The Return of Catholicism

They must have known we were coming:

The Catholic left is in trouble.

On March 31, the Catholic Church published the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In format, the Compendium harkens back to the question-and-answer style popular in Catholic schools before Vatican II. Of course, the new compendium has also incorporated the documents of Vatican II into its teaching.

The Compendium will come as bad news for liberal Catholics, who for forty years have managed to dismantle Catholic catechism in the schools through obfuscation, politics, and flat-out heresy. In the feverish political milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, liberal Catholic educators excused this away as the church being "relevant" to the great issues of the day -- poverty, war, social justice. More recently, a religion teacher at Georgetown Prep -- my alma mater and the oldest Catholic high school in America -- told me that they had to keep using the leftist text The Word Made Flesh because the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a doorstopper published in 1994, was "over the heads of freshman and sophomores."

The Compendium most certainly is not over the heads of the kids. But, of course, the real reason for keeping old textbooks is political. In the 1960s the Catholic left took over the writing and publishing of textbooks, a fact evident if you spend an afternoon in the library, as I did, going through old issues of the Catholic School Journal. The Journal was published from 1901 to 1970. It went from a small, text-heavy sheet in the early part of the century to a thick catalogue in the fat years of mid-century Catholicism, then delved into radicalism before folding in the summer of 1970. An ad from 1904 touts books about ancient history and a Catechism of Scripture History, and feels comfortable enough with its audience's Catholicism to not only sell a book written in Latin but describe it in the same language. Articles praise Thomas Aquinas and the pope's stance on Communism. A 1952 ad announces the publication of Teaching the Christian Virtues, now an out of print neglected classic.

This, I suspect, is one reason conservative Protestants such as WordGirl and myself are feeling the pull of Rome. Everywhere we turn, Protestant churches are tacking leftward in an effort to be more "relevant". After a disastrous flirtation with leftism in the 60s and 70s, brought about in part by liberal bishops flexing their muscles after Vatican II, the Catholic Church has returned to its true form.

Why should anyone seek out the Church for functions the State fulfills, and vice versa? We look to the Church for the eternal, not the temporal, and certainly not the political.

Now if only someone would inform Cardinal Mahony.