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).

Cursillo candidates are screened to exclude neurotics, include a cross section of active Catholic laymen, usually between 25 and 50 in age, with leadership potential. Separate Cursillos are held for women, but wives are not eligible unless their husbands have taken the little course. Unlike the retreat, which emphasizes individual meditation and passive attention to sermons, the Cursillo requires active, cooperative participation by all candidates. Thus each course includes one or two "auxiliaries" --veteran Cursillistas who pretend to be there for the first time. They keep discussions going, alert the rector and priest if someone is not entering into the right spirit of the course.

Prudish Zealots? The danger of the movement is fanaticism. A few graduates have suffered mental breakdowns.

Some men Cursillistas have jeopardized their marriages by losing interest in their wives and homes. Not all bishops will even permit Cursillos in their dioceses. Critics of the movement also charge that the Cursillo relies on simplist theology and a fundamentalist approach to Scripture, tends to create prudish zealots who are convinced, like Moral Re-Armers, that they alone possess the real key to spiritual living.

Most Cursillistas regard the little course as a turning point in their lives. Parish priests cite thousands of Sunday-Mass Catholics who became daily communicants and gave countless leisure hours to work for the church. Some clerics who distrusted the "Spanish" intensity of the course have changed their minds after undergoing a Cursillo. Says the Rev. Francis Norris, a theologian at San Francisco's diocesan seminary: "I must confess that my deepest experience of our common life in Christ took place during the Cursillo."

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