The Catholic Church has great veneration for the Bible. However, teachers have, through the years,...

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The Baltimore Catechism

Transcript of The Catholic Church has great veneration for the Bible. However, teachers have, through the years,...

The Baltimore Catechism

The Catholic Church has great veneration for the Bible.

However, teachers have, through the years, looked for ways to more clearly teach and interpret God's word.

As a result, catechisms have been an important tool in Church teaching.

These combine scripture & tradition into lessons that are easy to digest and remember. 

At the time of the Reformation, Bibles began to appear in languages other than Latin, so people who could read were able to find copies of scripture in their native language.

As part of the Church's reaction to the Reformation, private Bible reading was discouraged among Catholics.

Why? To prevent subjectivism — the possibility of misunderstanding what scripture says because you don't know the history, context, or theological background of a line of text.

Private Bible reading also was discouraged because Protestants did it, so Church leaders figured reading the Bible might spread Protestantism. 

The Church's understanding of scripture also changed over the years.

In the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, Pope Pius XII taught that the Bible's authority is juridical, not critical.

Juridical authority means the Bible should be considered as God's divinely-inspired word, and a correct guide to faith and morals. As a result, it is considered part of the Catholic deposit of faith.

Critical authority means the Bible also is correct in its descriptions of historical and scientific detail.

By drawing a line between juridical and critical authority, the Pope opened the door for Catholics to view scripture using the tools of biblical criticism, which try to discern what the author of a book of scripture knew about the world, accepting that their worldview may not be a clear as today's

Instead, the church relied on catechisms designed to teach scripture and theology, as well as Church tradition, in an easy to question and answer format that left no room for doubt.

You knew the answer to the question, or you didn't. There was no gray area.

This had the benefit of leading to uniform teaching

But it also led to stagnation and intolerance for questions or answers that weren't of the existing Catechism.

Sometimes, Catechism had to be written with the needs of specific groups of believers in mind. Such is the case of The Baltimore Catechism. 

The Catholic Church in the U.S. While Catholics were among the earliest

settlers of the colonies of the New World, particularly the colonies of France and Spain, Catholics were far outnumbered by Protestants in most of the English colonies that became the United States.

Due to economic condition in Europe, there was a huge wave of Catholic immigration to the U.S. between 1850 and 1900.

Number of U.S. Catholics

1790           35,000  1815           90,000  1820         160,000  1840     1,300,000  1880     6,000,000  1900     12,000,000 

Since all these new Catholics were settling in what Church leaders viewed as a hostile, Protestant land, their education in the faith became a top priority. 

.There was good basis for this view. Many U.S. Protestants were alarmed at the huge influx of Catholics, and tried to stop it. The Know Nothing Party, was vehemently anti-Catholic.

Local anti-Catholic organizations, such as the American Protective Association, also flourished. 

Some Catholic leaders were assimilationist, arguing U.S. society in the main was good and opened many opportunities to the new immigrants.

The anti-assimilationists argued Catholics should separate themselves from U.S. culture, which they considered too Protestant and too hostile.

The Vatican also viewed the U.S. Church suspiciously, feeling it was "too democratic.“

As a result, the anti-assimilationist view prevailed.

The American Church built its own system of schools, discouraging parents from sending children to the public schools

In 1884, when church leaders met for the Third Plenary Council in Baltimore, Maryland, they ordered a new Catechism be written as a teaching tool.

The Baltimore Catechism was written hurriedly by Msgr. Januanus de Concilio, an advising theologian and pastor of a church in Jersey City, New Jersey.

He came up with a series of questions and answers, which were published a few months later.

It is a product of its times, emphasizing the fundamentals of Catholic dogma, firmly rejecting "modern thought."

It is defensive, anti-assimilationist and not open to change. 

The Monsignor's work was not enthusiastically received. A revision was ordered in 1886, only two years after the original came out.

A commission was appointed, but worked slowly. It's work came to nothing when its chairman died in 1903.

In 1935, U.S. church leaders again ordered a revision of the catechism, which finally was finished in 1941.

This catechism was the main teaching tool for generations of American Catholics, most likely including your grandparents and, possibly, your parents. 

While the catechism changed very little over the generations, the times did.

The Catholic church slowly became less defensive and more open to the world.

The criticism of the Baltimore Catechism, which had been there from the beginning, also built up. 

Its question and answer format was considered too simplistic. 

There was no logical building to important conclusions. Concepts seemed to be seized out of thin air. 

The Catholic faith was reduced to memory work. There were several hundred questions and answers. Teachers would assign the memorization of groups of questions. Tests not only were given in class, cumulative examinations were required before students could receive the sacraments of Eucharist and Confirmation

Doubt and questioning of the answers was discouraged and equated to an attack on the Catholic faith, itself.

Doubts about the simplistic answers were not seen as healthy growth and development as children moved into the adolescent stage.  

The catechism emphasized what the Protestants denied about the Catholic faith, rather than the things both faiths have in common. 

 It did not encourage reading of the Bible  It was overtly authoritative and obligatory. It was legalistic, not moral.  It saw the Catholic Church as the only true

church.  It portrayed the states of life of the single

and married members of the laity, as well as the religious (brothers and nuns) as a lower state the the priesthood. 

All of these views were changed by Vatican Il.

As a result, the Baltimore Catechism was simply abandoned, usually without explanation and certainly without being replaced by any systematic instruction.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Catechism of the Catholic Church was published in 1993.

It was written in French, translated into Latin, then translated into English (Twice)