The Decalogue, Vatican II, and the Catholic and Lutheran Catechisms

Today we will learn and reflect on the history of the Catholic
Catechism and the Lutheran Large Catechism. The base of the
is word is catechesis, which means instruction in the faith.
Who should study these catechisms? Anyone who wants to
study, ponder, and strengthen their faith; anyone who seeks to
learn how to better love their neighbor and truly Love God.
The Catholic Catechism provides a study course of both
Western and Eastern spirituality, since it references teachings
from a balance of Western and Eastern Church Fathers.

At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this
video, and my blogs that also cover this topic. Please, we
welcome interesting questions in the comments, sometimes
these will generate short videos of their own. Let us learn and
reflect together!

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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Catholic and Lutheran Catechisms
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Book of Concord

You can purchase and/or view the full Catechism on-line at the US Catholic Bishops website:
http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catechism/catechism-of-the-catholic-church/

St Augustine remembers his period of catechesis of several months before he was
baptized by bishop Ambrose of Rome. As the general literacy rate gradually fell as a
result of centuries of barbarian invasions, this practice of catechetical instruction
diminished over the centuries.
Literacy also declined when the Muslims conquered Egypt, cutting off the supply of
papyrus, which deteriorated in the damp Northern European climate in any case.
The only alternative was animal parchment, which was time-consuming and
incredibly expensive to manufacture. We have some pictures from Wikipedia and
Wikimedia that help illustrate the difficulties in manufacturing parchment.
The literacy required for catechesis gradually expanded as paper became more
readily available and accepted between the 11th and 15th centuries in Europe. And
the invention of the printing press shortly prior to the Reformation greatly
encouraged rising literacy rates over time. Mass produced pamphlets helped
quickly spread the ideas of the reformers, and even more propaganda.

During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther sought to make the faith more
accessible to the laity. In addition to translating the New Testament into the
vernacular German, in 1529 Luther released the Lutheran Catechisms, including the
Small Catechism for parents to instruct their children in the faith, and the Large
Catechism for the clergy and educated laymen. Both the Small and Large Catechism
were included in the Lutheran Book of Concord, which included the key theological
works of the Lutheran faith.
The Protestant Reformation encouraged greater literacy so more people could read
the Bible. For Catholics, the Council of Trent encouraged education for the clergy,
and also better education for laymen as part of its reform efforts.

Catechism Lesson, Jules-Alexis Muenier, painted 1890
The Lutheran Catechisms
included sections for:
The Ten Commandments
The Apostles' Creed
The Lord's Prayer
The Sacraments
The post-Trent Catholic
Catechisms used a
similar outline.

Just as the decrees of the Council of Trent reaffirmed the Catholic
teachings on the entire sacramental system attacked by Luther and the
Protestants, so the post-Trent catechism adopted the general outline of
the Lutheran catechisms, except that it included teachings for all seven
Catholic sacraments.
Interestingly, Luther was pondering whether confession should be a
third Lutheran sacrament, but decided against this.
Luther did not discontinue the practice of confessions; indeed, he heard
confessions all his life. At least the older Lutheran hymnals included a
rite for confessions, but since it was no longer considered a sacrament,
in practice it has been discontinued in the Lutheran Church and all
Protestant churches I am aware of.

Who should study these catechisms? All Christians who wish to learn
how to live a godly life, and yes, both the ancient and modern churches
teach that instruction in the faith is critical to know how to live a life of
faith and love.
When writing my blogs on the Ten Commandments I must attest that
all Christians can learn from both Luther’s Large Catechism and the
Catholic Catechism. And the Vatican II decrees teach that Catholics
have much to learn from their separated Protestant brothers. We will
not deny that Luther was flawed. Indeed, in many places in the Large
Catechism, Luther interrupts excellent moral teachings to stop and call
the Pope nasty names, and of course these cursings should be ignored,
this is not how Christians should talk.

The Vatican II Catechism is more comprehensive than prior catechisms,
and its intended audience is both clergy and informed laymen. Through
the sacrament of penance priests often have to advise their flock on how
to deal with the problems we confront in our lives that are often caused
by the poor choices made by ourselves or our loved ones. Consequently,
the Catechism provides a framework to address the problems we face in
our modern world, including facing the challenges posed by marriage,
children, divorce, and many other dilemmas many of us face, such as
abortion, suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, and homosexuality. If you are
not Catholic and do not agree with the Catholic Church’s teachings these
sections are useful because they tell you why the Church teachings are
what they are, so you are better able to chart your course through our
life’s troubled waters.

