Telling Catholics What They Believe

WHAT LASTING MARK HAS POPE JOHN PAUL II MADE? The Pontiff is renowned, among other things, for his vigorous effort to stem dissent and clarify what Catholicism stands for. Thus the newly issued Universal Catechism "will be the signature that the Pope leaves behind him," says a ranking Vatican official. The 676-page summary of essential beliefs on doctrine and morals applies to all the world's 850 million Catholics. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's uncompromising doctrinal monitor, led the six-year project. His staff went through nine drafts and fielded 24,000 proposals from bishops. The French edition, released last week, is already a brisk seller, and debates will well up as the document appears in other languages.

John Paul's introduction says the big book adapts infallible church teaching to illuminate "the new situations and problems which had not yet emerged in the past." Writers of the last such catechism 426 years ago could not have imagined some sins condemned in 1992: test-tube conception, artificial insemination, speeding, drunk driving and check bouncing. There were closer medieval analogues for such evils as unjustly low wages, pornography, tax evasion and drug trafficking.

Capital punishment provoked heavy internal debate. The final text says that a punishment should be "proportional to the gravity of the crime, without excluding in extreme cases the death penalty." Henri Tincq of Le Monde found that "incomprehensible" in light of opposition to state execution by the hierarchies of France, Canada and the U.S.

Though Ratzinger has been tough on homosexuality, the catechism says persons "do not choose their homosexual condition; for most, it is a trying one. They must be greeted with respect, compassion and tactfulness. Any sign of unfair discrimination against them must be avoided." But homosexual acts are deemed "intrinsically disorderly," and the church calls on gays and lesbians, as well as unmarried heterosexuals, to abstain from sex. Subtle flexibility is also seen on suicide, with eternal salvation held out as a possibility.

Much of the catechism, of course, merely reasserts traditional stands, including the church's hotly contested opposition to women priests, birth control, divorce, mercy killing and abortion. The catechism may not be especially innovative but, asserts Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, it "will appear, with time, to be one of the major events of our age."