Heart Over Head: Engaging With the Catechism, One Paragraph At a Time, by  Gavin Ashenden

It’s not that I’m jealous of Fr Mike Schmitz and his success in producing an app that takes you through the Catechism in one year – and which has been downloaded millions of times – but I’m certainly inspired. The Catechism is one of the richest resources in the Catholic Church; Protestantism falls apart into thousands of splinters without an authoritative presentation of what the Church believes and teaches.

It’s one of the reasons so many people convert to Catholicism from Protestant denominations. In a society where so many people feel cast adrift without moorings, there is an ever-increasing hunger for something that contains the ring of truth and that they can engage with at a serious level. That’s partly why, with one of my other hats on – and inspired by Fr Schmitz – the YouTube channel Catholic Unscripted has set about offering a journey through the Catechism.

Unlike Fr Schmitz, however, we don’t just read it – we talk about it as well. Luckily my partner in catechetical discovery, Katherine Bennett, a fellow contributor to these pages, knows how to “focus our conversation”, as she calls it. This means helping me recognise when I’ve come to the summit of a viable train of thought, and that from then on less is more. …

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