Diana Macalintal – författare

Joined by the Church, Sealed by a Blessing does more than help parish leaders plan excellent wedding liturgies and prepare engaged couples well. It enables parish leaders to address the challenges of increased divorce, fewer Catholic weddings, empty pews on Sundays, and the increasing number of people who choose no faith. This is the one book that will give you a comprehensive plan to address these concerns with confidence, creativity, and clarity.            With over fifty years of combined hands-on experience in parish and diocesan liturgy preparation and catechumenate formation, Diana Macalintal and Nick Wagner give you more than just another marriage preparation resource. They give you a parish transformation tool.

Joined by the Church, Sealed by a Blessing does more than help parish leaders plan excellent wedding liturgies and prepare engaged couples well. It enables parish leaders to address the challenges of increased divorce, fewer Catholic weddings, empty pews on Sundays, and the increasing number of people who choose no faith. This is the one book that will give you a comprehensive plan to address these concerns with confidence, creativity, and clarity.            With over fifty years of combined hands-on experience in parish and diocesan liturgy preparation and catechumenate formation, Diana Macalintal and Nick Wagner give you more than just another marriage preparation resource. They give you a parish transformation tool. 

A prayer book for one and for all, for personal prayer and family blessing, The Work of Your Hands gives voice to the prayers of the heart. Diana Macalintal lifts up the extraordinary and the ordinary moments of life in humble yet beautifully wrought prayers that evoke our longings, confess our fears, and sing of our joys. Offering praise and asking for blessing, she helps us recognize the presence and grace of God in the work and play, the up and down of daily life. 

We all agree that the community needs to be involved in the OCIA. So we make bulletin and Mass announcements explaining the rites and the OCIA process, hoping the parishioners will “get” their responsibility to initiate these seekers. Then, although catechumens, candidates, sponsors, and team members form a tight-knit community, parishioners still wonder who these people are with their rituals that make the Mass long and most of the newly initiated still disappear from the parish after Easter. Taking to heart what the United States bishops said in their document on adult faith formation—“While the parish may have an adult faith formation program, it is no less true that the parish is an adult faith formation program”—Diana Macalintal argues that we have to stop trying to get the parish involved in the OCIA and start getting the catechumens and candidates involved in the parish. In this book, readers will discover:1. why doing the OCIA in the midst of the community not only forms seekers into disciples but renews the conversion of the entire parish; 2. what parishioners can do to take responsibility for the initiation of adults, without adding another meeting to their lives; 3. how to use the four key areas of parish life and the liturgical year to introduce seekers to Christ and train them in the Christian way of life; 4. the three levels of catechesis and how to use mystagogical reflection on parish life to provide a systematic and complete catechesis appropriate for each level. When you make your parish the OCIA curriculum, you will be shaping not just a group of people but an entire community into lifelong disciples.