The Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth

I teach a 9th grade class and I think this book is perfect for them. The style that it's written in is definitely better than any boring books that I had. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone teaching middle or high school kids.

This is an excellent source for faith formation. The title says it's for youth and although some of the language is geared toward teens, I would highly recommend it for adults as well. Its content is good, different sections of the book are very useful for catechists as well as the reader, the illustrations are beautiful and the layout was done very well.

I use this text as the confirmation text for Confirmation Candidates I sponsor in the Episcopal Church. The text succinctly presents the Catholic tradition of Christianity and provides ample material for discussion, thought and contemplation. It is not written for academics, yet it isn't banal or overly simplistic in its explanation of core dogma and doctrine. Very good for students from all traditions of Catholicism be they Anglican or Roman.

While I applaud the authors' attempt to produce a comprehensive, single-volume guide to the faith for teens, this book is problematic. Far too often the authors make false distinctions between a supposed "old" Church that existed before Vatican II and a "new and improved" Church that exists now. For instance, they describe worshippers before the council as "not participants as much as watchers, separated by distance, architecture, and language." Nowhere in the documents of Vatican II or in authoritative pronouncements from the Magisterium will you find such a sweeping, negative assessment.

The authors also claim that Vatican II removed Latin from the liturgy, when in reality the Council fathers instructed that "[t]he use of the Latin language is to be preserved ..." (albeit with an allowance that some of the vernacular may be incorporated.) Likewise, Vatican II had nothing to do with communion in the hand, an innovation introduced in the United States and other Western countries years later; the authors list it as an achievement of the Council. A frequent theme of this book on liturgical matters is disruption instead of continuity.

In the chapter on the Bible, the authors operate from the presumption readers believe the Gospels were written soon after Jesus' death and Resurrection. To the extent teens have thought about this question at all, it's more likely that they believe the more pervasive false notion that the Gospels were written hundreds of years later. (See Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code.")

Perhaps one day someone will take the recently-released United States Catholic Catechism for Adults and adapt it for teens. In the meantime, this book is a flawed substitute. Excellent resources currently available are Father McBride's Teen Catechism, the multi-volume Didache series produced by the Midwest Theological Forum, and the Prove It! series written by Amy Welborn.

It's getting harder and harder these days to find good information on the Church that isn't tainted by polemic. I have used this resource as part of confirmation programs, RCIA, high school classes, and had people tell me it was great just to peruse through as a reference. Faithful to the Catechism and the broader Tradition, but also engaging and apropos to the interests and questions of most teens. I highly recommend it as a complement to the Catholic Youth Bible for every teen.