Novus Ordo: YouCat (Youth Catechism) Weak on Homosexuality …
Dr. Robert Sungenis
Are you sitting down? I suggest you do so because
you’re in for a real shocker. A youth catechism, known popularly as
“YouCat,” which is claimed to be modeled from the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church,
contains dubious, suggestive and sometimes scandalous teachings on
issues such as homosexuality, contraception, euthanasia, evolution,
philosophy, and last but not least, biblical inerrancy.1
YouCat was released by the Vatican on April 4, 2011 and was translated in more than a dozen
languages.
Under direction from Pope Benedict, YouCat will make its big splash on
World Youth Day in Madrid on August 16-21, 2011.
YouCat contains a preface by Pope Benedict XVI, but
its editor-in-chief is Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, who once
served as the secretary of the editorial team that compiled the 1992Catechism of the Catholic Church. In
reference to YouCat, Schönborn stated: “The Pope was interested in the
project from the beginning. It was his own initiative to honor us with a
Preface that he himself wrote….I am always amazed by the high level of
the Pope’s understanding of the new generations’ way of thinking and by
his capacity to discuss in depth and to lead young people to a deeper
sense of the faith and of friendship with Jesus.”
YouCat was originally the brainchild of the Austrian
Bishop’s Conference. With its German and Swiss counterparts, YouCat
received Vatican approval for the original German edition from the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by William Cardinal
Levada.
Contraception:
YouCat had problems right from the starting gate. In
an article by Hilary White on April 13, 2011, the Vatican admitted the
original YouCat had several errors concerning faith and morals.2 For example, question 420 in the Italian language edition stated:
“Q. Puo una coppia christiana fare ricorso ai metodi anticoncezionali?”
(Translation: “Can a Christian couple have recourse to contraceptive methods?”)
“A. Si, una coppia cristiana puo e deve essere responsabile nella sua facolta di poter donare la vita.”
(Translation: “Yes, a Christian couple can and should be responsible in its faculty of being able to give life”).
Because this particular translation suggests that a
Catholic can use artificial methods of contraception, the Italian
publisher, Nuova Citta, announced it would be recalling the book and
correcting it. Prior to that, copies of the book handed out at the April
press conference had the section on contraception blocked out, and
included an insert saying that the Catholic Church promotes Natural
Family Planning (NFP). The English language version states that Catholic
couples are entitled to plan the size of their families by “regulating
conception” and that to do so the Church “recommends” Natural Family
Planning.
Although promoting artificial contraception is
certainly heretical, the correction of the Italian publisher and the
wording of the English version leave YouCat with a gaping hole in its
teaching, since it now appears as if the Church promotes NFP simply
because it is an acceptable means of birth control. In other words, it
breeds the same contraceptive mentality the world cherishes but chooses a
Church-sanctioned method to do so. Such a mentality was not the intent
of Pope Paul VI in Humane Vitae, which, although it stipulated
that married couples can space births by refraining from relations
during fertile periods, they can do so only on two conditions: (a) if
one of the spouses has a “physical or psychological condition” or (b)
there are “external circumstances” that prohibit bearing a child.3 Too often today Catholic couples interpret Humane Vitae as
a permission to practice birth control, albeit naturally, whenever they
desire, without having any specific reason to do so other than their
own preference not to have child. Humane Vitae does not teach
that Catholic couples can “plan out the size of their family.” It
teaches that Catholic spouses are to be always open to producing
children, unless there is a clear and present danger in doing so.4Consequently,
it appears YouCat is teaching a whole generation of Catholics that NFP
is the “Catholic way” of practicing birth control much as it has taught
them that an annulment is the “Catholic way” of allowing remarriage
after divorce.
Euthanasia
As for the issue of Euthanasia, Hilary White writes:
At a Vatican press conference today [April 13, 2011],
officials admitted that a book intended to teach young people the
details of the Catholic faith, which will be handed out at upcoming
World Youth Day in Spain, contains several errors, with particularly
egregious mistakes on life and family issues.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, president of the
Austrian Bishops’ Conference and a director of the project, told
assembled journalists that the Italian edition of the book, “YouCat,”
contains errors on the Church’s teachings on euthanasia, as well as
contraception.
In answer to question 382, the Italian book says, “In
so-called passive euthanasia someone helps another person in the dying
process and thereby obeys the commandment ‘Love your neighbor.’”
