Vatican accepts bishops' decision on U.S. confirmation age

By Jerry Filteau
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON -- The Vatican has accepted the U.S. bishops' decision to set the normal age range for conferring confirmation ``between the age of discretion and about 16 years of age.''
Within that range, each bishop can set a more specific policy in his own diocese. The age of discretion is usually considered to be about 7.
Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, communicated Rome's action to the U.S. bishops in late August and decreed that the new U.S. norm will take effect July 1, 2002.
It changes the current temporary norm, which is to confirm children ordinarily between the age of discretion and about 18.
The norm affects only the Latin Church in the United States. It marks at least a legal resolution to a multifaceted debate that has gone on for decades over the law, theology and pastoral practice of confirmation.
Eastern Catholic churches, which are governed by their own laws, normally confer all three sacraments of initiation together in infancy: baptism, first Eucharist and confirmation, which in the Eastern churches is called chrismation.
In the Eastern churches the priest usually administers all three sacraments. In the Western church the bishop is the ordinary minister of confirmation.
When the new Code of Canon Law took effect in 1983, pastoral practice on the age of confirmation for Latin Catholics varied widely across the United States.
In many dioceses there had been a gradual trend since the 1970s away from confirming children in grade school, toward administering the sacrament in the teen years, usually to students in junior or senior high school.
Canon 891 of the new code says confirmation ``is to be conferred on the faithful at about the age of discretion unless the conference of bishops has determined another age, or there is danger of death, or in the judgment of the minister a grave cause suggests otherwise.''
In response to the new code, at a national meeting in 1984 the bishops debated a proposal to set a national norm that students ordinarily would be confirmed within the age range from 8th to 11th grade.
The debate over that proposal showed such widely divergent views and practices that the bishops rejected that proposal. They adopted an alternative norm saying the national policy would be that each bishop determines the age of confirmation in his own diocese.
At least four other bishops' conferences, including those of Mexico and Canada, adopted similar national policies in the mid-1980s and received approval from Rome.
Because of what U.S. church officials called an ``administrative oversight,'' however, the U.S. conference never submitted its decision to Rome for approval.
When this was discovered in 1991, the decision was submitted.
In the meantime, however, the Vatican had stopped approving decisions that set no specific age or age range, and it asked the bishops to come back with a more specific norm.
In 1993, after extensive study of policies adopted in other countries and the differences in diocesan practice around the United States, the bishops approved a policy of setting the ordinary time of confirmation nationally from the age of discretion to age 18.
The Vatican approved that policy in 1994 on a temporary basis, with the provision that the bishops should revisit the question later and submit a new proposal for Vatican review.
Last November the bishops addressed the issue again and adopted the 7-16 range by a vote of 230-2.
In some parts of the country bishops of the same state or ecclesiastical province have agreed on a common policy for their area.

Copyright (c) 2001 Catholic News Service/U.S. Catholic Conference. The CNS news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method, in whole or in part without the prior written authority of Catholic News Service.