Abbreviated Review: Précis of Official Catholic Teaching

by Martin K. Barrack
Copyright © 2001, Martin K. Barrack

The Catholic Faith magazine
An abbreviated version of the article originally published in The Catholic Faith, Nov-Dec 2001

Précis of Official Catholic Teaching
by George Patrick Morse, J.D., K.G.C.S.G.
Catholics Committed to Support the Pope
9402 Stateside Court
Silver Spring, MD 20903
(301) 434-3245
$135 plus $14 shipping (all twelve volumes, within the United States)

Précis of Official Catholic Teaching is a stunning achievement. Every Catholic diocese, parish, and religious community absolutely needs a set of these twelve books in its library.

In response to the heresies propagated in the wake of Vatican II, Pat Morse and his wife Margaret, with the enthusiastic support of Rev. Vincent P. Miceli, formed an apostolate, Catholics Committed to Support the Pope (CCSP), with a twenty year project to organize and summarize Catholic teaching on each of eleven subjects. Pat was the driving and organizing force. Margaret answered innumerable phone calls, made sure the correspondence got out, helped Pat deal with printers and bookbinders, helped package and mail bundles of books all over the world, and did every other kind of work needed to support CCSP.

Their greatest source of inspiration and guidance was the late Papal Theologian, Mario Luigi Cardinal Ciappi, O.P. When Pat and Margaret Morse first visited Rome, Cardinal Ciappi met with them, listened to Pat’s concept, encouraged and guided them. He provided vital support to CCSP for the rest of his life. The Curia moves with great deliberation; it takes a mentor of high rank to obtain the cooperation of so many heads of dicasteries, including the many Cardinals who wrote the prefaces.

The Books

I had the joy of reviewing in this journal’s Jan-Feb 2000 issue Pat Morse’s The Mass: Its Mysteries Revealed. It was impeccable in its fidelity to the Magisterium and penetrating in its insights, a small volume intended to spread accurate Catholic teaching on the source and summit of Catholic worship. Now my joy is increased a hundredfold at being able to review this twelve-book set.

Each of the twelve books in Précis of Official Catholic Teaching summarizes authoritative Church teaching documents during approximately the past 100 years on a particular subject.

They are:

I Faith, Revelation and the Bible

II Christ Our Lord, True God and True Man

III The Church

IV Marriage, Family and Sexuality

V The Sanctity of Human Life

VI The Social Teaching of the Church

VII The Ordained Priesthood

VIII Worship and Sacraments

IX The Christian Call to Personal Sanctification

X Catholic Education

XI Marian Devotions and the Last Things

XII Supplemental Magisterial Documents

Volume XII was reserved for Church teachings published after the respective volumes were completed. It is organized according to the preceding volumes, so that it begins with two documents that belong to Volume I, followed by a document that belongs to Volume II, and so forth. Since Pope John Paul II produced so many superb teaching documents, Volume XII consists mostly of his writings on a variety of subjects.

Our Lord taught, “You will know them by their fruits.” Précis of Official Catholic Teaching is very sweet fruit indeed. Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Australia, writes in his preface to Volume XII: “It is a great honour to write the Preface for the concluding volume to this great work. The series provides a tremendous resource to priests, seminarians, and lay people and this last volume is no exception, concentrating as it does on the Magisterium of Pope John Paul II.”

The Honors

Pope John Paul II in 1993 asked James Cardinal Hickey, late of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., to invest Pat Morse as a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory for his work on Précis of Official Catholic Teaching. The order was founded by Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) in 1831 to honor loyal and meritorious gentlemen of the Papal States. St. Gregory the Great (sixth century) was a man of extraordinary holiness and an outstanding teacher of the Catholic faith. By the ancient documentation, a Knight is instructed in the uniform, with sword and decorations, including a beautiful medal with an image of St. Gregory at the center, all of which he is required to wear whenever he attends the Holy Father, the Apostolic Nuncio, or the Ordinary of his Archdiocese. In 1995 Pat Morse was elevated to Knight Grand Cross, the order’s highest civilian honor.

