The catechism is a daunting looking book, and according to the
developer of a new service, which streams extracts from the catechism
through a daily email feed; this is why so many people never read it. Now, however, and through the service, Read the Catechism in a Year, people are being sent bite size portions of the catechism each day, and if they read them, by the end of the Year of Faith, they will have read the whole catechism.
The Year of Faith marks the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, but also the 20th anniversary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In the encyclical letter for the Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI encouraged Catholics to read the Catechism and use it as a tool to reach a, “systematic knowledge of the content of faith.”
Matthew Warner from the US, together with a small team, developed the free application, which delivers easily readable segments of the Catechism to the reader’s inbox every morning.
“We are currently at over 70,000 people subscribed and still growing,” Matthew Warner, head of FlockNote, a social media service, told ciNews.
Mr Warner calls himself a digital dad with a mission to share and educate others about the ups and downs of social media. He developed FlockNote to helps parishes and dioceses communicate with their communities.
His free service, Read the Catechism in a Year, delivers five to ten paragraphs of the catechism via email to a subscriber each day.
Although the Year of Faith is well underway, people can sign up at any stage, and the service will continue daily from there.
They can also click a link that will give them the days they have missed.
“The catechism is broken down into 410 days (since the Year of Faith goes longer than a calendar year). Each day has 5-10 paragraphs depending on how long they are and with a practical attempt not to cut off a day in the middle of a complete thought,” he said.
“People like to consume information in small, digestible bites,” said Mr Warner. “And the reason I think so many people never end up reading the whole Catechism is because it's a fairly daunting task to take on all at once. So we make it easy. You get a small amount of it e-mailed to you each day that you can read in 5-10 minutes. Do that little bit each day, and after the Year of Faith, you'll have read the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church.”
The service has spread mainly by word of mouth, and according to Warner, about 1,000 new subscribers are signing on each day.
To sign up for the free e-mail service, see www.Flocknote.com/catechism.