Catechisms Are Only as Potent as the People Who Teach Them

​Paragraph 1066 is posted here as a sample of the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s language and style. It is also the opening paragraph of the Catechism’s teaching on the seven sacraments.
 
1066 In the Symbol of the faith the Church confesses the mystery of the Holy Trinity and of the plan of God's "good pleasure" for all creation: the Father accomplishes the "mystery of his will" by giving his beloved Son and his Holy Spirit for the salvation of the world and for the glory of his name.
 
Such is the mystery of Christ, revealed and fulfilled in history according to the wisely ordered plan that St. Paul calls the "plan of the mystery" and the patristic tradition will call the "economy of the Word incarnate" or the "economy of salvation."
 
THE PURPOSE AND USAGE OF THE 1993 CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH:
I feel sorry for well-intentioned Catholics who attempt to tackle major Church documents for the first time. Paragraph 1066 here, the first of the Catechism’s teachings on Sacraments, cited above, is poetic and florid, employing terms and phrases we don’t use in Church parlance every day. There are reasons why formal documents of the Church are composed in this way, the primary one being that such documents from the popes or councils go into the Church’s collection of teachings over the centuries, a body of collective faith documents known as Church Tradition. Such documents call for a classical, timeless linguistic setting, in Latin. Like nearly all major Church documents of the modern era, the Catechism is very lengthy. It is a work you would see in the reference section of your parish bookstore, along with the Bible and the Weekday/Sunday Mass missals.

I see on social media that some Catholics believe the Catechism must be read cover to cover, but this is not the case. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not a catechism in the way that local churches—including American ones—understand the term. In the United States, at a plenary council or synod of U.S. bishops in the 1880’s in Baltimore, the decision was made to erect a Catholic school in every parish in the country. Along with this was a call for a national [American] catechism for classroom use. And thus, the Baltimore Catechism was born, and it remained in use until the 1960’s, when Vatican II called for a theological reorientation of catechetics across the board.

The Baltimore Catechism was short and to the point, about 100-pages of principles and practices of the faith interspersed with illustrations, pious ferverinos, and prayers. We learned the Q&A format much like the multiplication tables, memorizing formulas that we would, hopefully, carry with us all our lives. “Why did God make me? God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world, and to be happy forever with him in the next.” As Wikipedia records, catechisms of this sort go back to the 1500’s and much credit has gone to St. Robert Bellarmine, a Vatican scholar of that time. It was during the 1500’s that educated priests and laity in Italy formed an association to teach the new catechisms to children: the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or good old CCD. [I still use this old label for religious education with fellow senior citizens, and it is so much easier than the terms we use today.]

In the introduction to the 1993 release of the Catechism, Pope John Paul II himself explains that “This catechism is given…that it may be a sure and authentic reference text [emphasis mine] for teaching catholic doctrine and particularly for preparing local catechisms…This catechism is not intended to replace the local catechisms duly approved by the ecclesiastical authorities, the diocesan Bishops and the Episcopal Conferences, especially if they have been approved by the Apostolic See. It is meant to encourage and assist in the writing of new local catechisms, which take into​ account various situations and cultures, while carefully preserving the unity of faith and fidelity to catholic doctrine.”

This is an intriguing instruction by the pope which impacts the role of the Catechism, to be sure, but equally, provides insight into the pope’s thinking and teaching about catechetics and faith sharing in general. The 1993 Catechism or CCC was never intended for instructional use in an educational or faith formation setting as a stand-alone teaching text. The pope assumed that each diocese or parish was already developing full faith formation resources for cradle to grave Catholics, with the new Catechism serving as both inspiration and guard rail in the handing on of Sacred Tradition. He also assumed that the handing down of the Faith is a venture of the local church, specifically the diocese, taking place in a communal fashion. Canon Law identifies the bishop as the senior catechist in his diocese, assisted of course by clergy and laity. The pope’s acknowledgement of “various situations and cultures” recognizes that the perfect revelation of God comes to imperfect people and communities who must wrestle with what a famous scholar called the Bible, a two-edged sword.

The Catechism or CCC has been with us now for 32 years. It is still a work in progress. In 2018 Pope Francis reversed the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment in para. 2267, stating that the execution of criminals undermined the Church’s professed faith in the sanctity of all life. Paragraphs 2357-2359, on homosexuality, probably need a rewrite down the road to address the personal circumstances of those in monogamous same-sex relationships. But for the moment, let’s look at the Catechism and its presentation of the Sacraments, now and in the future.

