From Picayune to the Vatican: How One Parish Put the Catechism Online

This past month, the Vatican rolled out a major website redesign for the first time since its launch in the mid-1990s. One thing that caught my eye was that the link to the Catechism of the Catholic Church was moved to the site’s front page. I grinned and thought, “I remember when the Catechism wasn’t on the site at all!”

For several years, whenever I searched for, e.g., “CCC 2365” I would be directed to “scborromeo.org” and right to paragraph 2365. As someone who comes from (and married into) families who loves to argue (charitably of course!) about philosophy and theology, I returned again and again to the catechism and scborromeo.org.

I had been using the website for about 5 years before I finally had the bright idea of asking myself, “Wait, what exactly is the website St. Charles Borromeo?”

I clicked on their homepage.

“Wait, this is just a parish website in…Picayune, Mississippi?!?!” I had assumed that St. Charles Borromeo was some large Catholic non-profit that had been tasked with hosting the Catechism online.

You may be forgiven if you have never heard of Picayune. Not to belabor the point, but the word “picayune,” originally the name of a Spanish coin, has come to mean something small or seemingly insignificant.

You might think I was surprised by having never heard of Picayune. However, what surprised me was that I had. In fact, I had been there. That family I married into? Some of them lived in tiny Picayune, MS.

So, after using the site for years, when I visited little St. Charles Borromeo to attend a family wedding, it was almost like a homecoming. It felt a little like finally visiting St. Peter’s in Rome. And that isn’t as strange as it might sound.

You see, a couple of decades ago, the Vatican’s website finally did put the English translation of the Catechism online. The Vatican’s website has always prominently featured St. Peter’s. Indeed, the only Church ever prominently featured on the Vatican’s website is St. Peter’s.

With one exception.

When the Vatican finally hosted the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for the English speaking world, there on the bottom of the Catechism could be found, “Credits: Preparation for Internet done by Charles Borromeo Parish, Mississippi, USA.”

For years, I’ve wondered, “What is the story behind this?” So, last month I reached out to St. Charles Borromeo in the hope that someone there could fill in the details.

As I learned the history of this undertaking, two quotes kept coming to mind. The first is from the founder of Christendom College, Warren Carroll. “One man can make a difference.”

In this case, one man, John Meyer, did.

Meyer relates, “My wife and I moved…to Carriere, MS, which is just outside of Picayune. The closest Catholic Church was a charmingly small church in Picayune, St. Charles Borromeo. The pastor, without the aid of a parochial vicar or deacon, was a gentle Irish priest, Fr. John Noone. Picayune is in the Bible Beltway and the vast majority of the population was/is Protestant, so Fr. Noone often tailored his homilies to the defense of the faith, especially regarding topics that his parishioners were challenged on by their passionate Protestant neighbors and friends.”

In 1997, Meyer’s wife began attending RCIA taught by Fr. Noone to learn more about her faith.

Meyer admits that, “When I saw her heavily marked-up and annotated copy of the CCC, I was a bit taken aback. My formal education included primarily religious textbooks that periodically referred to the Baltimore Catechism. I was surprised to see the depth of the teaching of the faith in the CCC.”

In 1999, Meyer decided to attend RCIA with his wife.

While attending RCIA, Meyer explains, “I tried to find the CCC online so I could more easily search and study the class topics which were announced the week before and addressed in depth at the following class. Surprisingly, the only thing I could find was a UK English edition which, in addition to being different from the American translation used in class, was riddled with typos and errors.”

Meyer had an inspiration. What he called, “this wild idea…What if I created a website for St. Charles and hosted the CCC online?”

Make no mistake, dear reader, that was a wild idea.

That wild idea brings me to the second quote. It’s about a computer scientist who accomplished something that was widely considered to be impossible. “[He] was not held back by the conventional wisdom for the simple reason that he was unaware of it.”

Conventional wisdom would indicate this project would be spearheaded by then-Cardinal Ratzinger. One might imagine him giving weekly reports to Pope John Paul II, who had commissioned and promulgated this new Catechism.

In 1999, John Meyer was 5,000 miles away from Rome.

He had no official title in the Church.

He had no mandate.

