The Catholic Church was nearly 2,000 years old when the Baltimore Catechism came on the scene.
In the past 122 years, the Baltimore Catechism has become the standard for teaching the faith to new generations of Catholics throughout the English-speaking world.
Baltimore Archbishop William Henry Keeler learned his catechism in grade school in Pennsylvania. He studied several editions, and noted some of the changes in his lifetime.
“I remember the questions: ?Who made me? God made me. Why did he make me? To know and love and serve him?, ” he said. “Then it was ?To know him and make him known, love him and make him loved. …?”
Now the catechism adopted a discussion format, said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Washington archbishop. “So they?re not just learning a pat answer where it?s something they might understand, but also they?re learning why,” he said.
“A Catechism of Christian Doctrine,” prepared by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, was the de facto standard Catholic school text in the United States from 1885 to the 1960s.
The original publisher, William H. Sadlier Inc., of New York, still publishes the catechism as well as educational texts for kindergarten through 12th grade in Baltimore and throughout the world. Sadlier celebrated its 175th anniversary this Wednesday with an awardsceremony and breakfast in Baltimore.
The Catholic family-owned publishing house built its oeuvre around parochial and regular education, said vice president and sixth-generation heir William Sadlier Dinger Jr. “We?ve always been involved with the Catholic Church,” he said
The Baltimore Catechism , with its global influence, is one of the defining documents in the English-speaking church, McCarrick said.
“This document was created in the middle of the 19th century. It?s still alive in my lifetime in the [21st] century. It?s all part of the continuity,” he said. “The church has been here all this time. It not only has been here, but has been teaching theology, teaching social structure. It?s all part of the great history of this country.”