Cardinal Ratzinger, who would later
become Pope Benedict, in an in-depth
interview in 1985 that the spirit of Vatican
II had faded, that it failed to generate a
new enthusiasm, but instead Catholicism
had become trapped in a spirit of
“boredom and discouragement.” What
the opponents and supporters of Vatican
II shared in common is neither understood
nor studied the actual decrees of Vatican
II. He compared the post-Vatican II
Church to a “construction site where the
blueprint had been lost but everyone
continues to build according to his taste.”

Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II felt that this ignorance was a
failure in catechesis, that the Church needed to develop a new catechism
to make those in the Church more aware of the Catholic and Christian
message, the Good News, the Gospel. Which means the Catechism is
not only evangelical, it is the best type of evangelism. How did the early
Church evangelize? Did they promote their music ministries? Did they
hire marketing managers, coining phrases like Faith is Fun? Did they
seek to entertain their parishioners?

Coronation of Pope John XXIII, the Pope who called the Second Vatican Council,
to “open the windows of the church to the modern world.”

To answer this, we need only read
the words of St Paul, who
proclaimed the Gospel “first to
those in Damascus, then to those in
Jerusalem and in all Judea, and
then to the Gentiles, I preached
that they should repent and turn to
God and demonstrate their
repentance by their deeds.”
Coronation of Pope John XXIII, the Pope who called the Second Vatican Council,
to “open the windows of the church to the modern world.”

Mount Athos, Moni Simonos Petras
Cardinal Ratzinger, responding to
criticisms that the new Catholic
Catechism that it was mainly a
catalogue of sins, said that the
“Church mainly wanted to tell
people what they could not do. Is
this a fixation on sin?”

This criticism tells us more about ourselves that it tells us about
Catholicism, this criticism tells us that we prefer a spirituality where we
live by our own rules, not rules provided by a centralized Church nor an
omniscient Deity nor a Bible written millennia ago, we would rather, as
the Book of Judges tell us, do what is right in our own eyes.

Answering this criticism, Cardinal
Ratzinger in the Ratzinger Report observes,
“JP Sartre regarded it as man’s basic
drama, indeed, tragedy, that he is thrown
into a freedom that leaves him to
determine what he ought to do with his
existence. But this is precisely what man is
ignorant of, and he plunges into
adventures of uncertain outcome.”

As an example, one of our first youthful choices is whom we should
marry, and how many parents become horribly frustrated as they plead
and beg their children to consider how momentous and life-changing
this choice often is. We want to be free to choose, but we do not want to
ponder our choices until after we have made them. Thank God for the
sacrament of penance!

What is the core of the faith and the
Catechism? “You shall Love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your mind, and
you shall love your neighbor as
yourself. On these commandments
hang all the Law and the prophets.”
(CCC 2055)

How does Cardinal Ratzinger restate this? “The
Catechism’s fundamental anthropological proposition is
that man is created in God’s image and is thus like
God.” God demands that man obey his moral
commands to live a godly life because man has been
created in God’s image. “This truth grounds those rights
that are inherent in man from conception to the final
moment of his existence. No one has to give man these
rights, no one can take them from him: he has them of
himself. It follows that the image of God is also the basis
of human dignity, which in every man is inviolable simply
because he is man. Finally, man’s Godlikeness also
implies the unity and equality of men. As creatures of
the one God, all men are of the same rank, are related
to one another as brothers, are responsible for one
another and are called to love their neighbor, no matter
who he may be.”

What Cardinal Ratzinger is trying to tell us is that morality, that Loving
God and loving our neighbor as ourselves, are all about obedience to
God, obeying the commandments. When these roots from love grow
deep in our soul, this Holy Love becomes part of our essence, part of our
soul, part of our very being, flowering into our dignity as men created in
the very image of God, loved by God, cherished by God, granting us the
grace to truly Love God and love our neighbor as ourselves.

We seek love, we seek connectedness,
we seek happiness. Cardinal Ratzinger
ponders, “As he pursued the tangled
paths of his life, Augustine constantly
asked himself one question: How can I
attain happiness?”
The Catechism teaches us that happiness
comes from our fellowship and concern
and care for our fellow man and from our
communion with God. “Morality is a
doctrine of happiness and the means to
attain it, not an egoistic pseudo-
happiness but real happiness.”
Together “with the Bible and the faith of
the Church, the Catechism affirms that
man’s happiness is love. The morality of
the Catechism is a teaching about the
nature of love.”

