Ratings for the Catechism of the Catholic Church on Google are completely bonkers.

A few of my friends and I have been studying the catechism for the past year or so. We have been trying to get in a session every Thursday, but things have come up, especially with the pandemic situation, that have prevented us from having a get-together each week.

On top of that, a friend of ours has actually left the province to enter the seminary! Such great and exciting news. I think he would make a fine priest.

I will perhaps get more into what we do as a group in another post. But for now, I just wanted to mention something a little strange that I found when doing some research.

I searched for the Catechism of the Catholic Church to find out when the most recent one was published. I searched for it on Google and it displayed a rating. I noticed it didn't have a great rating, just 3.8 overall. But almost all of the ratings seemed to be either 1 star or 5 stars. Very strange.

Looking a little deeper, I noticed the reason for this. People were giving the strangest reviews for the Catechism. Some would mention that they stopped attending Mass a long time ago. Some just had a grudge against the Church. Some of the comments were from Protestants who were voicing their disagreement with their false conceptions of what the Church teaches.

These people were apparently opposed to the Catholic Church and thus gave the Catechism a low rating. What a strange thing to do. Most of them seemingly didn't even read the Catechism, therefore they weren't even really rating it. They were rating how they personally felt about the Catholic Church. Okay, fine, I get that many people oppose the Church, but it doesn't make any sense to give the Catechism a low rating because of this. It would be like someone who hates BBQ rating a book on BBQ and saying the book was terrible because they dislike that type of food.

Anyway, it was just one of those things that caught my attention. On the other hand, there are hundreds of 5-star reviews, so the score doesn't completely plummet. I hope people realize this when they are looking at this rating.

I find the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a great resource, and it's quite a hefty book with over 800 pages, but despite this fact, it really is an introductory book. It goes over the main tenets of the Christian faith. Sometimes it will quote a saint in a sentence of two. However, it may be valuable to read the entire document or book from which the quote is taken.

The most recent Catechism isn't the only one. There are previous versions. For example, one came from the Council of Trent. There is another called the Baltimore Catechism which was quite popular.

So if you are planning on picking up a copy of this widely-available resource, don't let the reviews stop you!