There and Back Again: A Second Journey Through the Catechism Begins

I read the Catechism of the Catholic Church many years ago when I was in RCIA, but recently it dawned on me that this was about 25 years ago! Such happens I guess when you get older, time does seem to fly by quickly without you thinking about it. When you do stop and think about something, bam! You realize just how long ago it was! Now I've referenced the Catechism since RCIA, but don't recall having gone further. I've decided to change that and start over with the Catechism, taking a deep dive into it as I did all those years ago. Thus the title of this first post. I'm no hobbit of course, but this will seem like a journey of sorts and I rather like keeping the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien in mind.

For this journey I will be open and free with my thoughts, not dwelling on making apologetics or scholarly points, but simply taking the Catechism on its own at face value. I'm using this blog mainly to record those thoughts, not to convince anyone of anything and Twitter/X is too limiting for that. Fr. Mike Schmitz seems to offer the best program for my schedule, that is his The Catechism in a Year podcast (YouTube version). I've purchased Ascension's version of the Catechism and finished putting on all the indexing tabs. I may go into this more at another time, but their version is really, really good and makes it easy for the reader to use, more so than the version I used years ago and have had on hand. Douglas Beaumont gives a great review of this here:

Ok, with the preliminaries all done, along with my somewhat coherent ramblings, let's start today with Fr. Mike's Introduction: