I am not an expert on the Catechism, but I do know how to use it.
The Catechism can be a bit tricky to find your way around so I wanted to take just a couple of minutes to familiarize everyone with it.
Let’s start with what the word catechism means. A catechism is a summary of principles.
So, the Catholic Catechism is specifically designed as a reference guide. Some people call it the Catholic “rule book.” It is much more than that though.
“In the Catechism, we see the wealth of teaching that the Church has
received, safeguarded and proposed in her two thousand years of history. From Sacred Scripture to the Fathers of the Church, from theological masters to the saints across the centuries, the Catechism provides a permanent record of the many ways in which the Church has meditated on the faith and made progress in doctrine so as to offer certitude to believers in their lives of faith."
That is what Pope Benedict says about the Catechism ... and he should know.
The current Catechism was requested by Pope John Paul II and produced under Cardinal Ratzinger’s supervision. Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.
This Catechism is the first systematic synthesis of faith issued since the Council of Trent in 1566. Between then and now there were catechisms that were issued locally as various people saw the need.
The English version of this catechism came out in 1994 and was revised in 1997, so this is really current.
Think of it as the sort of encyclopedia from the days when all we had were books ... when you would sit down to look up facts about the moon and get pulled into other sections because they were so fascinating.
Of course, when you have a two thousand year old institution whose goal is to help get us to Heaven, they don’t think quite the way we do about organization.
The Catechism is arranged in four main sections that are often called the “Four Pillars” of the Faith:
- The Profession of Faith (the Apostle’s Creed)
- The Celebration of the Christian Mystery (the Sacred Liturgy, especially the sacraments)
- Life in Christ (including The Ten Commandments in Catholic theology)
- Christian Prayer (including The Lord’s Prayer)
Let’s look at a page. (get pdf of sample page here)
Every paragraph is numbered. (red circle) Those numbers are very important.
When you look up something in the index, the numbers it refers you to are
paragraph numbers, NOT page numbers. This can be confusing until you get used to it, but it does give us an idea of just how much information is packed into each paragraph.
The numbers in the margins (green square) are cross-references ... to other paragraphs in the Catechism that refer to the same subject and may shed more light.
The cross-reference paragraphs are a good reason to have the actual book. The Catechism is on-line in a lot of places (the Vatican’s web-site, the US Bishops’ website, etc.) and is super handy for searching. I use the online version all the time.
But those versions don’t have the cross-reference paragraphs ... and sometimes those lead you to just what you were looking for or for added depth you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
The writers of the Catechism know that this may be more information than you wanted. Maybe you were looking for a simple answer and didn’t need all the extra info.
Each chapter ends with an “In Brief” section that summarizes the main points of the chapter in one or two sentence paragraphs.
Of course, there are are copious footnotes for both direct quotes in the text and also where they refer to sources of the teaching, in particular the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, and the Ecumenical Councils and other authoritative Catholic statements, such as those issued by recent Popes.
Just finding your way to the correct “In Brief” answers may seem a bit daunting if you’re trying to find something quickly ... which is something I’ve experienced in our small group.
And the writers of the Catechism realized that too.
So, in 2005 they came out with the Compendium to the Catechism. (Download a sample page here.)
It is a more concise and conversational version of