Challoner and the ‘Penny Catechism’

Extract

The ancestry of Challoner's Abridgement of Christian Doctrine has been pretty well established by Mr Bernard Pickering in the Clergy Review of January, 1980 (Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 6-15). The ancestry of the ‘Penny Catechism’, which is partly dependent on the Abridgement, also deserves further investigation. For a full investigation, a great deal of work would have to be done. What follows is the fruit of a re-reading of the first section of the Garden of the Soul called ‘Christian Doctrine: A Summary of Faith and Practice’ and the Meditations for Every Day in the Year. Whether or not Challoner revised his Abridgement does not seem to be known, but these two books seem to have been among the sources used by what I have called the Redactors (Cf. CR, April 1978, pp. 140-6). In what follows, AB stands for the Abridgement, GS for the Garden of the Soul and Med. for the Meditations. The numbering of AB is my own, for the original is without any, and I have used the ‘Penny Catechism’ in the edition of 1905, which will not have been touched since the redaction of the second half of the nineteenth century.