Cardinal Schönborn also said that the French edition
contains errors about Catholic teaching on the “value” of other
religions according to the documents of the Second Vatican Council.
But instead of having the YouCat recalled and
quarantined, White reports that Schönborn said that “the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith will create a pool of theological experts
to examine the text and will publish all the errors in a pamphlet that
will contain corrections.”
Homosexuality
The most egregious parts of YouCat
are those which address the issues of sexuality, specifically
homosexuality. The bottom line is, YouCat does not treat homosexuality
as even a serious condition, much less a sinful state of existence. But
YouCat’s teaching is subtle. Note these words in Paragraph 65:
There is no man on earth who is not
descended from a union of a mother and father. Therefore it is a painful
experience for many homosexually oriented people that they do not feel
erotically attracted to the opposite sex and necessarily miss out on the
physical fruitfulness of the union between man and woman according to
human nature and the divine order of creation. Nevertheless, God often
leads souls to himself along unusual paths: A lack, a loss, or a
wound—if accepted and affirmed—can become a springboard for throwing
oneself into the arms of God.
Implied in the words “homosexually
oriented” is the idea that homosexuality is a congenital condition, not a
learned behavior or a perverse life-style one decides to enter. By
implying that homosexuality is “a lack, a loss or a wound” and not a
decision by a mature adult to transgress God’s laws (as Scripture and
Tradition say it is), YouCat seeks to elicit pity for homosexuals due to
the fact that they are simply “born that way,” as it were, and thus
denied the opportunity of sexual “union” that other people possess.
YouCat further implies that if the homosexually oriented person “accepts
and affirms” this congenital condition, he can do so knowing that God
can make good of it because He “lead souls to himself along unusual
paths.” Instead of telling the homosexual that his sexual tendencies are
an outgrowth of his uncontrolled concupiscence and that he should pray
to God to have the power to eradicate this state of mind, he is told,
more or less, to accept his condition and hold God to blame for making
him homosexually oriented. His only consolation is that God will make up
for it by using the condition to lead him back to God. In effect,
homosexuality is treated no different than if YouCat were talking about a
mongoloid baby, since, similar to YouCat’s understanding of the
homosexual, the deformed child can also use his condition as a
“springboard for throwing one into the arms of God.” In the end, YouCat
neither calls homosexuality a sin, nor does it say that homosexual
inclinations are perverse and need to be remedied.
This distorted view of homosexuality
begs the question as to how such a weak treatment of such a historically
perverse sin could appear in a Catholic catechism. As noted above,
YouCat was overseen by Cardinal Schӧnborn, who was also the editor of
the 1992 universal Catechism of the Catholic Church. It may be no
coincidence that before the Catechism was published, it is rumored that
Cardinal Ratzinger was forced to make various changes to the
Catechism’s teaching on homosexuality, since the original draft made it
appear that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable. That Cardinal
Ratzinger was compelled to edit Cardinal Schönborn’s understanding of
homosexuality is suggested by the fact that Schönborn has gone on record
stating one of the most perverse understandings of homosexual
partnerships to come out of the mouth of a Catholic. In May 2010, The Tablet interviewed Schönborn in which he stated the following:
“We should give more consideration to
the quality of homosexual relationships” and “A stable relationship is
certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.”5
Besides the blatant endorsement of
homosexuality as something other than a sin, Schönborn seems to be
advocating the position that a “quality” relationship is one in which
two men commit to having sexual relations with each other as opposed to
tramping themselves around in the homosexual market and sleeping with
numerous men. The former Schönborn deems as “stable” and therefore
worthy of being accepted by the Church, while the latter is “unstable”
and unacceptable. All one can do is shake his head in disbelief that a
cardinal of the Catholic Church would come to this point in his view of
humanity. This is the very person who was editor-in-chief of YouCat, and
perhaps now we can understand why it has such a kid-glove treatment of
homosexuality.
