Note: Below is the lecture I gave at the Union League Club in Chicago on Friday, June 14, 2019, as part of the lecture series of the Catholic Citizens of Illinois. My lecture could have been given the alternative title: “The Death Penalty for the Catechism? A How-To Guide for Excluding a Text from the Catholic Tradition.” Fortuitously, the lecture came at the end of an eventful week in Illinois and in Baltimore. On Wednesday, June 12, the state of Illinois disgraced itself by the passage of the most extreme pro-abortion legislation yet seen in the United States. Ironically, those who celebrate the indiscriminate murder of innocent children are usually opposed to capital punishment for guilty criminals, and the reasoning is consistent: the unborn, not having consciousness of their own personal dignity, cannot defend themselves, so the strong may do away with them at pleasure; but adults, no matter how wicked, are recognized as autonomous individuals with inviolable dignity who must be given free room and board by the state for the remainder of their lives. Then, on Thursday, June 13, the United States bishops voted, by a huge majority (194 in favor, 8 against, 3 abstentions), to alter the text of the U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults to bring it in line with Pope Francis’s novel teaching on the death penalty. The revolution in moral teaching thus continues unabated.
What Good is a Changing Catechism? Revisiting the Purpose and Limits of a Book[1]
Peter Kwasniewski
What is a catechism? How would you answer that question?
A standard dictionary definition runs like this: “a summary of the principles of Christian religion in the form of questions and answers, used for the instruction of Christians.” Wikipedia, which as we all know is hit or miss, does a decent job: “A catechism (from Ancient Greek κατηχέω, to teach orally) is a summary or exposition of doctrine and serves as an introduction to the Sacraments” and for the “Christian religious teaching of children and of adult converts. Catechisms are doctrinal manuals—often in the form of questions followed by answers to be memorized.”
[2]
It seems to me that this is the answer of history, of Church practice, and of what we might call “supernatural common sense.” A catechism is a convenient guide to what the Church teaches; more than that, a guide to what she has always taught and will always teach. A good catechism is like a clean, smooth, untainted mirror that reflects the content of the Catholic Faith and nothing else.
A poor catechism—like the infamous 1966 Dutch Catechism that caused so much trouble after the Council—is, on the contrary, a cloudy, scratched, bent, or chipped mirror that does not lucidly reflect the Faith. Good catechisms preserve and pass on the teaching of Christ and His Church, while bad catechisms distort it, or one-sidedly exaggerate it, or muffle or silence it.
