By Sean Fitzpatrick, Crisis Magazine, April 5, 2022
Sean Fitzpatrick is a senior contributor to Crisis and serves on the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy, a Catholic boarding school for boys in Pennsylvania.
When Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising celebrated Mass last month with the rainbow flag draped before the altar to celebrate 20 years of “queer worship” at St. Paul’s parish church, he apologized for the Church’s supposed decades of discrimination against homosexuals—and confirmed for many what they had been wondering about him: that he is a heretic for his radical pressure to overturn the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality. In an interview after the event, Cardinal Marx added more fuel to the fire when he said that the Catechism of the Catholic Church was “not set in stone,” and that Catholics had a right “to doubt what it said.”
Although Cardinal Marx is obviously wrong when it comes to homosexual activity, his comments about the Catechism can help clarify the relationship between heresy, pedagogy, and the purpose of catechisms. …