisible reality the sacrament creates and the visible simplicity of the rite through which it is accomplished. Let the experience be what it is, and trust that the theological reality is deeper than any feeling can fully capture.

You Will Still Be Expected to Go to Confession Before the Rite, Even If You Feel Spiritually Clean

One of the points that surprises many candidates being received into full communion is the expectation that they make a sacramental confession before receiving the Eucharist at their rite of reception. If you have been living a serious and morally upright Christian life before your reception, you may wonder what there is to confess. The answer involves understanding how the Church thinks about mortal sin and the sacrament of reconciliation in the context of reception into full communion. Before your reception, you were not bound by all of the obligations of Catholic practice, and some actions that constitute serious matter for a Catholic may not have carried the same weight of obligation for you while outside the Church. However, sins that are objectively serious by the moral law, including those against the dignity of human life, against the obligations of sexual fidelity, against justice, and against the obligations of worship, remain serious matters regardless of your canonical status. If you are aware of having committed mortal sins, meaning serious offenses committed with full knowledge and full consent, the Church asks you to confess them before receiving the Eucharist (CCC 1457). The general practice in OCIA programs is to offer candidates a time of preparation for confession in the weeks before the Easter Vigil or the rite of reception. If your program does not provide this clearly, ask for it directly. The sacrament of reconciliation is not a judgment on how well you have done in your preparation. It is the proper sacramental preparation for worthy reception of the Eucharist, and approaching the Eucharist for the first time as a Catholic in a state of grace and with a conscience cleansed by honest confession is exactly the right way to begin your sacramental life in the Church.

The People Around You in OCIA Are Not All in the Same Situation as You

One of the commonly overlooked realities of the OCIA process is that the candidates sitting in the room with you are in genuinely different canonical and sacramental situations, and the formation program’s tendency to group everyone together can obscure distinctions that actually matter. Unbaptized catechumens are in a fundamentally different situation from baptized candidates seeking full communion. Catechumens have not yet received any sacrament. They enter the catechumenate, a formal liturgical status, and they are considered already related to the Church in a meaningful way by virtue of their intention and their formation (CCC 1249), but they have not yet been incorporated into Christ through baptism. Candidates for full communion, by contrast, have already been baptized into Christ, already bear the permanent mark of baptism, and already belong to Christ in a real sacramental sense. The Church’s ritual documents make clear that these two groups should ideally be formed and celebrated separately, precisely because they represent different ecclesial situations. In many parishes, however, resource constraints mean everyone goes through the same sessions together, which can blur these important distinctions in the minds of candidates. You should know clearly which category you are in and what that means for your specific formation needs. If you are a baptized candidate, your formation should include particular attention to the specific ways Catholic belief and practice differ from the tradition you are coming from. If the program you are in does not make this distinction clearly, ask your catechist to help you understand how your path differs from that of the unbaptized candidates in the group, because the answer to that question is theologically significant and practically important for your preparation.

The Profession of Faith Includes Accepting Church Authority, Not Just Church Doctrine

The profession of faith you make at reception into full communion involves more than assenting to a list of doctrinal positions. It includes accepting the authority by which those doctrinal positions are held and defined, which is the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, the Magisterium, expressed through the pope and the bishops in communion with him. The Church teaches that those fully incorporated into her society accept her governing structure, her sacramental life, and the bonds of visible communion, including communion with the pope (CCC 837). This is a practical and operational commitment, not just a theoretical one. It means that when the Church defines a doctrine or issues a binding moral teaching, you accept that teaching as authoritative and not as one option among many. For candidates coming from traditions that place high value on individual judgment and personal interpretation of Scripture, this is a real and sometimes difficult adjustment. You are not being asked to turn off your intellect or to accept everything without question. You are being asked to accept the Catholic account of how divine truth is transmitted and authoritatively interpreted, which includes the conviction that the Magisterium has been given the authority to teach definitively on matters of faith and morals (CCC 891-892). Living under that authority in practice means that when you encounter a Church teaching you find difficult, your first response should be to seek to understand it rather than to simply reject it on the grounds of personal preference. Many people who are received into full communion discover, months or years later, that this commitment to Church authority is the one they underestimated most in their preparation. Take it seriously from the beginning, because it shapes every other aspect of Catholic life.

