The Catechism Doesn’t Say What You Think It Says

A bizarre story out of Germany exposes a much bigger problem: Catholics use the Catechism to justify error or defiance.

VIDEO SEGMENT is from Episode 49 of Fire Branded, “Gathering Storm”

Germany’s Katholikentag — the country’s flagship Catholic congress — just wrapped up in Würzburg. Twenty thousand attendees, nine hundred events, bishops taking up special collections for it at Sunday Mass. A major expression of German Catholic life, at least in theory.

On the Church Mile where roughly three hundred organizations had booths set up, you could find Radio Vaticana, Renovabis, and of course the Ecumenical Working Group on BDSM and Christianity 😳…

…Making its yearly reappearance. 🤯

Yes, it’s that “BDSM”. You read it right, and there are no lines to read between. A BDSM group had a booth at a Catholic event in the land of Synodal Way

That Catechism Doesn’t Say A lot — literally

When pressed, the organizers didn’t even apologize or make excuses. They defended it, saying that the group’s guidelines contain “no contradiction with the Catechism.” That’s their theological finding, and they’re sticking with it.

They’re wrong.

The Catechism is a summary of Catholic belief. It’s not an exhaustive library, and it was never meant to be read as a legal code where anything not explicitly prohibited is fair game. That’s not how Catholic moral reasoning works. The Catechism points toward a tradition — toward an anthropology, toward a coherent account of the human person, the body, and what sexuality is actually for. If you want the full argument, you follow the footnotes. You read John Paul II. You engage the tradition the Catechism is summarizing.

When you do that the contradiction with sadomasochism isn’t hard to spot. It’s not buried in a footnote somewhere. Catholic teaching on sexuality comes from a clear account of human dignity, what love requires, what sexuality is, what the nature of the sexual act it. A sexual practice built around pain, domination, and degradation doesn’t need an explicit Catechism entry to contradict that account.

The consent (‘consensual BDSM”) argument doesn’t save it either. Consent is necessary in Catholic moral theology, but it has never been sufficient and doesn’t elevate something to a moral standard it otherwise falls short of. Two people agreeing to something doesn’t change the moral character of the act. That’s a secular liberal framework, and dressing it in Christian language doesn’t make it Catholic.

The Right has ‘Left’ the Building

To be fair, this kind of surface-level Catechism reading isn’t unique to German progressives. When Pope Francis updated the Catechism to declare the death penalty inadmissible, some conservatives called it a reversal of tradition or a change of an unchangeable doctrine. But it wasn’t. It was an old principle that lethal force is only justified when genuinely necessary, applied to a world where modern prisons can accomplish what execution once was the only means of doing.

So it’s the same mistake as the Germans, but in the opposite direction.

The Catechism is a starting point, not a finish line. Following it seriously means following it all the way through. Germany’s Catholic congress didn’t do that. And “no contradiction with the Catechism” is not a defense — it’s a confession of exactly how far the reasoning didn’t go.