The Catholic Quiz Book

Who was the youngest Pope?

How many votes did it take during the six months long conclave to elect Benedict XIV?

What did the Jackdaw of the poem ‘prig’ from the Cardinal of Rheims?

Which Hollywood leading lady, who co-starred with Elvis Presley in Loving You and King Creole, is now a professed nun in a Benedictine convent in Connecticut?

Whether you know or you don’t, you will find the answers to these and many more interesting and amusing questions in Leo Madigan’s Catholic Quiz Book.

Informative and enormous fun, it provides both a wonderful game and an effortless education for Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

The delightful and provocative cover illiustration is by John Ryan.

Introduction to The Catholic Quiz Book

This offering is neither a catechism nor an examination paper. I don’t imagine that the College of Cardinals jointly could sprint through all 1000 questions without tripping up here and there and stubbing the odd toe along the way.

While compiling it, I was often confronted by the unanswerable question, “What is the purpose of a Quiz Book?” Is it intended to confound, dismay, amaze or instruct? Should it flummox those with less retentive minds, flatter well-oiled memories, or simply entertain? Perhaps it is because there is a medley of all these motives that the question is unanswerable, at least that is the verdict I arrived at while ammassing the information on my kitchen table.

The question and answer format on a particular theme do not occupy the same territory as a radio, pub or board-game type quiz. Be the subject matter Agriculture, Military Hardware or the Literature of Mali one is necessarily addressing The Prepared - reinforcing basics, endorsing principles and introducing aspects which, if not exactly novel, are nevertheless approached by way of unfamiliar streets.

My choice of questions is eccentric. I do not apologize for this because I see no alternative. Anybody’s choiuce would be. My aim has been not simply to introduce not simply what intelligent Catholics should know, but what they might like to know - even if the information be immediately forgotten. That does not mean that the more questions one answers correctly the better the Catholic one must be. To assume so would be tantamount to to assessing one’s fitness for controlling World Government by the size of one’s stamp collection.

If participants managed to answer 50% of the questions correctly from their store of knowledge, or by guesswork, I reckon they could congratulate themselves for excellence. If they scored more they might be considered admirable oddities.

I have not gone out of my way to pose difficult, obscure questions, or to practice an eclecticism so refined as to resemble the remoter black holes of Aalgebra. In most cases, when a fact is of interest though it cannot be expected to be common knowledge, I have endeavoured to incorporate clues in the question to enable a reader to make a responsible stab at the answer. As an instance, here is a fact:

St. John of Bridlington, canonized by Pope Boniface iX in 1401, was the last Englishman to be canonized until St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher in 1935. Now, to me anyway, this is an interesting fact and worth a question. The problem is, how to pose it! Thomas More and John Fisher are the subjects of several questions already so I would prefer that their names were not the answer. The years of Boniface IX’s papacy are too esoteric; Pius XI, the incumbent in 1935) is a possibility but too easy; the dates would require a multiple choice question and this would deflect from the inherent interest of the fact. I am really only left with St. John of Bridlington himself. In my ignorance, I knew nothing of him but, trusting that rreaders are more enlightened, I researched him in various works of reference and formed the following question:

Which St. John, a Yorkshireman, canonized in 1401, only 22 years after his death, was the last English saint to be canoniozed before Saints Thomas More and John Fisher in 1935?

If, like me, you have never heard of St. John of Bridlington, there would be know way of guessing the answer. But if you had heard of him then, in the ‘John’ and the ‘Yorkshireman’ and the date you have some clues. One way or another the fact that 534 years, over a quarter of the two millenniums of Christianity, elapsed with no Englishman or woman being raised to the altars is of interest. Cynics would interpret it as Roman pique at the Reformation.

Similarly, I have mostly avoided questions like, “Who wrote The Imitation of Christ? This would be too easy for the readership I envisioned. Instead I have opted for a quote, and often for a date and a nationality, in the hope that the style would suggest the authorship. So too with acronyms and heresies, et al. But, for the sake of mischief, or simply to let a Greek or Latin scholar shine, I’ve thrown in esoteric questions without clues. Whether they are answered correctly or no is immaterial. My purpose is that interest will be aroused and lead to further reading so that these pages may find a place, albeit among the back shelves marked ‘ephemera’, of those personal and precious libraries ‘haunted by the Holy Ghost’.

Available from Amazon.co.uk

Leo Madigan/Fatima-Ophel Books - www.theotokos.org.uk/leomadigan