The official presentation to His Holiness Benedict XVI of the new catechism for the young “YouCat” – acronym for Youth Catechism – was the occasion for the Order of Malta to hold a conference in its Magistral Villa in Rome.
The new compendium was the focus of a meeting in which Cardinals Paolo Sardi, Patron of the Order, and Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna and President of the Austrian Bishops Conference, which has overseen the new catechism, took the floor.  Also present were some of the authors and young people who had helped to create the volume, many from the Order of Malta’s youth groups.

“There was a great need for a catechism capable of talking to the young,” Cardinal Paolo Sardi said when opening the meeting, “a need which the young themselves have attempted to meet, together with priests and theologians, under the guidance of Cardinal Schönborn.  It is important to offer this tool to the young to help them rediscover the authentic faith”.

“The Pope has been involved in this project from the beginning, following it closely and encouraging it,” Cardinal Christoph Schönborn stated, “and it was his idea to honour us with a foreword.  Benedict XVI’s German text is a great  appreciation of the world of the young and their concept of life”.

“This work started up in 2005,” Michaela Heereman, dame of the Order of Malta and, amongst others, co-author of the new catechism”, tells us, “when, during the presentation of the Compendium to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, someone claimed it was not suitable for young people. Cardinal Schönborn agreed that we needed a version with a language more accessible to the younger generation”.

Michaela Heereman enthusiastically accepted to start working on this text during  youth summer camps organized in Germany. Participants were 51 young people from all classes of education, aged between 15 and 25 years, together with four adults, later flanked by two priests and two theologians, who were divided into four thematic groups.”. This was how the four chapters of YouCat came into being: What We Believe, How We Celebrate the Christian Mysteries, How We Are to Have Life in Christ and We should Pray:  three hundred pages, 527 questions and relative answers, besides comments, pictures, definitions and citations from the saints and the Bible, from the doctrine of the faith and from representatives of other religions, and even non-believers, in the typical language of the young.

700,000 copies of YouCat – accompanied by the Pope’s foreword and translated into six languages – will be distributed to young people participating in the next World Youth Day to be held in Madrid from 16 to 21 August.
There will be translations into 13 languages, including one in Arabic and one in Chinese.