For her work on Précis of Official Catholic Teaching, at the same ceremony and also at the Holy Father’s request, Cardinal Hickey conferred on Margaret Morse the high papal honor of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice (for Church and Pontiff). The beautiful medal is in the form of a cross, with figures depicted on it and on the ribbon. It was instituted in 1888 to mark the golden jubilee of Pope Leo XIII, and continues to be awarded as the sign of a Holy Father’s recognition of distinguished service to the Church and the Papacy.

In 1997 Cardinal Hickey awarded to Pat and Margaret Morse the Archdiocesan Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle Medal for distinguished service to the Church in connection with Précis.

It is the common teaching of the Church that we can never outdo Jesus in generosity. Pat and Margaret Morse, and all the distinguished theologians who worked with them, did all of their work without material compensation. We can only imagine the awards ceremony in heaven when Jesus presents the medals.

The Summaries

I was particularly interested in how Précis summarizes all these Catholic teaching documents. Faithful Catholics are so accustomed to thinking of each Vatican document as holy writ that we assume altering it would be a sacrilege. Rest assured, this time we can recall what Jesus told John the Baptist, “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.” After Pat Morse and his wife Margaret personally delivered the third volume to Pope John Paul II in 1993, the Holy Father told them, “Your work is very important to the Church; what you are doing is for future generations.”

As editor and publisher, Pat Morse personally planned and directed the Précis project, with major work contributed by Dr. William E. May and Rev. Msgr. Peter J. Elliott. Dr. May is a former member of the Vatican’s Theological Commission and currently professor of moral theology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Washington, D.C. Msgr. Elliott was for over ten years an official in the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family and is now Episcopal Vicar for Religious Education in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Australia and a Permanent Fellow of the new John Paul II Institute in that city. Dr. May and Msgr. Elliott captured the essence of each document by retaining the exact language of all the important sentences while carefully paring away extraneous comments. Theological advisers for the project are Most Rev. William E. Lori, Bishop of Bridgeport, CT., and Msgr. Elliott. In 1997, Cardinal Hickey awarded to Dr. May and Msgr. Elliott the Medal of St. Dominic.

After the summaries were completed for each volume, they were submitted to the cardinal prefect of the responsible dicastery for approval. After the dicastery assured him that nothing of significance had been left out, Pat Morse edited, designed and published that volume. Pat and Margaret Morse then personally presented a copy of that volume to the Holy Father.

I made several random comparisons between the original and summarized versions. In all cases the summarized version was appreciably shorter and easier to understand as a whole. The amount of compression varied because some Vatican writers are more skillful wordsmiths than others, and some more prolix than others. Because the document’s exact wording was retained in each case, it can be safely quoted for books, magazine articles, speeches, lesson plans, etc. Compression was particularly useful where an encyclical digressed from its primary theme. Many social encyclicals contain political and economic analyses. Some hortatory encyclicals contain a lot of biographical material on saints. Some other encyclicals digress into tangentially related areas. The Pope does not intend to teach infallibly on these matters, so they engage his teaching authority in a very limited way. In general, the longer the document the greater the compression. Overall, Précis retains about two-thirds of the original encyclicals.

The Organization

Cardinal Hickey observed in his forewords to several of the volumes: “It is an accurate summary of official Catholic teachings. Its compilers have rendered an important service in making these important documents accessible to a wide range of readers.” Catholic scholars know how difficult it has been to find and reach all of the Catholic teaching within the past hundred or so years on a particular subject. Pat Morse and his team designed a format and system that improves on the traditional arrangement at four levels. First, they placed all of the Vatican teachings on a particular subject in one volume. Second, within that volume they placed all the teachings in chronological order, which makes it easy to follow the development of doctrine. Third, each document is headed by a background statement that explains its circumstances and purpose. Fourth, within the document itself the substance is presented in “bullet” style without loss of significant information.

