Our Principles
Experience: Conscious and Meaningful
- Toward Integration and Intention
We do not manufacture events for the faithful to passively “experience”. Rather, we hope to evoke within the neophyte a way of engaging with the experience of their lives via a conscious relation to the meaningful reality of the ultimate world of values which is the liturgical life of the Church.
Liturgy: The Heart of the Kingdom of God on Earth
- Ordinary Time must transform our “ordinary”.
As the Heart of the Kingdom, the liturgy must become the freely chosen and responded to heart of the faithful. In line with Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the liturgical prayers of the Church, Criterion places a large stress on genuine cooperative affectivity of the human heart.
- In order for such an evocation, the faithful must be assisted in recognizing God’s presence in the midst of their everyday lives, by way of engaging with their experience of life through the lens of the liturgical life.
- The reality of sin as wound, oppression and disintegration must be recognized and opened up to the healing, sanctifying, saving mercy of God in the Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit and the Transformation of Values
- The Beatitudes, Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Theological Virtues
This is not a matter of doing more, or of gaining something. This is a matter of allowing oneself to be open to that which God has given. This is an attempt to inspire within the neophyte a disposition of docility to the Holy Spirit and an openness to the authentic freedom that is life in Christ.
- This is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is lifelong and it inspires, prompts, guides, challenges, and consoles the disciple of Christ to conform to the will of God. Conformity is a willed, and loving, adherence to that which inheres in one’s baptismal dignity as son or daughter, as priest, prophet and king in Christ Jesus.