Roman Catholics: The Little Courses

In Baltimore last Thursday evening, 53 Roman Catholic laymen, their bags packed with enough clothing to last the weekend, checked into St. Martin's Church at Fulton Avenue and Fayette Street, on the city's multiracial, row-house downtown fringe. The group included doctors, lawyers, day laborers, college students, a veterinarian and a politician. When they registered at the door, they were asked to pocket their wristwatches. Until Sunday night, their hours would be on God's time, as they went through a new method of spiritual renewal known as Cursillos de Cristiandad (Spanish for Little Courses in Christianity).

The Cursillo (pronounced koor-see-yo) is the fastest-growing movement in the Roman Catholic Church. Devised by Spanish Psychologist Eduardo Bonnin and the Rt. Rev. Juan Hervas, then Bishop of Palma, as a means of reviving the faith among laggard laymen, the Cursillo was first held at the Monastery of San Honorato on Majorca in 1949. Cursillos have spread rapidly throughout Spain, Latin America and Western Europe, were brought to the U.S. seven years ago by two Spanish air cadets studying at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. The first U.S. Cursillos were mostly given in Spanish, but now they have spread so widely into the population at large that the common language is English. There are now 50 U.S. dioceses that sponsor the little courses, and this week a new Cursillo center opened in Brooklyn.

Prodigal Son. The Cursillo, which may be made only once in a lifetime, is something of a cross between a revival meeting and an extended group therapy session. Students in the three-day course are guided by a priest, a lay leader known as the rector, and ten or twelve veteran Cursillistas (Cursillo graduates), who assist in giving the lectures and helping out with the household chores.

Prospective Cursillistas rise at 6 for Mass and meditation, spend until 11 p.m. each day listening to a total of 15 sermons. The first four topics, for example, are ideals, habitual grace, laymen in the church, actual grace. The fifth, on piety, attacks Christian hypocrisy—"hits at every variety of religious nut," says one Cursillista. The prodigal son is an insistent theme; laymen provide practical instruction on how Cursillistas can apostolically serve God on the "fourth day" of the Cursillo—their life after the course ends.

After each lecture, the Cursillistas divide into smaller groups to discuss its application to their lives, draw pictures that illustrate the sermon's main points. To relieve spiritual tension, the Cursillo schedule provides moments of respite in which the students tell jokes and sing songs, notably a jaunty little Spanish folk tune called De Colores (Of Colors) that has become the unofficial theme of the Cursillo. Sample verse:

Living colors envelop the rainbow

in heavens above

Thai's the reason I like all the colors,

That brighten the life of the things that I love

The course ends Sunday night with a brief ceremony at which new Cursillistas explain what the experience has meant to them. Since follow-up is all important, the graduates are encouraged to meet with other Cursillistas once a week. After taking the course most graduates also subscribe to the movement's bilingual monthly magazine Ultreya (Beyond).