Yes, Virginia, the Catechism is a Magisterial document.

he Mag­is­teri­um is the teach­ing author­i­ty of the Catholic Church. The word does, after all, come from the Latin mag­is­ter, which means “teacher.” So when St. John Paul II, in pro­mul­gat­ing the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church, called it a “sure norm for teach­ing the faith,” he sure seems to be call­ing it Mag­is­te­r­i­al by def­i­n­i­tion. He said that in Fidei Deposi­tum. Fidei Deposi­tum is an apos­tolic con­sti­tu­tion. An apos­tolic con­sti­tu­tion is the high­est, most solemn decree a pope can issue. I mean, look, when a pope pro­mul­gates a document—say, a Catechism—as a for­mal act of his papa­cy, it is an act of the Mag­is­teri­um. It’s not as though the pope is say­ing, “You know, here’s a pri­vate opin­ion of mine.”

You may won­der, dear read­er, why I make so much of this. Per­haps you will won­der less when I tell you I’ve been on Face­book. There, amidst the fusil­lade of pri­vate opin­ions mas­querad­ing as Mag­is­te­r­i­al decrees, I read this [Post no longer available—SEA, 4/21/24.]

The cat­e­chism is not itself a mag­is­te­r­i­al text nor inspired (see Ratzinger’s doc­tri­nal note on its release when he was head of the CDF). He informs the­olo­gians that the cat­e­chism is not a mag­is­te­r­i­al doc­u­ment and does not end debate on the doc­trines sum­ma­rized in it, which stand or fall on the sound­ness of argu­ment and right inter­pre­ta­tion and author­i­ty of the mag­is­te­r­i­al texts upon which its state­ments are based and should con­tin­ue to be debat­ed. Proof text the­ol­o­gy is nev­er the­ol­o­gy.

Well, okay. There’s a lot there to iron. Let’s take a look, first, at a few oth­er items before we move to Ratzinger’s “doc­tri­nal note.” Here’s St. John Paul II again, again in Fidei Deposi­tum:

A cat­e­chism should faith­ful­ly and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly present the teach­ing of Sacred Scrip­ture, the liv­ing Tra­di­tion of the Church and the authen­tic Mag­is­teri­um.

The Cat­e­chism con­tains a “faith­ful” and “sys­tem­at­ic” pre­sen­ta­tion of “the authen­tic Mag­is­teri­um”; call me crazy, it must be Mag­is­te­r­i­al.

The pope goes on:

The Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church, which I approved 25 June last and the pub­li­ca­tion of which I today order by virtue of my Apos­tolic Author­i­ty, is a state­ment of the Church’s faith and of Catholic doc­trine, attest­ed to or illu­mined by Sacred Scrip­ture, Apos­tolic Tra­di­tion and the Church’s Mag­is­teri­um.

St. John Paul II pub­lish­es it “by virtue of his apos­tolic author­i­ty”; it is a “state­ment of … the Church’s Mag­is­teri­um.” Well gol­ly gee, it must be Mag­is­te­r­i­al, then.

The USCCB fig­ured that one out, too. The Cat­e­chism was “pro­mul­gat­ed by the Holy Father as part of his ordi­nary Mag­is­teri­um.” It is “part of the Church’s ordi­nary teach­ing author­i­ty.”

“Pope John Paul II placed his apos­tolic author­i­ty behind it. Its doc­tri­nal author­i­ty is prop­er to the papal Mag­is­teri­um.”

It holds, the USCCB goes on, a “priv­iliged place” among “cat­e­chet­i­cal doc­u­ments with­in the Church’s Mag­is­teri­um.

All of which is to say: The Cat­e­chism is a Mag­is­te­r­i­al text.

•••

So what does Ratzinger say in his “doc­tri­nal note” that sup­pos­ed­ly calls all this into ques­tion? Here is the key pas­sage, as quot­ed by Jim­my Akin:

The indi­vid­ual doc­trine which the Cat­e­chism presents receive no oth­er weight than that which they already pos­sess. The weight of the Cat­e­chism itself lies in the whole. Since it trans­mits what the Church teach­es, who­ev­er rejects it as a whole sep­a­rates him­self beyond ques­tion from the faith and teach­ing of the Church.

At this point, we need to be care­ful. Ratzinger is not deny­ing that the Cat­e­chism is Mag­is­te­r­i­al. What he is say­ing is that the con­tents of the Cat­e­chism car­ry no addi­tion­al Mag­is­te­r­i­al weight above what they had already pos­sessed. Their inclu­sion in the Cat­e­chism does not invest them with extra weight.

It is a com­mon­place that dif­fer­ent Mag­is­te­r­i­al teach­ings car­ry with them dif­fer­ent lev­els of author­i­ty. This does not mean, and nev­er meant, that Catholics are free to dis­re­gard stuff that is not to their lik­ing. And it does not mean that some­thing with less Mag­is­te­r­i­al author­i­ty is some­how not Mag­is­te­r­i­al at all. That’s, frankly, absurd.

But the author of the Face­book com­ment above gives things away when he says that the con­tents of the Cat­e­chism “stand or fall on the sound­ness of the argu­ment” (as though the Cat­e­chism is mere the­ol­o­gy or phi­los­o­phy) and “should con­tin­ue to be debat­ed.” This is code lan­guage for “there’s stuff in the Cat­e­chism I don’t like and wish to have a ratio­nale to reject.” Not so, accord­ing to the USCCB (in the text I linked above); and not so, accord­ing to the very same Car­di­nal Ratzinger in a CDF doc­u­ment from 2004. There, ten years after Pope John Paul II pro­mul­gat­ed the Cat­e­chism, he called it a “procla­ma­tion of faith” and said:

[T]he faith is not pri­mar­i­ly the mat­ter for intel­lec­tu­al exper­i­men­ta­tion, it is rather the sol­id foundation—the hyposta­sis, as the Let­ter to the Hebrews (11,1) tells us—on which we can live and die.

If that were not so—if the Cat­e­chism were a the­o­log­i­cal text, some­thing that “stood or fell on the sound­ness of the argu­ment,” and so forth, then, accord­ing to Ratzinger, it would be “entire­ly a prod­uct of our own thought and no dif­fer­ent from the phi­los­o­phy of reli­gion.” But the Cat­e­chism, as a “book of the faith,” is more than that. It is not Cog­i­to but Cre­do.