I am one of the
generational Catholics schooled in the Faith by the teaching of the Baltimore
Catechism prior to Vatican II, which the postconciliar religious education
establishment had branded as defective pedagogy; my quarrel with them is not
over their contention concerning the style
of teaching, but rather their view that the truths of the Catholic faith on the
existence and nature of God, the creation and Fall, the Incarnation and
Redemption, and the Church set down in the Baltimore Catechism were defective
as well.
P ope Paul VI will be beatified Sunday at the Vatican. While he is perhaps best known for his decisive 1968 encyclical on the regulation of birth, Humanae Vitae , he will also be remembered as a man of extraordinary gifts who was burdened by the tumult the Church faced during his 15-year papacy. His election as Pope Paul VI in 1963 required of him to bring the Second Vatican Council to a conclusion and oversee its implementation. Having taken the name Paul to signify the Church’s mission to evangelize the whole world, he made nine overseas journeys, beginning with the Holy Land. Unhappily his pontificate was marked by a series of crises. Both heterodox and traditionalist Catholics considered him feeble and vacillating, though for differing reasons, and he was tormented to the point of once saying that “the smoke of Satan” had entered the Church. It was this phrase which caught my attention to the point of research for a book on the Church in the U.S. si...

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