Your Protestant Formation Was Genuinely Valuable and You Should Not Discard It Carelessly

A temptation that some newly received Catholics fall into, particularly those who came through a rigorous intellectual conversion process, is a tendency to look back on their Protestant formation with a kind of embarrassed dismissal, as though everything they learned and practiced before entering the Church was at best a pale preparation and at worst a series of errors to be corrected. The Church does not hold this view, and adopting it is both theologically inaccurate and personally harmful. The Catechism is clear that the communities from which Christians seeking full communion come are genuine ecclesial communities in which the Holy Spirit works, in which Scripture is honored, and in which sincere Christian life is possible and real (CCC 819). The faith, love for Scripture, commitment to prayer, and genuine encounter with Christ that you developed in your prior tradition were real goods. The intellectual and moral formation you received in a serious Protestant community is a genuine asset that you bring into the Church with you. What you are doing in reception is not replacing what you had but completing it, adding to genuine and real Christian formation the fullness of the sacramental life, the Eucharist, the complete sacramental system, the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, and the full inheritance of the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition. Carry your Protestant formation with gratitude rather than embarrassment. It prepared you for where you now stand. The best Catholic intellectual tradition, from Newman to Chesterton to Scott Hahn, shows clearly that Protestant roots honestly engaged, rather than hastily discarded, often produce some of the most well-formed and articulate Catholics in the Church.

Your Existing Friendships and Family Relationships Will Experience Real Tension

Being received into full communion with the Catholic Church is not a neutral event in your relational world. If you come from a serious Protestant family, your reception will carry a meaning for them that goes beyond a simple change of church affiliation. For many Protestant families, Catholicism represents precisely what the Reformation opposed, a church they believe substituted tradition and institutional authority for the pure gospel. Your reception may feel to them like a departure from the faith rather than a deepening of it, and that perception is held with genuine conviction rather than simple misunderstanding. The relational strain this creates is real and it can be painful. Parents may grieve. Siblings may become distant. Friends from your Protestant community may pull away or engage you in sustained theological debate that you may not always feel equipped to handle gracefully. The Church does not ask you to cut these relationships or to treat your Protestant family with contempt. The Catechism is explicit that other Christians are genuine brothers and sisters in Christ by virtue of their baptism (CCC 1271), and the Church’s attitude toward separated Christians is one of respect and genuine desire for unity rather than triumphalism. What the Church does ask is that you hold your Catholic identity with genuine conviction and without apology, while maintaining charity and patience in relationships where your faith is challenged or misunderstood. That balance is genuinely difficult to maintain, and it helps enormously to have a spiritual director or a trusted Catholic community that supports you through the relational adjustments that follow reception. Being honest with yourself about the cost of reception before you make it is part of making it with full and informed freedom.

Life After Reception Requires Active Investment, Not Passive Presence

One of the most honest things that can be said to someone preparing for reception into full communion is this: being received into the Church opens a door, but walking through it in a meaningful way for the rest of your life requires choices you make every single day. The enthusiasm and clarity that many candidates experience during formation and at the Easter Vigil or rite of reception tends to fade within months, replaced by the ordinary demands of daily Catholic life in which prayer sometimes feels dry, Mass sometimes feels routine, and the difficulty of living the Church’s moral teaching is more apparent than its beauty. This is normal. It is the experience of virtually every serious Catholic, including those who have been practicing faithfully for decades. The Catechism describes ongoing conversion as the normal state of the Christian life, and it emphasizes that this ongoing conversion is nourished by the sacraments, by prayer, by the practice of virtue, and by active engagement with the community of the Church (CCC 1428). After your reception, the single most important decision you make is whether to keep showing up, to keep going to Mass weekly, to keep receiving the sacraments regularly, to keep praying even when it is dry, and to keep seeking formation through reading and community even when the momentum of OCIA has faded. The people who leave the Church within a few years of reception are rarely those who encountered a specific theological problem they could not resolve. They are almost always those who stopped investing in the daily habits of Catholic life and found that without those habits, the faith slowly became abstract and eventually irrelevant. Do not let that happen to you. Build the habits deliberately and protect them as the essential structure of your Catholic life.

The Mystagogy Period After Reception Is Designed to Help You and Most Parishes Neglect It

Very few people being received into full communion have heard of mystagogy before they encounter it in formation, and even fewer parishes implement it well. Mystagogy is the period following the Easter Vigil, covering the weeks of the Easter season, during which the newly initiated gather to reflect on the sacraments they have received and to begin integrating their experience into a sustained Catholic life. The Church intends this as a structured continuation of formation, not a social gathering or a brief celebration before the OCIA group disbands. The OCIA documents make clear that this period is meant to deepen the newly received person’s understanding of the sacraments from the inside, using the experience of having received them as the starting point for a richer theological reflection than was possible before the Easter Vigil. In practice, many parishes treat mystagogy as an optional add-on, hold only one or two sessions after Easter, or skip it entirely once the Vigil has passed and the catechetical year is considered complete. If your parish provides genuine mystagogy sessions in the weeks after Easter, attend them seriously and use the time to ask the questions that arose during and after the Vigil. If your parish does not provide them, seek out the content yourself through Catholic reading, through conversation with a spiritual director, and through continued engagement with the theological questions your reception raised. The weeks immediately after reception are among the most formative of your entire Catholic life, and leaving them entirely unstructured wastes an opportunity that the Church’s own wisdom identifies as significant. Do not let the excitement of the Vigil give way to spiritual drift simply because the formal program has ended.

