Celebrating the Year of Faith

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that October 11, 2012 through November 24, 2013 will be celebrated as a “Year of Faith” to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has released a Note containing recommendations for the universal Church, episcopal conferences, dioceses, and parishes for celebrating the Year of Faith, “to aid both the encounter with Christ through authentic witnesses to faith, and the ever-greater understanding of its contents.”

In particular, the Year of Faith “will offer a special opportunity for all believers to deepen their knowledge of the primary documents of the Second Vatican Council and their study of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” The note encourages initiatives for this at all levels through symposia, seminary curricula, diocesan study days, homilies, and parish-level teaching.

Also, to this end,

The republication in paperback and economical editions of the Documents of Vatican Council II, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its Compendium is to be promoted, as is the wider distribution of these texts through electronic means and modern technologies. (emphasis added)

I resisted the temptation to title this post “Pope: ‘Buy Logos Bible Software!’” (even if exaggerated misreadings of the Vatican seem to be par for the course in the press), but it’s hard to imagine better timing for the arrival of the Logos edition of the Catechism.

Significantly, the CDF Note quotes Pope Benedict’s well-known 2005 address to the Roman Curia calling for an understanding of the Second Vatican Council that rejects a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” and replaces it with a hermeneutic of reform and renewal in continuity. And, along the same lines, the Note quotes his Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei announcing the Year of Faith, calling the Catechism an “authentic fruit” of the Council, in which

we see the wealth of teaching that the Church has received, safeguarded and proposed in her two thousand years of history. From Sacred Scripture to the Fathers of the Church, from theological masters to the saints across the centuries, the Catechism provides a permanent record of the many ways in which the Church has meditated on the faith and made progress in doctrine so as to offer certitude to believers in their lives of faith.

The Logos edition of the Catechism is just one way that electronic media can make these texts more accessible for the Year of Faith, but, especially when combined with one of our base packages, its particular strength is the way it seamlessly links together the Catechism and Vatican II with their sources in Holy Scripture and in the entire Catholic tradition. This makes it an ideal tool for the kind of renewed understanding the Pope is calling for for—a gateway into the faith and a deeper understanding of the tradition behind it.