One of the Brothers at the Irish De La Salle school where I began my education had a brisk warm-up routine for frosty mornings. It consisted of a rapid-fire set of catechism questions round the class. If you faltered or made a mistake you got a ferocious slap on either hand with a whippy three-foot cane, and went to the back of the line to be questioned again. The remembered tingle of swollen finger-ends as the second inquisition drew near is still capable of bringing me out in a sweat. It is some testimony to the effectiveness of this pedagogic technique, however, that while I have now wholly forgotten the Brother’s name, I have almost total recall of any question in the catechism, even at a distance of thirty years, and coasted through the first year of doctrine tutorials in my undergraduate theology degree- course on the strength of it—“I see that Duffy is the only member of the class who has actually read the Chalcedonian decrees”.

Indeed, it was as an elaborate mnemonic device that I think I chiefly valued it. Not just the riveting stacatto crispness of the question and answer form, and not just the lapidary elegance and compression of many of the answers, which seemed then, and seem still, admirable—‘What is prayer? Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God’. Best of everything were all those wonderful lists: the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost and the two great precepts of charity, the seven corporal works of mercy and the eight beatitudes, the seven deadly sins and the six sins against the Holy Ghost, the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, the three eminent good works and the four last things.