What he had was a Catechism. In that Catechism, paragraph 1268, we find the astonishing truth, “The baptized…share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission.”

John Meyer was baptized. In virtue of that, he shares in Christ’s prophetical and royal mission, as do we all. Who has time to think about, or even remember the conventional wisdom when, after all, our King has told us we are called to serve in His great royal mission?

Fr. Noone readily approved Meyer’s plan to create a website for the parish, but hosting the CCC wasn’t quite as straightforward. Fr. Noone liked the idea, but as Meyer explains, Fr. Noone “told me to ensure I wasn't violating copyright in publishing the CCC.”

At this point in the story, it is necessary to praise the real prudence and fortitude that Fr. Noone showed. After all, he would be the one to be contacted by copyright lawyers if something wasn’t done in just the right way. Keep in mind, this was the early days of the internet where some of the thornier legal questions weren’t entirely clear. The easy answer then was “no.” Nevertheless, before him was his spiritual son, asking to make the Catechism’s doctrine more widely known. Fr. Noone no doubt recalled paragraph 25, “The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends,” which is nothing other than the great royal mission.

"That okay and challenge got me working immediately,” Meyer told me.

Working immediately? Even without knowing whether copyright permissions would be granted? There’s that pesky conventional wisdom again, which Meyer simply had no time for. “I also took a leap of faith that I'd get the necessary approval(s),” Meyer recalls.

What did that process look like in 1999? Lots of cutting and pasting. No, not electronic cutting and pasting. Meyer explained to me that he “scanned torn-out pages of the CCC and used…[Optical Character Recognition] software to create text, which unfortunately resulted in LOTS of errors.”

It is certainly true that, in this world, there is not a single person who has examined every single letter, comma, period, footnote number, and yes, iota, of the Catechism more than John Meyer did over a nine month period in 1999.

He still didn’t have copyright permission. Nor was it obvious who to contact to obtain it. Nevertheless, he persisted and, after many phone calls, “finally reached someone at the USCCB who informed me that the USCCB did not control internet-based CCC copyright and that I'd need to request that approval directly from the Vatican.”

Approval directly from the Vatican for a seemingly random man in Picayune, Mississippi, USA?

How does one even go about contacting the Vatican?

Phone call? Email? Fax? Letter?

Yes.

All of the above.

That’s exactly what you do if you’re John Meyer, of St. Charles Borromeo Parish, Picayune, Mississippi, USA, who went to his mailbox one afternoon and found, among the usual bills and advertisements, a letter, addressed to him, postmarked from 5000 miles away.

The Vatican granted approval.

Inspired by his success, Meyer created a paragraph-by-paragraph search utility, “a unique capability on the web at the time. The word got out and, using today's vernacular, the website went viral.”

Among its first users, though, were the RCIA teachers at St. Charles. The RCIA program gained a new teacher as well: John Meyer, who would go on to teach RCIA for the next 15 years at St. Charles.

In 2001, Meyer was once again contacted by the Vatican. The Vatican had only two translations of the Catechism on their site: Latin and Italian. Would St. Charles grant, they wondered, permission to use the American Translation of the CCC that Meyer had painstakingly prepared?

Fr. Noone happily granted it. This incredible turning of tables might make one recall fables of mice and lions, or ants and doves. As those fables rightly teach us, “A kindness is never wasted.”

Almost a quarter century later, other than the USCCB’s site, St. Charles remains the one and only copyright approved American Translation of the CCC.

To this day, St. Charles’ current pastor, Fr. Bernard Papania, routinely receives “thank-you” emails from souls around the globe.

We might be surprised by the global effect of the picayune parish of St. Charles Borromeo. Then again, perhaps we ought to remember that none of us are ever meant to be insignificant. We—each of us—serve in the King’s royal mission, And our parishes, even if seemingly small and insignificant, bear the names of great saints. Perhaps we need only ask ourselves, “What would our patron saints do, if they were here?” St. Charles Borromeo parish believed their patron would exclaim with the catechism, “The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends.” That is indeed from paragraph 25 of the CCC, but it is actually quoting another Catechism: The Catechism of the Council of Trent. That catechism of course was created over 500 years ago at the behest and under the direction of one of the Church’s greatest saints: St. Charles Borromeo.