Heart over head: Engaging with the Catechism, one paragraph at a time

Gavin Ashenden• March 22, 2025

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.

But there is a price to be paid for reflection. If one episode manages a serious paragraph taking up a third of a page, and there are about 700 pages, then with only a little mental arithmetic it’s going to take 2,100 episodes to get through. At a rate of three times a week, it’s going to take about 13 and a half years to get to the end – and into my mid-eighties, if my inherited genes carry me that far.

Nevertheless, I’m finding it an exciting process. From the opening paragraphs, we are invited to reconsider what “belief” is. The initiative in revealing Himself to us is God’s; to which we respond, fuelled by the desire He has placed in our heart when He created us: our homing device. But in our late Enlightenment culture we are thrown off balance by an overemphasis on thought. We still live in a culture that (until very recently, at least) prizes rationality.

Thinking about God is not much help with the belief. The moment we hold God with a thought, we have demoted Him from the incomprehensible first cause of the universe – the launcher of time and space – so that He becomes limited and packaged into whatever thought we have constructed to hold or contain Him.

The moment we have thought about God, the object of our thoughts is no longer God but a diminished object to our subject, reversing the reality in which God is the real subject and we are the object. He created us. In thought, we create Him.

The etymology of the word “belief” helps us a little. It is closely related to the German word belieben (similar to our “beloved”), and directs us away from thought towards love; away from the head towards the heart. The ever-wonderful 14th-century anonymously-authored Cloud of Unknowing reflects on this conundrum:

“Now you put a question to me asking: How shall I think about God, and what is God? – and to this I can only answer: I do not know. With your question you have brought me into that same darkness and into that same cloud of unknowing into which I would wish you to come yourself. Through grace one can have great knowledge of all other creatures and their works, and even of the works of God; and one can think about all of them; but of God no one can think. I would therefore leave all those things of which I can think and choose for my love that thing of which I cannot think.

“And why is this so? God may be well loved, but cannot be thought of. God may be reached and held close by means of love; but by means of thought never. And therefore, even though it is good occasionally to think of the kindness and the great worth of God in particular aspects, and even though it is a joy that is a proper part of contemplation, nevertheless in this work it should be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting.”

There is always a balance to be found between the language of the heart and the aspirations or ambitions of the head. It’s always tempting to approach God with the head, but for so many, down that road the cul-de-sac of atheism lies, in recognition that all our thought can do is create a rather restricted demi-god whom we are not inclined to take seriously.

It’s the head’s job to sift claims of truth. But the real knowing – the real encounter, the deeper intimacy – is discovered by the heart.

Which is perhaps why Jesus promised, at John 7:38, that: “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”

This article appeared in the March edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

Photo credit: Joe Raedle / Staff (Getty Images)