Editorials
Free at last Miraculously, the Book of Daniel tells us, the three bound men Nebuchadnez'zar cast into the fiery furnace emerged unscathed. "And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the...
...No surprise then, that what has been described as post-Vatican II theological chaos and religious illiteracy should provoke yearning for a rendering of the faith that is as clear, compressed, and uniform as those catechisms...
...That leaves almost no time for consultation among themselves or with theologians, diocesan educators, liturgists, and catechists...
...Consider some of the more serious charges against this provisional text: Inappropriate use of Scripture...
...references are taken out of context and linked together despite marked differences...
...When it comes to catechisms, there are at least two distinct, but overlapping, issues...
...Much can be said about the shape of a democratic South Africa...
...Is there no law prohibiting this kind of graffiti...
...Mandela, his wife Winnie at his side, miraculously walked away from his defeated captors, his elegant head held high, his former boxer's fist raised in unyielding defiance...
...Everything is presented as of equal centrality to the Catholic faith...
...Starting by amalgamating the formulas of Gospel writers, St...
...it is silent about the role of ecumenical councils...
...its treatment of Judaism...
...The comparison points to the danger...
...Rarely does it acknowledge the historical shifts and ever-present pluralism of views...
...Thus the Baltimore Catechism and the pedagogical method to which so many attribute the alleged religious literacy of pre-Vatican II American Catholics...
...Some suggest that since Rooney had thrived in that hall of mirrors, he must suffer its capricious penalties as well...
...If national conferences, local churches, or religious educators are flexible in trying to adapt it, it will undoubtedly become another source of fractiousness between those who support the local adaptations and those who see heresy in any departure from the Vatican-established template...
...There, the thud people heard was the sound of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., the "junk bond" and corporate takeover champeen, hitting the hard surface of reality...
...The birth pangs of democracy have begun, but the delivery likely will be even more painful...
...and America, March 3, for essays on selected topics...
...Finally but most extravangantly, New York is awash with the "news" of the pending divorce of skyscraper- and casino-builder Donald Trump and his wife of thirteen profitable years, Ivana...
...His sense of himself and his mission seemed equally the fruit of a great faith...
...This open, fuller discussion, the bishops should insist, is what "our era demands of us...
...If reason and moral courage prevail, he may come to represent the same things for the nation's 5 million whites...
...There was dancing in the streets of Harlem as well as in the cities and segregated townships of South Africa...
...Indeed, there is scarcely a Catholic old enough to hold an important church position who didn't absorb the faith within some such framework...
...ET CETERA HOW THE FLIGHTY HAVE FALLEN Along with valentines, February brought the demise of four seemingly invincible public figures or institutions...
...Q. WHO WROTE THIS CATECHISM...
...Mandela and South African President F.W...
...The last several decades of scriptural scholarship seem to be ignored...
...They should propose widespread discussion at every level and invite comment from the church's ecumenical partners...
...A. That's a Good Question Q. Who made the world...
...It avoids everyday language in favor of a religiously charged language-but religious language sadly diminished from the rousing words and ideas of a Gaudium et spes...
...143-46 for an overview...
...But really, Galileo had a fairer trial...
...For the most part, the catechism could have been written before Vatican II...
...Moreover, this narrowed and hardened version of the council has increasingly come to substitute for the council's own documents...
...Virtually never does the catechism acknowledge the church's own blind alleys in its pilgrimage for truth...
...The document is lathered with biblical references, sometimes to the point of unreadability...
...Catholic bishops around the world, who received the text in December, have until the end of May to return their recommendations to the Commission for the Preparation of a Universal Catechism, chaired by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger...
...That faith is more political and ideological than religious, presumably...
...Other nations had similar catechisms...
...Despite its apparent comprehensiveness, the catechism passes over questions arising from modern natural science or psychology that would occur to many modern readers...
...And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the king's coun-selors gathered together and saw that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men...
...De Klerk is perhaps in an even more fragile position...
