Dutch Catholic Disease

When I was young—my brother thinks I was ten or eleven, but I must have been at least fourteen—I rebelled against the Catholic faith.

I had attended Catholic schools, so I ought to have had some reasonable grounding. But the catechism I had been taught in Montreal, beyond grade 2, had been the spongey, bland stuff about butterflies and rainbows and God creating this beautiful world we live in. The Hallelujah chorus.

I remember little. I remember far better the bits of the Baltimore Catechism I had learned in Grade 2; that made sense. But not this vague happy-happy-joy-joy bunkum.

Knowing too well that the world was hellish, this was hardly solace for me. And it seemed clear that it was not just that these guys had no idea. This was propaganda for the way things were, and for what powers might be. I rebelled against such tripe, just as Jesus did, and against the false God it worshipped, a figure strikingly like Orwell’s Big Brother.

What I needed was Jesus’s teaching; instead, this is what the Pharisees taught.

My father, when I told him of my discontent with it all, forced me to read the “Dutch Catechism.”

Confirming all my misgivings.

The Dutch Catechism is perhaps little remembered now; even though it is sometimes called “the notorious Dutch Catechism.” It was the big bestseller among progressive Catholics in the years after Vatican II. It is no doubt the main reason the faith is now almost dead in the Netherlands.

It doubled down on the feel-good approach. The actual title was “A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults.” Two red flags: “new” and “for adults.” The implication was that the teachings folks were familiar with were outmoded and childish. Whoever wrote it took seriously none of this supernatural Son of God stuff. That was just a lot of double-talk to keep the peasantry quiet. We sophisticates, of course, knew better.

This catechism discounted miracles as products of the imagination. Satan was only “a force endowed with personality.” Angels were forces of good. Demons were merely symbols of evil. Purgatory was sublimated into a vague concept of the need for “purification.” Praying to the saints for intercession was an “old custom whose inspiration through faith must be noted.” Mention of virgin births or transubstantiation was avoided.

It introduced man’s essential nature as questioning, and proceeded to raise questions without giving answers.

Nothing was left but a dull materialism and Rotarian morality.

Clearly, the Catholic Church had positioned itself against the supernatural.

What first turned me back to the church was Humanae Vitae. Being teenaged and preoccupied with sex, I did not like the teaching on birth control; but I had to respect it. Here at last were rules. And the teaching against abortion was like a distant beacon in a tempest at night: at last someone was prepared to stand up for morality and the oppressed instead of just pandering to the well-nourished. At last somebody believed in something.

Next in importance was that phrase in the Nicene Creed, “maker of all things, visible and invisible.” It contradicted the Dutch Catechism, and hinted that the original teaching was something deeper. It was aware that there was more to life than the material.

At seventeen or so, I was reminded by a Pentecostal friend of the Biblical passage “consider the lilies of the field…” I had forgotten it, or overlooked it. This clearly showed that the original Christian moral teaching was not the vapid “work ethic” notion that the point of life was earthly and material success.

It took many more years to recover from the damage done to my spiritual life by the Dutch Catechism and the anti-religious attitude it represented. If I have fully recovered even now.

Appallingly, while the Dutch Catechism itself has faded in influence, similar cynical and irreligious views are visible in the Church today.

I read of a priest omitting the Nicene Creed from his masses, “so as not to offend ecumenical sentiment.”

I read of prelates, even cardinals, using the priesthood as a cover for a homosexual lifestyle.

I now read of the Pope himself lamenting that income inequality is causing the growth of world poverty.

Problem: world poverty is actually declining? Where did the Pope get such a false idea?

It conforms, not with reality, but with Marxist theory. This is what Marx expected to happen.

So it seems that Pope Francis believes in Marxism so strongly that Marxist dogma trumps evidence.

This is not a trivial issue: no sin could be worse than turning the young and questing from religion. Jesus warned that it would be better for such false teachers to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around their necks.