Seán Ó Conaill: Is YouCat Unwittingly Heretical?
YouCat Q98
Q. Did God will the death of his only Son?
A. The violent death of Jesus did not come about through tragic external circumstances. Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). So that we children of sin and death might have life, the Father in heaven “made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21). The magnitude of the sacrifice that God the Father asked of his Son, corresponded to the magnitude of Christ’s obedience: “And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (Jn 12:27). On both sides, God’s love for men proved itself to the very end on the Cross.
[YouCat – The Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2011 – Article 98]
[The following text is the complete unaltered final processing of a dialogue between Sean O’Conaill and the Microsoft chatbot ‘Copilot’ – Jan 28, 29 2026]
Is YouCat Unwittingly Heretical?
1. The Core Problem: A Catechetical Vacuum
YouCat presents the Catholic faith in a simplified, youth-friendly format. But in doing so, it omits several foundational elements of the Christian theological tradition:
- Satan as a personal agent of deception and rebellion
- The angelic sin (superbia) as the root of violence
- The genealogy of human violence in Scripture
- The distinction between God’s positive will and permissive will
These omissions are not minor. They create a conceptual vacuum in which violence has no intelligible origin outside of God. When the roots of violence are not explained, the only remaining explanation for violent events in salvation history becomes God’s will.
This is precisely what happens in YouCat Q98, which attributes the crucifixion solely to the will of God, without reference to human or demonic agency.
2. The Risk: A Heretical Implication
Catholic doctrine is clear:
- God cannot will moral evil.
- God cannot be the author of sin.
- God does not directly will violence.
Yet YouCat’s formulation risks implying that God willed the violent actions of the crucifiers. This is not formal heresy, but it is a catechetical deficiency with heretical implications.
Teenagers reading YouCat could reasonably conclude that God directly willed the injustice, cruelty, and murder of Jesus. If a catechetical text can lead to such a conclusion, it requires revision.
3. The Missing Category: Superbia (the Sin of Satan)
The tradition has always explained violence through the lens of superbia—the angelic sin. Superbia is not “pride” in the modern sense of dignity or self-respect. It is:
- the refusal of truth
- the refusal of limitation
- the refusal of humiliation
- the militant defence of status
- the will to dominate
This is the sin of Lucifer, the sin that gives rise to all violence in Scripture: Cain, David, Herod, the Pharisees, and ultimately the crucifixion.
But YouCat never names superbia. It never names Satan. It never names the refusal of truth. It never names the militant self-protection that drives human violence.
Without these categories, the crucifixion becomes unintelligible except as an act of divine will.
4. The Linguistic Collision: The Church’s Problem with “Pride”
The Church traditionally translated superbia as “pride.” But modern English has developed a new, positive meaning of “pride”:
- dignity
- self-respect
- refusal of unjust shame
- reclamation of identity
This is morally good and entirely unrelated to superbia. Yet the Church continues to use the same English word for two opposite realities.
This creates confusion:
- “Pride” as dignity is good.
- “Pride” as superbia is the root of all sin.
To avoid confusion, some Christians now use the phrase “sinful pride,” but even this does not appear in YouCat. In fact, YouCat avoids superbia altogether—just as it avoids Satan.
The result is a catechesis that cannot explain violence through the tradition’s own categories.
5. The Consequence: God Becomes the Only Agent
When YouCat omits:
- Satan
- superbia
- the genealogy of violence
- the refusal of truth
- the militant defence of status
then the crucifixion has no perpetrators except God.
This is why YouCat ends up attributing the crucifixion solely to God’s will. Not because the Church teaches this, but because YouCat has removed the categories needed to say anything else.
6. The Constantinian Shadow
This catechetical vacuum echoes a much older problem: Constantine’s claim that God sanctioned Christian violence.
The New Testament never makes this claim. The pre-Constantinian Fathers rejected Christian violence. But once the Church aligned with imperial power, it struggled to articulate a coherent theology of violence.
YouCat inherits this unresolved tension. By failing to explain violence through superbia, it leaves open the Constantinian logic that God can will or sanctify violence.
7. The Path Forward: Restoring the Tradition’s Clarity
The solution is not to abandon the tradition but to restore it:
- Reintroduce superbia as the root of violence.
- Distinguish clearly between God’s positive and permissive will.
- Recover the biblical genealogy of violence.