BUT GETTING BACK TO SACRAMENTS, STARTING WITH CATECHISM PARAGRAPH 1066….
Sacraments—all seven—are the greatest works of the Church. They are, in fact, the Holy Spirit living and acting among us in the human material world. We often think of sacraments as solely divine, internal, metaphysical encounters with God. But in fact, the proper celebration of any sacrament is earthy, material, and communal, centered around the Biblical proclamation of how Christ is working among us in that event. Even Penance, which we think of as a “private act,” is a sacred point where the transcendent God visits his people, even if the sacramental celebration is focused upon one person. For that one person in the confessional is committing to deeper faith life in the Church, and we are all richer for that.

But even with the Catechism and three decades past, there is no strategy from the universal church or individual dioceses on how to promulgate, unpack, and preach the essential Tradition of the Church. I haven’t posted much lately on sacramental theology, the Catechism’s specific emphases on the sacraments individually and collectively, or on the ways we teach and learn about sacraments, a learning process that should continue throughout life, and not as a passage through childhood. Of course, we must take into consideration the “condition” of the Church in the United States, which is different from the days of Vatican II in 1965 and even from the days of the Catechism’s release in 1993. Studies of the Church from a sociological vantage point are on the rise.

Early this AM I received notice from America Magazine of a release of a new work, Catholicism at a Crossroads [2025], which, thanks to the army of Amazon Prime drivers, will be on my front porch by 9 PM tonight. I am anxious to see what four of the best Catholic sociologists have to say based upon several years of interviews and inventories, and how they interpret this data. We know there is a priest shortage that will endure through much of this century. It is time to stop saying “priest shortage,” so that we won’t spend the next century sitting around like the Gospel virgins trimming their lamps. There is no “bridegroom” coming to rescue us. We have all been baptized to do the work in the Spirit’s will, including the manner we can select our priestly ministers. St. Augustine, the venerable father and teacher of the Church around 400 A.D., was drafted by his people to become their bishop—held in house arrest till he agreed!

When I was young, we prayed for the Lord to send missionaries into the Amazon Region, Bolivia, and the Communist-atheist countries to make converts through the sacraments. The reason I’m backing off the term “priest shortage” is because we have—now—a greater shortage that presently goes unacknowledged, i.e., church professionals. I am speaking here of the titles you see in your bulletins [or don’t see.] That would include the parish director of faith formation, a position in many parishes that needs multiple personnel. We just lost our director in my parish, a charismatic and effective deacon, who joined an extraordinary new Catholic high school—a Cristo Rey High School—in the City of Orlando.

Just for the heck of it, I looked up our parish posting for the now-vacant position in my parish, on our diocesan employment website. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. The responsibilities are far beyond the time capacities of the director; here is a red flag, too: “The omission of specific statements of the duties or functions does not exclude them from the classification if the work is similar, related, or a logical assignment for this classification. Other duties may be required and assigned.” You don’t need an interpreter for this one. A pastor is bound by no legislation in terms of the open-ended work expectations he may place upon any church employee. Fifteen years ago, as an EAP provider to my diocese in my psychotherapy practice, it was sad to hear the discouragements and the depressions of lay employees in churches. I would get truly angry in the therapist’s office that there is no true due process to protect church employees from arbitrary church officers who demanded too much, or who did not maintain a congenial work environment, or who could fire at will. Strange thing that we never hear a sermon [or even mention] of Pope Leo XIII [r. 1878-1903], who taught that worker exploitation was a problem that must be faced by the State and the Church, along with the social responsibility of employers. Personally, I favor contracts for all church employees with independent HR services available.

I won’t be around to see what parish life is like in the U.S. in 2050, or 2100 for that matter. But for those who will live in that world, it will be necessary to honestly and critically review the Church’s recent past and the crises of the present; more specifically, to assess the successes and failures of the implementations of Vatican II—and it is OK to say out loud that we botched a good deal of the conciliar reform, to the detriment of Church unity. In our hurry to experiment with the Novus Ordo, i.e., the Mass Missal of 1970 promulgated by Pope Paul VI, we overlooked both history and charity. Pope Pius V [r. 1566-1572], when he mandated the Roman Latin Rite Missal [the one we old timers grew up with], allowed for geographic regions in Europe to continue worshipping in their previous rites if they dated back to 1370, two centuries before Pius issued the universal Latin Mass of 1570. You wonder: could Pius V’s generous consideration of the faithful’s devotional needs been repeated by Paul VI in 1970 by allowing use of the Tridentine Rite? Did we even stop to consider it? Would we have the conservative-liberal divisions within Catholicism had we listened to each other in the 1960’s?

You can have magnificent Church Councils throughout history; you can have the best Catechism in the world. But both must be “received” by the folks in the pews and the preachers in the pulpit. A Lenten meditation might be: “Do I honestly love Jesus’ Church enough to invest my body and soul into the Church’s survival?”

We will pick this up in two weeks.