Masturbation:
What young man hasn’t struggled with
the temptation of masturbation? Unfortunately, he is going to struggle
even more if he uses YouCat to be his guide. In paragraph 409 it states:
“The Church does not demonize masturbation, but she warns against
trivializing it.” One can surmise that this language was chosen so as to
cut a middle road, neither condemning nor condoning masturbation. The
teenager who reads this equivocal pabulum is not going to know whether
he is permitted to masturbate or not. Or, some clever teenager will
convince himself that he can masturbate because it’s wrong to “demonize”
masturbation, but he won’t masturbate too much because that would be
“trivializing” it. Moreover, if there is a connection to YouCat’s weak
teaching on masturbation with its weak teaching on homosexuality,
perhaps the reason is that masturbation is a favorite practice of
homosexuals.
The truth is, masturbation, as the Church has always taught, is wrong.6 On
a subject of this nature, a Catholic catechism needs to be clear and
decisive – masturbation is wrong and young men should not be engaging in
it, at all. If they do, it is a sin (barring some mitigating factor of
maturity of conscience); and if he continues to masturbate it will not
only harm him spiritually but also psychologically.
Scripture
As dubious as YouCat’s teaching is in
certain places, it makes Scripture’s teaching in certain places even
more dubious. For example, Question 15 states: “How can Sacred Scripture
be ‘truth’ if not everything in it is right?” Directly against the
numerous official and infallible Catholic teachings on the total
inerrancy of Scripture, YouCat implies that Scripture simply cannot be
trusted. A whole generation of young people will now view the Bible as
an assortment of historical mistakes and ignorant concepts, despite the
fact that the Holy Spirit was supposed to have inspired it all.
Even the qualification YouCat gives doesn’t help much:
The Bible is not meant to convey
precise historical information or scientific findings to us. Moreover
the authors were children of their time. They shared the cultural ideas
of the world around them and often were also dominated by its errors.
Nevertheless, everything that man must know about God and the way of his
salvation is found with infallible certainty in Sacred Scripture.
Here YouCat appeals to the old canard: “The Bible is
not a science textbook.” I’m glad the Bible isn’t a science textbook. If
it was anything like today’s science books, it would be changing its
contents every ten years.
Yes, the Bible is not a science book, but when it
touches upon science the Bible is just as accurate as it is on matters
of salvation, and the Church has never said otherwise (at least in its
official and binding statements on the issue as opposed to the many and
varied opinions that are proffered today by some high-ranking clerics).
It is particularly egregious for YouCat to say that
the biblical authors were “dominated by the errors” of the culture
around them. If that were the case, why weren’t they dominated by the
same “errors of the culture” when they were writing about the “way of
salvation”? For example, maybe Jesus didn’t actually rise from the dead.
Maybe it was just the “error of the culture” to believe that he did.
Maybe Jesus really wasn’t God. It was just the “error of the culture”
which was steeped in wishing for a divine Messiah that made the people
think that way. If the biblical writers can make errors in science and
history why can’t they make errors in salvation? Where does the Bible or
the Church say that the biblical writers are only protected from error
when they speak about salvation? For that matter, where does either the
Bible or the Church say that only certain parts of the Bible are for the
purpose of salvation? The answer to both questions is: nowhere. It has
all been made up out of thin air by modern biblical scholarship which is
bent on promoting its unproven scientific theories as fact.
Evolution
In paragraph 42 YouCat asks: “Can someone accept the theory of evolution and still believe in the Creator?” YouCat answers:
Yes. Although it is a different kind of knowledge,
faith is open to the findings and hypotheses of the sciences. A
Christian can accept the theory of evolution as a helpful explanatory
model, provided he does not fall into the heresy of evolutionism, which
views man as the random product of biological processes.
It is good that YouCat says a Christian should be
“open to the findings and hypothesis of the sciences.” True science and
true theology will never conflict. But the problem is this: the domain
of science YouCat doesn’t lead the Christian to examine consists of
convincing evidence that evolution has very little, if any, scientific
support. For the last 50 years Christian scientists have given the world
a viable and convincing scientific alternative to evolutionary science,
but YouCat, as well as the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church (both
with Cardinal Schӧnborn leading the way) fail to even mention these
scientific advances. Would a typical YouCat youth know of any of these
alternatives? Probably not, since he has been taught since childhood
that: (a) the only science available is that which supports evolution,
and (b) there is no science that shows evolution to be a dubious
hypothesis.