...Few mourners were in attendance when the financial fairyland built by the lengendary Michael R. Milken went down for the count, except perhaps for the five thousand employees who were pushed onto the street and into the unemployment lines...
...It is meant to serve as the template for the church's catechetical teaching...
...What Rooney actually said about blacks does not appear to be pertinent...
...A. God made the world...
...At this moment, however, satraps, prefects, counselors, and men and women everywhere stand humbled before the witness offered by Mandela's life...
...Obviously Mandela's enormous dignity was forged through great suffering and sacrifice...
...It does not refer or allude to the world of secular knowledge or events...
...CBS suspended Rooney for three months and lightened his wallet by a reported $200,000 for illiberal pronouncements about homosexuality and alleged but denied derogatory remarks about blacks...
...Meanwhile, Lent is upon us, and sackcloth and ashes have rarely seemed more fitting reminders of the human condition...
...in some cases, it ignores the last several hundred years of history, sacred and profane...
...Thomas Reese, the convener of the Woodstock meeting, summed up the matter: "If this were a text submitted to an ecumenical council, it would deserve an overwhelming 'nonplacet' from the bishops" (Tablet [London], February 24...
...In 1985, John Paul II convened an extraordinary synod of bishops to examine the outcomes of Vatican II...
...If it is strictly adhered to, a universal catechism, inadequate in its approach and questionable in its content, will injure the church by its alienating pedagogy and its constriction of Catholic doctrine...
...Almost every published commentary complains of "prooftexting...
...Certainly many will be tempted to let this document roll on by its own momentum...
...It has certain strengths: the centrality of Christ rather than the church in the catechism's structure...
...But the proposal for a universal catechism found its strongest support in the camp of those who seemed to feel that the council's aftermath was more perilous than hopeful for the people of God...
...Unnecessary detail without distinctions in importance...
...it is focused on what,, not how...
...From newspaper front pages to television to radio to idle coffee shop chatter, there is no sanctuary from this plague of prurience...
...Some critics, for example, refuse to accept at face value its clear disclaimer of being a pedagogical model...
...The net effect is to make the faith seem like a self-enclosed and self-validating reality...
...Not every criticism aimed at the catechism is justified...
...Perceived or alleged insult is sufficient grounds for evaporation in the insubstantial world of TV...
...But the bishops need to insist firmly upon their teaching office...
...The catechism gives readers a scriptural foundation that will crumble when they encounter contemporary learning, and it deprives them of a wealth of insight born of the biblical revival...
...At a minimum, they should ask for time to consult on redrafting the catechism...
...Even in the midst of personal scandal, Trump seems to be doing what he does most passionately-putting his name on everything...
...To study it...
...A fatal error, we believe...
...it uncritically repeats preconciliar teaching on mortal and venial sin...
...Evasion of real problems...
...Mandela commands the allegiance of perhaps 45 percent of the black population...
...Paul, and the fullblown doctrinal development of Nicea or Chalcedon, the proposed catechism presents Catholic teaching as all of a piece...
...the hair of their heads was not singed, their mantles were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them...
...That witness should give black and white South Africans of good will strength in the difficult days ahead...
...Heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was flattened and relieved of his worldly crown by James "Buster" Douglas...
...As Mandela himself has urged, economic sanctions should stay in place for the time being...
...Even better, they should transform a danger into an opportunity and make the very process of revising the document a catechizing moment for the church...
...Our own less-than-expert perusal of the text confirms that scholarly assessment...
...Among some religious educators, memorization appears to be one of the few uncontestable mortal sins...
...The human dimension of seeking God, of trying to record God's actions and celebrate the divine presence in history, of ordering community life in ways that respect and mirror the divine spark in reality, is obscured by an abstract, "God's-eye" picture of an eternal revelation, plan of salvation, and law of morality...
...On the right is Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha movement...
...The neglect of human experience...
...Mandela's resolute fight for simple human dignity and equality before the law, his refusal to renounce resistance, even violent resistance, to the racist white minority government, has made him a poignant symbol for people of color and for the oppressed everywhere...
