Many of the manifestations of the counter Reformation, or rather of its backwash, are becoming almost unpopular, even among Catholics. Rococo was the first to suffer, and Baroque. Then florid counterpoint. Then some of its devotional forms and religious methods, institutions, and thought. Many expressions of the Catholic reaction do not belong merely to the period. Michael Angelo, Palestrina, and the Jesuits, for instance, if not immune from criticism, are anyhow great enough to defy it. There is now an attack on a common catechetical method which dates from the sixteenth century.

In a recent book, Père Tahon, a Scheut missionary in the Philippines and an educational expert, has marshalled the evidence to show that what he aptly calls psittacism, or the system of imposing a bare summary of Christian doctrine on the memory of the child without previous understanding, is Protestant in origin, is not authentically Catholic, exists in the Church as an abuse, and is, besides, contrary to the principles of pedagogical psychology.

The apostolic method of teaching beginners consisted in first presenting the facts of sacred history, and then drawing out from them the doctrinal elements of religion. This narrative method was continued by the Fathers, was formulated by St. Augustine (de Catechizandis Rudibus) precisely as the best way of instructing the ignorant, and became traditional in the Church, until it was largely displaced by a new catechetical method deriving from the polemics of the Reformation.