Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France

Chapter 1: The Science of Salvation

C H A P T E R O N E The Science of Salvation Catechisms and Catholic Reform Of all the sciences which should be the object of your application, this is the most useful. It alone teaches us the true destiny of man, the ardor with which he must desire it, and what he must do to obtain it. . . . All the knowledge to which the world attaches handsome names and grand ideas—is it worthy to be compared to this? Alas, what good is a knowledge of all the rest, if the only necessary science is ignored? —Bishop Scipion Jérôme Bégon i Bishop Bégon of the diocese of Toul was just one of several early modern French bishops to refer to a knowledge of Christian truths as a science. For example, a bishop of Saint-Claude described his newly revised catechism as the “science of salvation” and emphasized that any child who neglected to learn this science would find himself on the path of ignorance, superstition, and vice rather than virtue and obedience. A bishop of Laon urged parents to use his 1698 catechism to teach their children the “science of 23 religion,” while the bishop of Soissons argued that his catechism contained “the science of the holy, the science of salvation.”1 What did these bishops mean by “science”? During the early modern period, the word “science” evolved from being synonymous with “knowledge” to its more modern definition of a systematically organized body of knowledge on a given subject.2 For seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bishops, the “science of salvation” was a science in the latter sense. Just as the philosophers and scientists of the period claimed that a knowledge of the science of physics would enable one to understand the movement of the planets or the laws governing motion in the physical world, bishops claimed that a knowledge of the science of salvation—conveniently found in the catechisms they issued for their dioceses—would lead to an understanding of God’s involvement in the world and provide the tools needed to gain salvation in the next life. The bishops’ emphasis on catechism and the science of salvation was part of the larger Catholic Reformation movement taking place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Catholic efforts to reform both clergy and laity had begun with the Council of Trent (1545–1563), but it took several decades for the church to effect significant change. By the end of the seventeenth century, bishops had taken a number of important steps toward reform: they established seminaries to train their parish priests, issued dozens of ordinances and regulations governing clerical behavior, and held regular synods to establish and maintain clerical discipline and order.3 The bishops’ next major task in the reform process was to educate the laity in orthodox Catholic doctrines and practices, and for this they needed a consistent method of instruction : the catechism.4 Yet the catechism has received very little attention from historians, who often either overlook or take for granted the importance of children ’s religious education in the Catholic Reformation period.5 In fact, modern historians often mistakenly classify the catechism as an ineffective method of instruction. Because the basic catechetical method— the often tedious process of memorization and repeated recitation—is entirely antithetical to modern methods of education, the institution of weekly catechism classes by elite reforming bishops is misunderstood as mere pedantry. Previous studies have emphasized that because religious 24 DIOCESAN CATECHISMS education centered on memorizing the catechism, children quickly became bored and usually forgot everything they learned. Some historians argue that the results of catechetical education therefore reversed the reformers’ actual intentions by instilling in children an aversion to religious education and everything associated with it; however, we cannot allow modern attitudes to distort our understanding of early modern educational methods.6 Bishops, parish priests, and parents believed that memorizing doctrines through the questions and answers of the catechism was the most appropriate way to instill Catholicism into young children and even ignorant adults, as the large numbers of catechisms printed in early modern France attest.7 Despite the seemingly obtuse nature of the catechetical method, a closer examination of the history of catechisms in early modern France demonstrates the ways in which the bishops adapted their catechisms to meet the needs of their parishioners. The institution of weekly catechism classes by elite reforming bishops...