This post is partly just for my own benefit, although others might find it of some use. I help out with a confirmation class on Wednesday nights; a person more poorly suited to relating with teenagers than myself I can hardly imagine, but I seem to have one advantage over a great many people, namely, that I'm actually willing to help at it if help is needed. If that sounds a bit acidic, it is; if there's anything that I've learned from this and other cases in which I've helped out with a ministry, it is that Catholics are much better at demanding that things be done than they are at helping to get them done. In any case, we've had some difficulty with the fact that we have a very diverse parish and we can't assume anything about what the students actually know about Christianity. So ever since we realized this, we've had to go back to basics: Bible stories, Ten Commandments, and the like. And in the same spirit, I dug up a translation of St. Peter Canisius's old catechism for children, the Parvus Catechismus. The translation is nicely accurate, but the catechism was written for the catechesis of nine- to fourteen-year-olds, and the translation choices are not always what I would have chosen for handing over to a typical child of this age. So I really need to go back to the Latin original, and due to the wonders of the Internet, it turns out there's a handy one available in the Latin with a facing German translation, at the Internet Archive. Thus I put it here so I can easily find it again.