Dr. May proposed the eleven categories, with substantial aid from Cardinal Ciappi, Msgr. Elliott, and Pat Morse. They were particularly well chosen to cover the range of subjects important to Catholic life. However, to impose a reasonable limit on the number of categories, some subjects are necessarily excluded. For example, all of the Vatican II documents are present except Perfectae Caritatis, on the renewal of religious life, and Inter Mirifica, on the media and social communication, evidently because they did not fit into any of these eleven broad streams of Catholic teaching.

All told, with more than 2,500 pages of text organized and distributed among twelve volumes, the work was monumental.

Some Additional Observations

Encyclicals are not divinely inspired and do not contain new revelation, but they are authoritative teaching instruments from the Vicar of Christ. In descending order of formal authority, the papal documents are: apostolic constitutions, encyclical letters, encyclical epistles, apostolic exhortations, apostolic letters, letters, and messages. An encyclical letter is written for the whole Church, while an encyclical epistle is directed toward part of the Church, e.g., bishops or laity in a particular country, leaders of religious orders, priests, etc.

Précis will foreseeably be the high water mark in accessibility for Church documents in paper form for a long time. The whole set takes up less than 8½ inches of bookshelf space. Pretty impressive for a hundred years of major Vatican documents. Because it is currently up-to-date, Précis will not need updating for at least four or five years. After that, plans are to either include new summarized documents in the relevant volume when supplies run out and it has to be reprinted, or to add another volume as appropriate. However, Pat and Margaret Morse are both 84 years old, full of years and honors. Let us pray that they remain active for many years to come.

Although Précis of Official Catholic Teaching was approved at the highest level of Church authority, there will be purists who decry it as altering the documents originally signed by the Popes or heads of dicasteries. No need to fret. The originals are still available, and serious Catholic libraries will have them as well as Précis. But I expect even the purists will use Précis’ rigorous organization of the documents to find what they are looking for and then take the full document from the library shelf for quotation.

Précis of Official Catholic Teaching and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are both summaries of authoritative Catholic teaching, but they are not at all comparable. The Catechism of the Catholic Church contains only 45 direct quotations from encyclicals. The Catechism is concerned with the profession of faith, the celebration of the Christian mystery, life in Christ, and Christian prayer. It devotes, by my count, only thirteen of its nine hundred pages, less than two percent, to Catholic social teaching. However, more than twenty percent of Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals have been on Catholic social teaching. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not a substitute for Précis of Official Catholic Teaching.

The best way to order a set of the twelve Précis volumes is to make a check to “CCSP” for $149 and mail it to Catholics Committed to Support the Pope, 9402 Stateside Court, Silver Spring, MD 20903. An address to which the Précis volumes should be shipped would also be helpful. Pat and Margaret Morse fill all the orders themselves. If they are traveling when the letter arrives, they will fill the order when they return.

On March 28, 2001, Cardinal Estévez, Cardinal Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, published Liturgiam authenticam, on the use of the vernacular languages in the books of the Roman liturgy. It is the harbinger of more accurate translations of the sacred liturgies as compared with the Latin typical editions, long awaited by faithful Catholics. Pat Morse has reprinted Volume VIII, on Worship and Sacraments, to include Liturgiam authenticam in full. Owners of the existing set who wish to obtain the reprinted Volume VIII may request a copy together with a check for $16.50 (including shipping within the United States) to CCSP as above.

About four thousand copies of the twelve volume set are already on bookshelves in more than forty-five countries throughout the world. Every Catholic diocese, parish, and religious community needs a set of Précis in its library. Certainly every ordained bishop, priest or deacon should own a set kept near his writing desk. Every Catholic catechist who teaches other catechists needs a set as well. Catechists who teach RCIA or adult-ed or CCD classes should also have a set. If there are enough copies of Précis and the Catechism of the Catholic Church around, we can drive the heresies propagated in the wake of Vatican II back into the darkness from which they came.