The Latest in Catechisms

Extract

Few intellectual groups within the Church have deserved more gratitude from their fellow-Catholics than the Catechetical Society of Munich. It came into existence towards the end of the nineteenth century; a few kindred spirits among the clergy—Stieglitz, Weber, and others—gathered themselves round a periodical, Katechische Blätter, still happily flourishing, and from 1898 onwards had the conscious aim of improving the prevailing ways of teaching religion to the young. They were well aware of the educational psychology of those days, Herbart and suchlike, and they soon evolved the needed applications of it to the teaching of religion. Their Munich method, as it was called, made a point of properly organized lesson-units, instead of just ploughing steadily through a book of questions and answers. They may have seemed a shade pedantic perhaps in their insistence on the regular elements of each lesson—aim, presentation, explanation, questioning, application, expression-work and so forth. But the distinctive feature of Munich was to start from something concrete, some narrative or at least some picture, but preferably from some Scriptural story, and work up from that to the explanation of the doctrine concerned and if necessary to the relevant catechism- answer. Other methods had used Scripture for ‘examples’; Munich started from Scripture. As time went on, and the liturgical movement made itself felt especially in Germany, together with a deepening theology, the Munich catechists welcomed the new insights and incorporated them into their plans and material. Gradually the present generation of pioneers, in Germany and elsewhere, has come to see that catechetical renewal is not merely a matter of methods, of introducing a few more pictures or stories or activities, but involves reconsidering the content of the instruction itself.