You can but Magento is good at one thing, and that is selling. Using it only as a catalog would be a waste of resources and you might be better of using another system like Typo3 or Wordpress.

At the end of the day the most important thing is that you it in a system you feel comfortable working with and the end user and administrator can work with.

But in my honest opinion: the answer would be: NO

Is it possible to create a non-ecommerce site using Magento
If $f: \mathbb Q\to \mathbb Q$ is a homomorphism, prove that $f(x)=0$ for all $x\in\mathbb Q$ or $f(x)=x$ for all $x$ in $\mathbb Q$.

I'm wondering if you can help me with this one? 
