The truth is that John Paul was far more focused on his own musings and the Vatican II ethos than he was 2,000 years of established church teaching.
One thing that galls me the most is the fact that he wrote his own Catechism and made it the standard of the faith.... to the point of the Catechisms of Trent and Baltimore becomming irrelevant in most circles. These great works are treated as if they are some sort of subversive material forcing interested Catholics to aquire them from backwoods traditional sources - no catechism classes use them anymore.
This is nothing short of shameful. As if all of the great knowledge and divine guidence we've garnered are moot in to now be replaced by John Paul's very own catechism... wise Polish philosopher that he was.
In what way(s) does the Catechism of the Catholic Church undermine anything taught in the Baltimore Catechism or the Catechism of Trent?
You don't get it. When John Paul became pope there WAS no catechism in use. Someone mentioned Father Martin. In the early '80s he wrote that the US Church was fractured, that those following Rome were decidedly in the minority. Noticed how so many priests resisted teaching it. It wasn't because they were traditionalists.
He's the Pope. It's part of the job description.
You say "his own" Catechism, like he pulled it out of thin air.
He wrote a catechism of the Catholic Church, for the Church, of which he is, or was, the spiritual leader. He did this, not in an effort to undermine the Catechisms which you love-for they had already fallen into disuse- but rather to once again put before people a Catholic Catechism. To remind them that these things are important.
If he does nothing he gets flak, if he does something he gets flak.
The problem here, as with the article above, is not with the Pope, but with those who think they know better than the Pope.
There are far, far too many people giving unsolicited advice to the See of Peter- from all sides of the spectrum. From those who consider the occupant to be an antediluvian dinosaur totally out of step with modern thinking, to those who consider him to be a modernist stalking horse.
Perhaps that is true, but exaggerations or even outright (if unintended) falsehoods do not help the trads prove their case.
no catechism classes use them anymore.
The Trent Catechism was never used by catechism classes, at least widely. It was directed towards priests and assumes a level of theological knowledge beyond that enjoyed by most laity (especially children). The Baltimore Catechism was already out of use almost entirely by 1990 - it wasn't JP II's fault, as others have pointed out. In fact, the CCC is not supposed to replace all other catechisms anyway - JP II's letter in the front says that explicitly. And Ratzinger stated openly that the Pius X Catechism was still perfectly appropriate for use. A much better perspective on the good work that JP II did in promulgating the CCC is here, from an address at the Wanderer Forum in 1993.
What all this amounts to, of course, is that, with the advent of the Catechism, it is once again made clear beyond all possible doubt that the Church which is about to launch into the Third Millennium is still the Catholic Church of all the ages. So from now on the appropriate response to the tired old taunt that this or that point of orthodoxy is "pre-conciliar" will be that heterodoxy is "pre-Catechism." ...The Catechism simply yields nothing to their demands. Not one article of faith is demythologized, muddied or called in question. Not one moral norm is discarded or compromised. And they know it!
As the old maxim says, scripta manent: what is written remains. And nowhere is this truth more relevant than when the Catholic Church publishes a universal catechism. That of the Council of Trent "remained" as a source of life-giving truth for four centuries, and that of Vatican II will certainly not be here today and gone tomorrow.
PS: Those who think of the old catechisms as "subversive" generally do the same of the new one.