Canon Law Now Applies to You in Ways You Have Not Previously Considered

When you are received into full communion, you become subject to the full body of Canon Law as it applies to Latin Rite Catholics, and that is a practical reality with specific consequences that most formation programs do not explain in sufficient detail. Canon Law governs how Catholics marry, how they may be buried, what obligations they bear regarding worship and the sacraments, what rights they have within the Church, and a range of other matters affecting Catholic life. For most Catholics in ordinary circumstances, Canon Law operates quietly in the background and rarely requires direct engagement. But there are specific areas where its provisions become immediately relevant for newly received Catholics. If you marry after reception, you must marry in the Catholic form, meaning before a Catholic priest or deacon and two witnesses, unless you have received a dispensation from the bishop allowing otherwise (CCC 1631). If you were previously married, the canonical status of that prior marriage will affect what options are available to you for future sacramental marriage. If you change your mind about being Catholic after reception, you cannot simply un-receive yourself by declaration, because the sacramental mark of baptism and confirmation remains (CCC 1272, CCC 1304). Understanding that Canon Law is not an arbitrary bureaucratic overlay but a coherent system ordered toward the good of souls and the integrity of the sacramental life helps you approach it as part of the life you have committed to rather than as an external imposition. Ask your OCIA director or parish priest early in your preparation about the specific canonical implications of your situation, particularly if you have a prior marriage, children from a prior relationship, or other circumstances that might intersect with Church law in specific ways.

What You Are Entering Is a Church With a Real History of Both Sanctity and Failure

Being received into full communion means entering a Church that has both the greatest saints in human history and some of the most significant institutional failures in recorded religious history. Holding both of those realities clearly and without flinching is part of what honest Catholic membership requires. The Church has produced Augustine, Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Maximilian Kolbe, and thousands of other men and women whose lives were extraordinary examples of faith, charity, and courageous holiness. It has also been the institutional home of the Borgia papacy, the conduct of certain Inquisition tribunals, and most recently the clerical sexual abuse crisis and the episcopal failures that compounded it. The Church does not ask you to pretend the failures did not happen or to minimize their gravity. Its own theology is clear that the Church is both holy, by virtue of its divine foundation and the grace that operates within it, and wounded by the sin of its human members, at every level of the institution (CCC 827). Entering the Church with a clear-eyed view of both its sanctity and its failures is more intellectually honest and ultimately more spiritually stable than entering with a romanticized view that will be shattered by the first serious encounter with institutional failure. The question to ask yourself before reception is not whether the Church is perfect, because it clearly is not. The question is whether you believe it is what it claims to be, the Church founded by Christ, sustained by the Holy Spirit, and entrusted with the fullness of the Christian faith, despite and through the failures of its human members. If your honest answer to that question is yes, then reception into full communion is the right and coherent next step.

The Full Catholic Life You Are Entering Requires Formation That Outlasts OCIA by Many Years

Reception into full communion through OCIA, however well-designed and thoroughly executed the program was, gives you a foundation for Catholic life. It does not give you a complete Catholic formation, and no one-year program could. The theological tradition of the Church is centuries deep. The spiritual tradition, including the methods and insights of the great mystics and masters of prayer, requires years of practice and study to engage meaningfully. The moral tradition, which touches every area of human life from economics to sexuality to politics to the care of creation, unfolds over a lifetime of application in real circumstances. The saints whose lives illuminate what Catholic life looks like at its best took decades to become who they became, and most of them would have said they were still growing at the end. Ongoing formation after reception takes many forms and all of them are worth pursuing. Reading serious Catholic theology and spirituality, works like the Catechism itself, Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa in accessible translations, John Paul II’s theology of the body, and the writing of contemporary Catholic thinkers, gives you intellectual substance that sustains and deepens your faith over time. Regular spiritual direction provides personal accompaniment that OCIA, with its group format and institutional timeline, cannot replicate. Active involvement in a parish ministry, a small faith community, or a Catholic movement gives you the kind of relational accountability and support that makes long-term fidelity genuinely sustainable. Reception into full communion is a beginning, and approaching it as a beginning rather than a completion will shape your Catholic life in every year that follows. Come in ready to keep learning, keep practicing, keep asking, and keep growing, because the Church you are entering is deep enough to sustain a lifetime of exactly that.