- Clarify the difference between dignity (“pride”) and the angelic sin.
- Name Satan as Scripture and tradition do.
If these elements are restored, the crucifixion becomes intelligible again:
- Human beings, driven by fear and militant self-protection, commit violence.
- Satan instigates the refusal of truth.
- God wills Christ’s non-violent obedience, not the violence inflicted upon Him.
This is the Gospel’s own structure.
8. Conclusion
YouCat is not formally heretical. But its omissions create a catechetical environment in which a heretical conclusion becomes thinkable: that God directly wills violence.
This is avoidable. And it can be corrected.
The tradition already contains the tools—superbia, the angelic sin, the genealogy of violence, and the distinction between God’s wills. Restoring these to catechesis is not optional. It is necessary for the integrity of the faith.
[Copilot ends]
The Good News is not the Crucifixion. It’s the Resurrection. People get crucified in one way or the other every day of the week and it makes no real difference.
The Good News is
“ I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me shall not perish” not sure if that’s an exact quote.
Copilot ends ???????
Have we reached out to AI to assist us find relevance or have we lost faith in the Holy Spirit to inspire us.
If it takes Copilot to point out the absence in YouCat of any indexing, let alone, substantive treatment of, the sin of Pride – and its decisive role in the Crucifixion of Jesus – why fault Copilot rather than the editors of YouCat?
Q98 in YouCat attributes the crucifixion totally to the positive will of God, and has no mention whatever of Satan, the accusing spirit that unifies every lynch mob. That is not the Theology of the early church – which understood the Easter events as an unmasking of that demonic force of pride that had directly sought Jesus’ life and lies at the root of all violence in all eras.
Those who produced YouCat in 2011 were sleepwalking – and that’s still the problem of a magisterium that tolerates this nonsense.
Before I ever went to Copilot I could see those problems, and wrote that up. Copilot simply confirms what I saw.
Have you read the piece, Pat – or simply dismissed it, sight unseen?
“The Good News is not the Crucifixion. It’s the Resurrection.”
Totally Agree Ben. It was the overthrowing of the power of death that God willed first of all, not death itself, for anyone.
“People get crucified in one way or the other every day of the week and it makes no real difference.”
Again totally agree – and if God is into Crucifixion too – as YouCat implies – why should things ever change?
James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (A new abridgement, Oxford World Classics, 1994) has a vast collection of scapegoat rituals, which are fascinating, though sometimes cruel, and all of them, at least in Frazer’s eyes, no more than wishful magical thinking. The Bible has only one scapegoat story, Leviticus 16, but it is hard not to apply the scapegoat theme to the Suffering Servant and the Lamb who takes away the world’s sin. Girard and Schwager shed light on the human texture of the paschal drama, and also suggest how divine providence is at work in it. The evil side is allowed by the permissive will of God, whose positive will is to draw good from this evil, by the obedient agency of his son. Paul, John, and Hebrews seem quite at home with language of God laying on him the iniquity of us all. Sean’s call for a theological critique of the Vatican’s youth catechism is discouraged by the memory of the theological critiques of the Catechism of the Catholic Church when it came out, some accusing it of fundamentalism. It seems that they had no impact at all on the Vatican’s successful promotion of the Catechism as a supremely authoritative document of the Magisterium and as the go-to reference for Catholic teaching on every question. The Vatican has not invited Catholics to have open critical debate on the Catechism or to submit proposals for improving it. Even its own International Theological Commission is not invited to do that, as far as I know. A permanent committee to work on improving and upgrading the Catechism would be a nice idea. It might also measure the reception and the pastoral implications of every part of the Catechism. Such ideas, I imagine, would be thought to savour of Protestantism and to clash with the idea that church teaching never changes. We have not outgrown such attitudes. The one substantive change introduced into the CCC in a later edition has been in the teaching on the death penalty, and this seems to have been due to Pope Francis personally. Did he have a commission to investigate the question and advise him for years before making the change? What was the role of the CDF? Has there been any recent document on the Atonement from the ITC or the Dicastery formerly known as the CDF? If unease and confusion about this doctrine are as widespread as Sean suggests, would it not be a good idea to devote a session of the Synod to it? Revision of the Catechism faces a high bar, and revision of the New Testament language an even higher one. Interreligious perspectives have enriched the lines of possible discussion and renewal (as Catherine Cornille has shown in her edited collection on the Atonement). I think one thing to be avoided in this discussion is vehemence — learning from earlier intemperance (Bernard vs Abelard, Luther vs Erasmus). — Oh, I see the ITC did issue a long document on the Redemption 30 years ago:
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_1995_teologia-redenzione_en.html
“The evil side is allowed by the permissive will of God, whose positive will is to draw good from this evil, by the obedient agency of his son.”