We can see this true love “visibly in the
Person of Jesus Christ, in His Words, and
in His life and death. The Ten
Commandments merely unfold the ways
of love, we understand the Decalogue
correctly only when we read it together
with Jesus Christ.” “Moral doctrine takes
as its starting point the yearning for
happiness and love that the Creator has
placed in each of our hearts.”
Moses shows the Tables of the Law, from the
Book of Exodus, Marc Chagall, painted 1966

Let us now review the history of the FORMATION OF THE CATHOLIC
CATECHISM.
Twenty years after the close of Vatican II an extraordinary synod of
bishops was convened to explore the future path of the Church. The
synod felt that the Church was drifting, that there was an “emptying out
of catechesis,” that catechetical instruction was often ineffective. This
synod established a commission to draft a new Catholic Catechism,
starting a process that would last six years.
The Synod desired that the Catechism “should be written, not by
scholars, but by pastors drawing on their experience of the Church and
the world.”

The Catechism would use the outline of the Trent Catechism, drafts of the
section on the Creed would be written by bishops from Spain and Italy,
drafts on section on the sacraments would be written by bishops from
Chile and Argentina, and the section on morality would be written by
bishops from France and England. The synod desired that the section on
prayer be written by a representative of Eastern theology, a Lebanese
bishop, who wrote his section in his basement while Beirut was being
bombarded. The commission was placed under the direction of
Cardinal Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict. The editor
of the Catechism was Christoph Schonborn, who had earned his
doctorate of theology under the instruction of Professor Ratzinger. These
drafts were submitted to all the bishops, who suggested over 20,000
modifications, making the Catechism truly a collegial effort of the
Catholic Church, and one of the most closely edited works in the history
of Christendom.

Cardinal Ratzinger tells us, “We took care
to maintain a balance between witnesses
from East and West in order to underline
the truly catholic character of the
Catechism. We also tried to take due
account of the words of holy women.”

For example, this balance of references to both Western and Eastern
Church Fathers can be seen by scanning the footnotes for the section on
the Tenth Commandment:

Tenth Commandment
Church Fathers Referenced
St John Chrysostom:
Homilies on 2 Corinthians
Homilies on Romans
St Augustine:
Catechizing the Uninstructed
Sermon on the Mount
City of God
St Gregory the Great:
Moralia in Job
St Gregory of Nyssa:
Beatitudes

The primary motivation from drawing from both Western and Eastern spirituality
in composing the Catechism is to deepen and strengthen the spirituality of the
Catholic Church. By 1985 there was little enthusiasm for unity or even full
communion between the Catholics and Orthodoxy.
For whom was the Catholic Catechism composed? Schonborn says that it was
composed first and foremost for the bishops who are primarily responsible for
promoting unity in the Church, and through the bishops, the priests.
So, has the Catechism saved Catholicism from becoming trapped in a spirit of
“boredom and discouragement?” How many of the opponents and supporters of
Vatican II study and understand the Catechism? We don’t really want to answer
this question, other than to invite you to listen to our future videos and read our
blogs in the coming years on the Catechism; and, most importantly, encourage
you to study and understand the Catechisms yourself.

But the Catechism was not written for just a
select few, the Church desired that
interested laymen should have access to
the teachings of Church, so they “can know
for themselves what the Church teaches
and she does not,” so their faith can
mature, so they can take greater
responsibility for their faith. Finally, “the
Catechism should serve the original task of
catechesis, evangelization.” The
Catechism is also composed to present
the Catholic teaching to the entire world,
to “agnostics, seekers and inquirers, so
they can become acquainted with what the
Church teaches and tries to live.”

SOURCES:
The Large and Small Catechisms are included in the Book of Concord,
which also includes the Augsburg Confession and other foundational
confessions of the Reformation-era Lutheran Church. You can also
purchase them separately.
You can either purchase from Amazon the US Bishop’s edition of the
Catechism, which has all the useful footnotes. You can also purchase
and/or view the full Catechism on-line at the US Catholic Bishops website:

Two excellent books that include the history behind the Catholic
Catechism are Cardinal Ratzinger’s interview book, the Ratzinger Report,
that is a timeless reflection in 1985 on the status of the post-Vatican II
Catholic Church and the need for catechizing the faithful, and the
Introduction to the Catechism written by Cardinal Ratzinger and his
former doctoral student, Christoph Schonborn. Both are easy to read
and I highly recommend them.
And also the serious student will want to purchase this rather thick
Compendium of Texts footnoted in the Catechism. I purchased my copy
used for like ten dollars, and they instead shipped me an untouched
copy. Some of the works referenced are difficult to find otherwise, this
compendium also reprints the many verses of Scripture referenced in the
Catechism in order.

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The Decalogue, Vatican II, and the Catholic and Lutheran Catechisms