nal Ratzinger’s stamp of approval.
In the case of the regular book given to the diocese, the manuscript would go from the censor to the bishop to receive the:
Bishop’s stamp: IMPRIMATUR (“let it be printed”)The religious superior may also go ahead and submit the manuscript they approved for an Imprimatur. So it is possible to have a book with all three seals of approval.
By the way, it is only necessary to put the Imprimi Potest or Imprimatur on the book. You can assume it has gotten a Nihil Obstat first if it made it to those two stages.
A word of warning though ... if you see a book that only has a Nihil Obstat, be cautious. It may be in error. This happened in the 1960s a lot and some of those books contained incorrect material, even heretical material. You need the double-check system to be sure something didn’t slip by someone. That is why if one bishop gave the Nihil Obstat, another bishop has to give the Imprimatur.
The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are often followed by this statement on the copyright page:
The “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed.
So if one of these authors has all theCatholic truths right but is using them to try to prove that we shouldn’t drink hot coffee because it’s the devil’s temperature ... we can’t blame the Catholic Church.
Remember those footnotes in the Catechism? The ones for materials that are simply referenced, where they might have summarized twelve pages of a Church Council document into two sentences?
If you ever wonder just what was summarized, there’s a book for that too.
The Companion to the Catechism of the Catholic Church ... which is a compendium of texts referred to in the book but not quoted there.
It has every word of the pertinent part of the originally referenced materials, in English, so you don’t have to go all over the place looking for something.
It is almost 1,000 pages long and is really fascinating and enlightening if you want to see it all from original sources.
Just imagine if all this material had been included in the Catechism.
That would’ve been a book no one would have wanted to open.
It makes the Catechism not look so big after all, does it?
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Catechism Demystified
This is a talk that I gave to our RCIA class last week. I'm sharing it here for anyone else who'd like a little help finding their way around the Catechism, which can be confusing but need not be.