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Teaching a “Living Catechism” with Mary

Pope St. John Paul II described Mary as a “living Catechism.”[i] What did he mean by this phrase? How might this description help us to understand more about the pedagogy of the faith that is enshrined in the pages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church? From this identification of Our Lady with the notion of a catechism we can clearly expect there to be an intimate relationship between the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Mary. What is this relationship? We go to the Catechism, of course, to find the definitive and authoritative teaching of the Church on Mary. We go there to learn how to teach about Mary and how to proclaim her place in salvation history and in the lives of each of the members of the Church. Calling Mary a “living Catechism” suggests something more, however: that, as we read about Mary in the Catechism, we will be learning not just about her but also about the contents of the Catechism as a whole, because she is herself a kind of catechism. As we learn about her from the Catechism, we will be, at the same time, learning the faith from her. She is the living Catechism; she is, in a sense, the book we learn from. [In the October issue of The Catechetical Review, Dr. Willey will be contributing a longer article focused on the issue’s theme of “The Liturgical Encounter.” This series on The Catechism & the New Evangelization will then resume with the January 2016 issue.]

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Dr. Petroc Willey BD, STL PhD, PhD (Lateran) studied theology at King's College, London and Maynooth in Ireland and philosophy at Liverpool University in England and the Lateran University in Rome. From 1985-1992, he was Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Plater College, Oxford. From 1992 until October 2013 he worked at Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, where he was Dean of Graduate Research overseeing a doctoral program in Catholic Studies at the Maryvale Institute, offered in collaboration with Liverpool Hope University. He was appointed by Benedict XVI as a Consultor for the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization and is currently a Consultor for the Dicastery for Evangelization. He is a professor at Franciscan University for the Office of Catechetics. His publications include Become What You Are: The Call and Gift of Marriage (with Katherine Willey), and The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Craft of Catechesis (co-authored with Professor Barbara Morgan and Fr. Pierre de Cointet, and with an introduction by Cardinal Schonborn), and has articles in collections of essays and in journals such as The International Journal for Catechesis and Evangelization, New Blackfriars, Faith, The Nazareth Journal, The Catholic Canadian Review. He was the Host of the EWTN series Handing on the Faith (2007).

This article is from The Catechetical Review (Online Edition ISSN 2379-6324) and may be copied for catechetical purposes only. It may not be reprinted in another published work without the permission of The Catechetical Review by contacting [email protected]

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