Welcome to the Catholic Church is both a popular resource suited for Catholic families and a theological reference library useful for professors, graduate students, priests, deacons and catechists.

Welcome to the Catholic Church: A Review

Welcome to the Catholic Church is designed to communicate in a popular multi-media format what the Catholic Church is all about.  It is extremely well done, enabling it to be of interest and value to individuals who are at very different levels of knowledge about Christian faith and the Catholic Church. For example, not only does it include the most important theological sources but it also includes music and over 1500 illustrations, some of which are designed to be colored by children!

Despite its popular format, however, Welcome to the Catholic Church is a true library of Catholic theological sources. Indeed, my only criticism of the program is that its present arrangement fails to make obvious its extreme usefulness for seminarians, professors, and other students and teachers of theology.  Instead of working through the popular topical interface, the serious student can easily locate the document he or she desires by clicking the Index menu and finding either its English or Latin title, and clicking again to jump to the Table of Contents or a particular chapter. Then the user may either read through the document or use the powerful search engine to find key words or phrases.

Theological students will be especially interested in the documents of Vatican II, all the important papal encyclicals since 1846, Denzinger’s Sources of Dogma (in English), and the Early Christian Fathers (Apostolic Fathers).

Catholics eager to study the Bible will appreciate the presence of both the NAB and the Catholic RSV (easily compared by clicking a button). Additional biblical resources include the Catholic Encyclopedic Dictionary of Biblical Terms, the Biblical Commission’s document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, maps and other visual resources.

Priests, deacons, religious educators, and all involved in liturgical ministries will find useful information on the celebration of the sacraments (a practical manual with norms and pastoral orientations) and catechesis (catechisms, a moral theology, the General Catechetical Directory).

The content provides not only food for the mind but also food for the spirit in the form of prayers, devotions, daily meditations, lives of the saints, Catholic Household Spirituality, and the cycle of readings.

The material is arranged topically under the headings Divine Revelation, Church Teaching, Mass and Sacraments, Prayer and Spirituality, Saints and History, and Church Organization. Hyperlinks connect references in one document to other documents--for example, from a Vatican II document to a biblical text cited, or to a source in Denzinger.

The number of resources on one relatively inexpensive CD is amazing considering how much it would cost to acquire these books individually in print.  But the ability to search them for key words or phrases is a great advantage over having all of the same resources in print form.