In fact, YouCat goes out of its way to ridicule
alternative answers to evolution, as, for example, when it says that
creationists “naively take biblical data literally (for example, to
calculate the earth’s age, they cite the six days of work in Genesis
1).” Perhaps Cardinal Schӧnborn forgot what the Pontifical Biblical
Commission said in 1909 under Pope St. Pius X when the question of how
to interpret the “days” of Genesis was posed:
Question VIII: Whether in that designation and
distinction of six days, with which the account of the first chapter of
Genesis deals, the word (“days”) can be assumed either in its proper
sense as a natural day, or in the improper sense of a certain space of
time; and whether with regard to such a question there can be free
disagreement among exegetes?
Reply: In the affirmative.
So there we have it. The 1909 PBC does not say that
it is “naïve to take biblical data literally” in regards to the six days
of Genesis. It says that one can interpret it as a literal six day
period or a period of a certain space of time. Cardinal Schӧnborn once
again finds himself at great odds with Catholic tradition. In the end,
all the talk about “not taking the bible literally” is a smoke screen
for those who, like Cardinal Schӧnborn, have already accepted evolution
as the correct scientific position and who wish to indoctrinate today’s
youth to the same. Of the two views of the “days” of Genesis permitted
by the PBC, our tradition has stated that we should opt for the literal
unless science can “prove” that the literal is impossible.7 Moreover,
our Catholic tradition has had no problem interpreting the Bible
literally. The Church proved this early on when it interpreted the words
“This is my body” to be the real body and blood of Christ when the rest
of the world was trying to make it a figure of speech.
Uniformitarianism
Hand in hand with YouCat’s push for evolution is the
idea that because God brought the world into existence by evolution, all
that we see today, including all the bad things, are also the result of
evolution. This is strongly implied in YouCat’s paragraph 51:
God created the world to be good, but it is not yet
complete. In violent upheavals and painful processes it is being shaped
and moved toward its final perfection. That may be a better way to
classify what the Church calls physical evil, for example, a birth
defect, or a natural catastrophe. Moral evilsin contrast come about
through the misuse of freedom in the world.
The ghost of Teilhard de Chardin is alive and well in
YouCat. Notice the absence of Original Sin as the cause for why “birth
defects” entered the world. YouCat doesn’t teach the traditional
Catholic doctrine that God created the world good such that it had no
imperfections before Adam and Eve sinned. Rather, it uses the infinitive
(“to be good”) to suggest that God merely intends to make the world
good and will do so through a long process of evolution; and it is
obviously not good now because evolution “is not yet complete.” YouCat
also ignores traditional doctrine by teaching that “physical evil” is
the result of God deciding not to create the world completely good. It
ignores the fact that evil is the direct result of man’s decision to go
against the laws of God, after which God was required by justice to
administer punishment (e.g., birth defects and natural catastrophes).
There are many other problems in YouCat, but the
above are some of the more egregious errors and departures from
traditional Catholic doctrine. Overall, YouCat is one of the most
farcical efforts at catechesis of youth that the Catholic Church has
ever produced. Perhaps the problems in YouCat originated when, as Hilary
White reports, it “was written by a committee of 50 unnamed ‘young
people’ and theologians,” of whom, to this very day, few know who they
are.
1 We
are indebted to the recent paper circulated by Maximos and Anastasios
which alerted us to these issues in YouCat. Our paper raises additional
concerns against the material in YouCat as well as important facts
behind the scenes.
3 “If
therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising
from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from
external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then
take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive
system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that
are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the
least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.” (www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html)
4 Humane
Vitae further states: “From this it follows that they are not free to
act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were
wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. On the
contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do corresponds to the
will of God the Creator. The very nature of marriage and its use makes
His will clear, while the constant teaching of the Church spells it
out….The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the
precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant
doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity
retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human
life….Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only
partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the
nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the
plan of God and His holy will….Similarly excluded is any action which
either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is
specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a
means….Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married
life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which
is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.”
5 The Tablet, May 8, 2010.
6 “Both
the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition,
and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have
firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely
disordered action” (CCC, para. 2352).
7 “But
if they are able to establish their doctrine with proofs that cannot be
denied, we must show that this statement of Scripture…is not opposed to
the truth of their conclusions” (St. Augustine, The Literal
Interpretation of Genesis, Book 2, Ch. 9, para 21); “The literal sense
is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by
exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: ‘All other senses
of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.’ (Catechism of the
Catholic Church, 1994, para. 116).
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