Foreword
“Among the aids available to catechesis, catechisms excel all others”— General Directory for Catechesis.
St. Francis Xavier, in a letter to St. Ignatius in the year 1542, wrote of the situation in India. He lamented: “There is nobody to teach them the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Commandments of God’s law”. Yet even the children were anxious for divine Truth and grace. He wrote: “The older children would not let me say my Office or eat or sleep until I taught them one prayer or another. Then I began to understand: ‘the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’ ”
Even graver than the situation in sixteenth century India has been the situation in much of the Catholic world since the Second Vatican Council. Often orthodox teaching has been replaced with false. Spawned by a renascent Modernism, sometimes called the Teilhardian Revolution because of its roots in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, catechetical institutes in Holland, Belgium, France and elsewhere gave us what is called “The New Catechetics.” Because of its lack of doctrinal content it is also called “Creedless Catechetics” or even “Catechetics without Catechetics”. The old catechetics dating from the early Church was rejected. The old methods enshrined in great catechisms like those of the Council of Trent, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Peter Canisius, St. Pius X, and hundreds of their offspring like the Butler Catechism and the Baltimore Catechism were despised, even forbidden. (more...)
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