WASHINGTON, D.C. — When is the last time you cracked open the Catechism of the Catholic Church? Odds are, it’s sitting on your bookshelf collecting dust.
A new global project, Real + True, seeks to “unlock” the catechism and modernize the way Church teaching is presented to a digital age.
The catechism “is not just a technical book,” said Real + True co-founder Edmund Mitchell, “but it’s written to really change our relationship with Christ.”
Launched Sept. 7, the initiative includes videos, social media content and a podcast organized along the four pillars of the catechism. Each month a new unit will be released, with 12 units for each pillar, totaling 48 units.
Aimed at millennial and Generation Z audiences, the content is meant to supplement evangelization and catechesis efforts that already exist as well as be a resource to those seeking answers to questions online, said co-founder Edmundo Reyes.
The material is free and available on realtrue.org in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.
Reyes said the inspiration for Real + True came six years ago in Portland, Oregon, when he encountered BibleProject, a nonprofit organization with a library of resources to help people read and understand the Bible.
While the organization isn’t Catholic, he was impressed by their work, which he’d “never seen done in a Church setting.” After learning about BibleProject’s creative process, he came back “with the hope of one day doing something similar with the Church.”
The Church is moving in the direction of an “evangelizing catechesis,” said Reyes, citing the example of Pope Francis instituting the ministry of the catechist in May and the Vatican updating the “Directory for Catechesis” June 2020. He sees Real + True as participating in that evangelizing catechesis.
Reyes quoted the catechism, which states: “Periods of renewal in the Church are also intense moments of catechesis.” And with the 30th anniversary of the catechism next year, the time seemed ripe to launch the initiative.
Reyes described Real + True as a “passion project,” apart from his work as the director of the communications in the Archdiocese of Detroit.
Co-founder Emily Mentock explained that the project’s goal of “unlocking the catechism for the modern world” means bringing the “content of the text into more digital media channels to better reach the audience that we’re after” -- people that are not against the Church but are curious and open to learning more about their faith.
Mentock, 29, said her own journey back to practicing Catholicism informed her work on Real + True. A pivotal step in her story was seeing a tweet quoting Bishop Robert E. Barron’s sermons podcast.
The tweet piqued her interest, so she started listening to the podcast and eventually “became compelled to go back to Mass and from there became compelled to actually read all the Gospels,” said Mentock, who works as associate director of digital strategy at the Archdiocese of Detroit.
Each Real + True unit contains three videos -- a proclamation video, an explanation video and a connection video -- as well as a podcast that is geared toward formal and informal catechists.
Funded by a grant from Our Sunday Visitor, the Real + True initiative is also seeking donations to translate content into more languages and produce videos at a faster pace.
“The work of evangelization online is significant and important, especially in a world so connected, which is what we saw in the pandemic,” said Reyes.
— Anna Capizzi Galvez, Catholic News Service