Cd. Schonborn: Homosex acts as “intrinsically disordered” absent from YouCat


The cardinal’s (Schönborn) visit, (to Ireland) the committee’s national coordinator Máirín Ní Shúilleabháin said ahead of the event, was well timed, coming during preparations for August 2018’s World Meeting of Families as it would give further insight into the Gospel of the family at this moment in our history, helping to increase our knowledge of what we believe as Catholics and enriching our understanding of the dignity of the Christian family.
The Catechism is an invaluable tool for evangelising, the cardinal told The Irish Catholic after the Mass, explaining that, “Pope St John Paul said when he published the Catechism – he promulgated the Catechism on October 11, 1992 – that this is a secure guide for Catholic doctrine, and therefore it is the right tool for evangelising.”
However, he adds, it is not the only such tool, and related books and resources might be better suited to individual situations. “Some countries have produced national catechisms,” he says, continuing, “there have been published a good number of working tools to work with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for homilies, for catechesis – kind of instruments to use the Catechism practically, but it is a fact that the Compendium and I think even more the YouCat became very important tools to popularise the Catechism.”
The 2006 Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church follows the template of the kind of classic catechism with which older readers of this newspaper would have grown up, but 2010’s YouCat: Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church, which the cardinal was involved in at its conception, follows the template of the full catechism, albeit in a way targeted at teenagers and younger adults.
Describing it as “a worldwide success”, the cardinal continues, “it’s a tremendous success – it’s I think a perfect example of what Pope St John Paul intended when he encouraged, so to say, ‘inculturated’ or ‘localised’ instruments for catechesis.
An obvious question that arises from that is whether the language of the Catechism is suitable for ordinary readers, couched as it sometimes is in philosophical and theological approaches with which few in the modern Church are familiar, let alone comfortable.
Difficulty
Indeed, this difficulty reared its head during 2014 and 2015’s synods of bishops when concerns were raised about Church language sometimes coming across as unintentionally hurtful, perhaps the classic example of which being the description of homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered”. 
The phrase, which is conspicuously absent from both the Compendium and the YouCat, is one that really only makes sense in the context of Thomistic theology and philosophy, rooted in the thinking of Aristotle.
“The Catechism first, as it says in the introduction, is intended for bishops,” the cardinal points out, stressing that they – and not general readers – are the target audience, something that has inspired some people to joke “are the bishops so ignorant that they now need their own catechism?”
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