Objection #1:

 YOUCAT insinuates that The Holy Bible contains errors.

The most serious error in YOUCAT can be found in Question 15 which addresses the question:

How can Sacred Scripture be “truth” if not everything in it is right? ⁽³⁾

Here, YOUCAT makes a problematic statement in question form, avoiding the appearance that it is the authors who are questioning the truth and accuracy of Sacred Scripture. The question also uses the phrase that “not everything in it is right” to avoid the obvious heresy that Sacred Scripture contains errors or that inspiration extends only to matters of faith and morals.

Rather than countering this misguided question with the explanation that all of Scripture is God-breathed and immune from error, the YOUCAT authors provide the following answer:

The Bible is not meant to convey precise historical information or scientific findings to us. Moreover, the authors were children of their time. They shared the cultural ideas of the world around them and often were also dominated by its errors. Nevertheless, everything that man must know about God and the way of his salvation is found with infallible certainty in Sacred Scripture.(emphasis and underline added) ⁽⁴⁾

By stating that the Bible does not seek to convey “precise historical information” and that the Scriptural authors were often “dominated” by the “errors” of their time, YOUCAT creates the impression that the Sacred authors were simpletons whose writings contain errors, or that only those things needed for salvation are presented in Scripture without error. Yet such a position is a repudiation of the constant and never-interrupted teaching of the Church on Scriptural inerrancy and contradicts YOUCAT’s own teaching in another section where the Bible is called the “Word of the living God.” ⁽⁵⁾

How should YOUCAT have responded to the question? Recognizing that “the Word of the living God” cannot possibly contain errors of any kind, the Catholic Church has always taught that the whole of Scripture was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and that, since God is the principal Author of Scripture, the books of the Bible cannot contain any errors at all. This teaching on complete inerrancy, affirmed by Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers and Doctors, plus the councils of Florence (1431-1443), Trent (1545-1563) and Vatican I (1869-1870), was also reiterated by Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus (1893):

By supernatural power, He so moved and impelled them to write—He so assisted them in writing—that the things which He ordered, and those only, they first rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth.

This great Pope also stated in the same encyclical:

it is absolutely wrong and forbidden…to [state] that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it—this system cannot be tolerated…For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost…it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church. ⁽⁶⁾

Likewise, the Second Vatican Council document Dei Verbum, (1965) states:

Those things revealed by God which are contained and presented in the text of sacred scripture have been written under the inspiration of the holy Spirit. For holy mother church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (see Jn 20:31; 2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:19-21; 3:15-16), they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the church itself. ⁽⁷⁾

Despite this teaching, it has been widely taught since the Second Vatican Council that Dei Verbum restricted the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture to matters directly pertaining to faith and morals. But that is far from being the case. The Council Fathers took pains to cite references to statements by the Council of Trent, Vatican Council I, and the encyclical letters of previous Popes, which emphatically upheld the absolute truth of the Scriptures on all subjects, including those not directly related to faith and morals, such as history and geography. In his encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII wrote:

For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the [First] Vatican Council’s definition that God is the author of Holy Scriptures, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. ⁽⁸⁾

So fundamental, historical, and vital is the Church teaching on inerrancy that in 1907, Pope St. Pius X issued the decree Lamentabili Sane, which was the “Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists.” In this document, he specifically condemned the Modernist position that “Divine inspiration does not extend to all of Sacred Scripture so that it renders its parts, each and every one, free from every error.” ⁽⁹⁾

Thus, any claim (or insinuation) that the original autographs of Holy Scripture contain error contradicts the constant teaching of the Church and is (or reflects) a condemned, heretical, Modernist position. This error alone should have stopped YOUCAT from being published in its current form and is more than sufficient reason to urgently recall and correct YOUCAT, or to replace it with a document containing sound doctrine. If the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture is questioned, the authority of the Church Fathers and Sacred Tradition will also be questioned—for the Fathers, Doctors, Popes, and Councils believed in inerrancy—and the door for confusion on moral issues will be opened. In fact, such moral confusion is contained in YOUCAT, as summarized in the second objection.