Have Come,

❝ Did it ever strike you how interesting it was that at the end of two thousand years of Christian history, and on the cusp of the third Christian millennium, only one Christian community thought it necessary and worthwhile to offer the world a comprehensive, coherent account of its faith? Nobody else thought to do that. But that’s what the Catechism of the Catholic Church was. It was the Catholic Church saying, “Here’s what we believe, here’s how we think we should live, here’s how we pray, and we offer this to you as a proposal. We’re not jamming this down anybody’s throat. But if you want to know whether we still think, two thousand years out, that you can put this together, that knowledge is not ineluctably fragmentary, [or] that we do not have any real contact with the historical sources of our faith, [the answer is:] no, we think we do. We think we’re in touch with the living Christ who is our history and our tradition. We think we can put this together in a comprehensive way. And here it is. ❞

George Weigel, The Achievement of John Paul II: A Retrospective