Thanks, Joe, for this confirmation of a vitally important distinction – a distinction NOT made by YouCat in attributing Christ’s death TOTALLY to the will (no qualifier) of God. The explicit denial of the role of ‘tragic external circumstances’ surely leaves no option but to conclude that, according to YouCat, everything that happened from Gethsemane to Golgotha was positively willed by God, essentially a fundamentalist position.
I am not sure of the scale of ‘unease and confusion’ on this issue, but the total avoidance of this question by officiating clergy in my lifetime of Mass-going certainly creates the impression of unease on their part – and such an attitude is surely infectious. I know also that teachers of RE call the subject of atonement ‘difficult’ and that ‘Anselm’ is mentioned in the same breath.
If it is indeed Catholic teaching that God cannot will anyone to sin – and the sinfulness of the abuse of Jesus unto death is so plain – it surely then becomes necessary for clergy to know about and to explain the difference between the merely permissive and the positive will of God. I cannot ever remember being told – e.g. in an Easter homily – that the crucifixion of Jesus was sinful, and this reticence alone surely suggests ‘uncertainty and unease’.
Nor have I ever heard a homily on Simeon’s promise to Mary that the persecution of her Son would reveal ‘the secret thoughts of many’. Given growing concern about a rising tide of violence-from-nowhere the lack of clerical interest in that biblical pattern of inability to deal with shame – shown in the murder stories of e.g. Abel, Uriah and John the Baptist, as well as Jesus – is very hard to understand. Authoritarianism alone may be the cause – with no one knowing exactly where the parapet is on such questions, advising silence as the safest option.
Both depth psychology and neuroscience confirm our greatest fear to be of the negative opinion of others. That Jesus overcame this fear, and deliberately so, points to this being the Father’s intention for us also – to realise that the whole world can be wrong. Ignatius of Antioch is just one of the martyrs who absorbed this lesson.
Thanks also for that reference to the 1995 ITC piece on ‘Redemption’ – even if that date is somewhat ominous. I will get to it even so.
“Paul, John, and Hebrews seem quite at home with language of God laying on him the iniquity of us all.”
I have no problem with that either, since the sense of it was that the Father, through the Son, was liberating or redeeming us from the burden of our sins. The emphasis is upon a Father as bent on blessing the poor in spirit as the Son, and on the giving of his Son as a ‘ransom’ for many, to free the world from Pharaohism as represented by the crucifixion culture of Rome.
Anselm of Canterbury’s satisfactionism of 1098 changes that emphasis completely – to a Father who needs Jesus to suffer to repair the ‘dishonour’ our sins have done to Himself, because our own sufferings aren’t enough. And now – because for Anselm there was no longer any Pharaoh among Christendom’s ‘Christian’ kings – that Ransom was owed to that Father instead, for Satan had been overthrown and had never deserved a ransom anyway.
No wonder this theology needed the suppression of liberation theology to survive in the Catechism of 1994. In the mindset of bishops of the medieval ancien regime – including Joseph Ratzinger – Christendom was as close to the Kingdom of God as you could get. Social hierarchies are fine so long as those at the top of them pay lip service to Jesus and patronise the clerical institution. Catholic social teaching will put an aspirational gloss over social and economic inequality – whereas Marxism (liberation theology) is the high road to perdition.
This is not to bless everything said or written by the liberation theologians, but to lament the complete loss of dialogue about Christian liberation itself – on what we mean when we say ‘By your Cross and Resurrection you have set us free.’
Pharaohism – driven as ever by egoic status anxiety – is alive and well in the boardrooms of the multinationals and now, plainly, in the Kremlin and the Oval Office and every other autocracy – and more than half of US Catholics voted for that in 2024. No wonder Pope Leo is echoing Pope Francis in speaking of a ‘rupture’ in the ‘transmission’ of the faith to younger generations. Stand up, St Anselm, for continuing applause from the many medievalists among us – and thanks, Pope Benedict XVI, for catechetical brilliance in the CCC and YouCat.