Sure, back a number years ago I may have been the clever guy to come up with the idea for a collaborative blog based on reading and faith sharing on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition [CCC] but here’s the real deal, it’s my dear wife who has read the CCC daily since our conversion in January of 2006.
She reads a small portion each day, over breakfast, along with the daily Mass Readings from her Bible. She doesn’t necessarily complete the CCC each calendar year because sometimes she reads as little a single numbered article at one sitting or over more than one sitting but in five years she’s read the entire Catechism three times. That’s no merger accomplishment. It’s certainly more than I accomplished via the defunct Catholic Catechism blog and more than I’ve accomplished in reading the CCC myself period. And I’m the guy who is supposed to be some kind of part time catechist.
The one gift she wanted last year for Christmas, believe this now, was the Compendium to the CCC which makes the CCC look like a novelette. I obliged, happily, proudly.
I don’t blame you at all, dear reader, if you’re thinking, Heck, have your wife write this column. I know, and she’s an educator by profession so she could do it. But she reads the CCC to tune her own heart and mind and isn’t quick, like me, to tell others what she’s discovered. Like Mary, yes that Mary, she ponders things in her heart. I love that about her. I love that she approaches the living teachings of the Catholic Church the way they are to be approached, namely, with the intention of conforming her mind to the will of God, trusting the Catholic Church does indeed hold the deposit of the faith as given by Christ through the Apostles and under his actual authority in order to “to help men believe that Jesus is the Son of God so that believing they might have life in his name, and to educate and instruct them in this life, thus building up the body of Christ” [CCC #7].
She may eat breakfast while reading the Catechism but a ‘cafeteria’ Catholic she is not.
For the Catechism Project, this is your Artist + Illustrator + Occasional Catechist, owenswain of owenswain.com/blawg
P.S. It’s a pleasure to have been welcomed by FRIVAL to be a contributor. May God bless our journey through the CCC and yours as you read along. I do not claim to be anything other than what I am, no official authority but a fellow pilgrim – who happily subjects himself to the greater wisdom of Christ given authoritatively through the teachings of the Apostles through the ages who are in full communion with Rome – and clergy convert from Protestantism. I thank God for my Protestant heritage and for his saving grace by which we are alone brought to the gates of eternity.
