Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Catholicism For Dummies

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Three great religions trace their roots to the prophet Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And one of those religions, Christianity, is expressed in three different traditions: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. You may already know that. You may also already know that currently, more than 1 billion Catholics occupy the earth. That’s approximately one-fifth of the world’s population.

Whether you’re Catholic or not, you may be totally clueless about or just unaware of some aspects of Catholic tradition, history, doctrine, worship, devotion, or culture. No sweat. Regardless of whether you’re engaged, married, or related to a Catholic; your neighbor or co-worker is a Catholic; or you’re just curious about what Catholics really do believe, this book is for you.

Catholicism For Dummies, 4th Edition, realizes that you’re smart and intelligent, but maybe you didn’t attend Blessed Sacrament Grade School, St. Thomas Aquinas High School, or Catholic University of America. This book’s goal is to give you a taste of Catholicism. It’s not a Catechism or religion textbook but a casual, down-to-earth introduction for non-Catholics and a reintroduction for Catholics. It gives common-sense explanations about what Catholics believe and do in plain English, with just enough why and how thrown in to make solid sense.

Although Catholicism For Dummies, 4th Edition, is no substitute for the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, our hope is that it’ll wet your whistle. We don’t cover everything about Catholicism, but we do discuss the basic stuff so that the next time you’re invited to a Catholic wedding, Baptism, funeral, Confirmation, or First Communion, you won’t be totally confused. And you may have an edge on other people in your life who are less informed about Catholicism than you.

This book covers plenty of material on Catholicism — from doctrine to morality and from worship and liturgy to devotions — but you don’t need a degree in theology to comprehend it. Everything is presented in an informal, easy-to-understand way.

This book is also a reference, unlike the schoolbooks you had as a kid. You don’t have to read the chapters in order, one after the other, from front cover to back cover. You can just pick the topic that interests you or find the page that addresses the specific question you have. Or you can indiscriminately open the book and pick a place to begin reading.

Throughout this book, if you see the word orthodox with a small letter o, it means correct or right believer. However, if you see the capital letter O, then Orthodox refers to the Eastern Orthodox Churches, such as the Greek, Russian, and Serbian Orthodox Churches. Also, if you see the word church with a small letter c, it refers to a church building or parish, but Church with a capital C refers to the universal Catholic Church.

Bible references in this book use the traditional chapter and verse designation of a chapter number followed by a colon and the verse number(s). For example, Deuteronomy 6:4–6 refers to the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy from verse 4 all the way to and including verse 6. Unless we tell you otherwise, our Scripture references are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV).

A quick note: Sidebars (shaded boxes of text) dig into the details of a given topic related to Catholicism, but they aren’t crucial to understanding it. Feel free to read them or skip them. You can pass over the text accompanied by the Technical Stuff icon, too. The text marked with this icon gives some interesting but nonessential information about Catholicism.

One last thing: Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these webpages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an ebook, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the webpage.

While writing this book, we made some assumptions about you:

You have Catholic friends, neighbors, or relatives, and you’re curious about Catholicism and want to know a little more about it.

You’ve heard or read something about Catholics or Catholicism, and you have questions about Catholic beliefs or practices.

You may or may not be Catholic. Perhaps you were baptized Catholic but not raised Catholic. Maybe you’re committed to a different faith, still searching, or have no faith to speak of. Regardless, you do want to know something about Catholics.

This book uses icons to point out various types of information.

Ummm, well, we can’t remember what this icon’s supposed to point out. Just kidding. This icon draws your attention to information that’s worth remembering because it’s basic to Catholicism.

This icon alerts you to technical or historical background stuff that’s not essential to know. Feel free to divert thine eyes whenever you see this icon.

This icon points out useful tidbits to help you make more sense out of something Catholic.