...Among other grave problems: it slights Jesus' ministry and, indeed, his humanity...
...Q. Why did God make you...
...Rooney is not our favorite commentator...
...but there is no parallel appreciation of theological pluralism...
...Recognizing both merits and drawbacks in a refurbished version of traditional textbook theology is one thing...
...Without doubt, the freeing of the seventy-one-year-old African National Congress leader signals the end to apartheid...
...As John XXIII said in opening Vatican II, "Our duty is not only to guard this precious treasure, as if we were concerned only with antiquity, but to dedicate ourselves with an earnest will and without fear to that work which our era demands of us, pursuing thus the path which the church has followed for twenty centuries...
...so few apparent consequences...
...But for real bloodshed one had to turn to Wall Street...
...The idea was to do for postconciliar Catholic doctrinal understanding something comparable to what the revised Code of Canon Law did for church structures-provide a comprehensive, universal framework from which local variations could take their cues...
...Less instructive was the purging of "60 Minutes" resident curmudgeon Andy Rooney...
...One is a question of pedagogy, about which even the professedly undogmatic can be sadly doctrinaire...
...The Code of Canon Law very imperfectly reflects the council's perspectives: power over its composition shifted away from the world's bishops, who had done the work of the council, to the Vatican bureaucracy that had often resisted it...
...How many bishops will actually have time and the expertise to read a text that is anything but accessible...
...No council is in the offing...
...The other is primarily a question of content...
...In releasing him, the white South African government admitted that the military and political fires of apartheid can exert absolute power over the nation's black majority little longer...
...It is tempting to draw a tidy moral about the consequences of avarice from Drexel's ignominious end, but who would listen...
...So much seeming turmoil...
...Passages are cited without concern for their original meaning...
...A sensitivity to the Byzantine liturgical tradition is evident in the section on sacraments, perhaps to the point, some commentators have said, of overshadowing the Western liturgical legacy...
...It was not unreasonable to fear the same outcome or worse in the case of a universal "compendium of the whole of Catholic doctrine" prepared by authorities hand-picked by curial officials and subject to no independent deliberation and vote of the world's bishops...
...The synod did not, as some had feared, roll back the council's teachings...
...it rejects the Eucharist as a meal...
...Which points to a further shortcoming...
...Elevating that theology into a measuring rod for the church's teaching worldwide is quite another...
...Millions watched what seemed like the resurrection of a martyr...
...Every new world is brought forth by such intangible powers...
...Unbowed, Mandela now powerfully embodies the hopes and aspirations of South Africa's 25 million blacks...
...As it was with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, so it was with the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in South African prisons...
...The catechism treats everything from God's existence to guardian angels, from the resurrection to the relationship between Jesus' joined human and divine natures, his body in the tomb, and his soul descended into hell...
...The latter concern was the forcing bed of the Catechism for the Universal Church...
...See Berard Marthaler, pp...
...Knowledgeable readers of the text, gathered in January at Georgetown University's Woodstock Center to assess it, seemed to agree that it pointed in one direction, the status quo ante...
...To his left is the more revolutionary Pan Africanist Congress...
...His National party faces strong, and now galvanized opposition from the Conservative party, which thinks apartheid can survive...
...False and unhistorical synthesizing...
...It ignores both the spirit and teachings of Vatican II...
...But in his lifelong battle to end the racist program of apartheid, Mandela was of necessity acting on "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen...
...A. God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world, and be happy with him forever in the next...
...But this is not a theological text to be reviewed like any other...
...The catechism is theology from the top down...
...How many have interpreted the text's semiclassified status ("sub secreto") to rule out widespread consultation...
...de Klerk, his improbable liberator, face dangers from every conceivable side in negotiating a transfer of power...
...Therein lies the potential damage of its privileging of a single theological option on questions that are open to different approaches...
...Now the provisional text of the catechism is out, and it proves such fears were amply justified...
...To assess all of its topics and presentations...
...Most surprising was news that insolvency had come to the firm of Tyson & Co...
...its rejection of biblical justifications for the inequality of men and women...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 5
