Angelus News | September 23, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 19

MORE THAN TEACHING
What exactly do
Catholics believe
in? Thirty years ago,
the Church gave an
answer that deserves
another look.
BY RUSSELL SHAW
Dorothy Day put her finger on
the problem. The co-founder
of the Catholic Worker Movement,
whose orthodox faith existed
side by side with radical social views,
said she didn’t want to be called a saint
because then people would stop paying
attention to what she said. (It’s hard to
tell what Day would say now, when her
canonization cause is underway and
she has the title Servant of God.)
Obviously, the situation is very
different with the Catechism of the
Catholic Church — not a person but
a book, and therefore not a candidate
for sainthood. Yet 30 years after it was
published, the catechism may be at risk
of becoming the literary equivalent of
a saint — an object of respect and veneration
that holds an esteemed place in
the Church but doesn’t receive nearly
the attention it deserves from many of
the faithful.
If that is so, it’s a great loss, although
not so much for the catechism as for
the people who don’t read it. In three
decades this volume has aged remarkably
well, and, though not exactly what
you’d call a good read, is a book that,
read slowly and thoughtfully, is capable
of engaging attention, uplifting minds,
and now and then even warming hearts
— perennially timely precisely because
of its timelessness.
“This catechism is conceived as an
organic presentation of the Catholic
faith in its entirety,” the text boldly
announces at the start. Today, just like
30 years ago, that is a dauntingly ambitious
goal that it succeeds remarkably
well in reaching.
Here some history is in order.
In January 1985, St. Pope John Paul
II convened an “extraordinary general
assembly” of the World Synod of Bishops
to discuss successes and failures
in implementing the Second Vatican
Council in the preceding two decades
since it ended. Well up among the
CNS/USCCB
problems of those times was the rise of
public dissent — and, with it, public
confusion — in regard to the teaching
of the Church.
Now, 400 years after the Catechism of
the Council of Trent, wasn’t the time
ripe for a new universal catechism that
10 • ANGELUS • September 23, 2022