A Year with the Catechism. Petroc Willey, Dominic Scotto, Donald Asci, & Elizabeth Siegel

be “fully alive” (294). Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). The world was created so that it might point us to this abundance, through the natural glories around us and finally through being the home for the Incarnate Son who came to bestow his grace on us. The Father longs for us, to make us able to participate in every way in what he has to give — himself. This is why God creates, so that he can fill creation with his goodness and so draw us to himself, to become “all in all” (294).

      Day 46

       CCC 295-301

      The Mystery of Creation

      This section of the Catechism wants us to see that creation is a mystery: it is luminous with a spiritual, personal presence. It is not a flat, self-subsisting intricate mechanism, but has depth and carries meaning.

      The Catechism speaks of creation being “addressed” to us (299), like a letter. And because God creates everything out of love (295), it is a love letter. Saint Augustine described creation as the ring given by the Beloved. Whenever we see creation, we also “see” the love of God. God did not have to write this letter or give us this ring. He chose to, because he loves us. And he needed no help to do so — it is a pure expression of who he is. Everything in it comes directly from him (296).

      We can read the letter because, although we are creatures, he has made us in his image, with a share “in the light of the divine intellect” (299). When God wrote us the letter, he knew he would also need to teach us to read it, for it would be indecipherable otherwise, a mere jumble of symbols. But God has given us the ability to rise to a unified intellectual understanding of his world. In his poem “Frost at Midnight,” Samuel Coleridge beautifully expresses the hope that his sleeping child will come to be able to understand the language of God:

      … so shalt thou see and hear

      The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

      Of that eternal language, which thy God

      Utters, who from eternity doth teach

      Himself in all, and all things in himself.

      Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

      Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

      In the end, even love letters are not enough. The divine Lover and Letter-writer himself comes and finds us in the midst of his works. The letters are only meant to prepare us for that. But that is the topic of Chapter Two of this first Part of the Catechism (422).

      Day 47

       CCC 302-314

      God Carries Out His Plan: Divine Providence

      Today’s reading can give us great confidence. “Providence” refers to God’s plan and ability to bring us to the happiness for which he has created us. “He who calls you is faithful, and he will do it” (1 Thes 5:24).

      God might, of course, simply have placed us in a position of perfection from the beginning (310); he might have planned to bring us to this state by himself, without involving us. But what shows his delicacy and utter respect for us is that he will bring us to everlasting joy only in, through, and with our free collaboration (306-307). He will never force us to be happy. But he has promised to give us everything we need to reach happiness (308).

      The cooperation he seeks from us is simply our “childlike abandonment” (305) to his providence. This abandonment asks us to move forward, not because we always see the way ourselves, but because we trust the Father. The Scriptures were given to educate us in this trust (304).

      If the way were easy there would be no need for trust. But as we know, trust is needed every day in the face of the evil and suffering which lies all around us in a world terribly disfigured by sin. The lure of compromise and the temptation to despair are always present. What enables us to patiently resist both of these dead ends is the conviction that in every situation God never for a moment abandons us. Nothing falls outside of his providence, or his ability to use all that happens to draw every person into the happiness to which he has called us (311). The central event of our faith demonstrates this. There we see the greatest of all evils — the murder of the Father’s beloved Son. There, in the midst of this sin, Christ bore all, forgave all, and triumphed over death, bringing us “the greatest of goods” (312).

      Day 48

       CCC 325-327

      Heaven and Earth

      These paragraphs introduce us to the two “orders” of creation — the invisible world of the angels (328-336) and the visible world (337-349).

      Both orders of creation are equally real. Because reality received through the senses is so important for us, we have a natural tendency to measure reality by what we can feel and see and touch. And precisely because of that, God came to show himself to us in a way that accommodated the senses. The apostle John cries out in wonder and delight, “We have seen with our eyes … touched with our hands” (1 Jn 1:1). God the Son lovingly came among us in the full reality of visible creation. But the visible is not an end in itself, or the final word in reality. Rather, it is given in order to lead us to the invisible. The visible world is a great sign, pointing us on to the greater reality of what is spiritual. In the case of Jesus himself, the Catechism will explain that “what was visible in his earthly life leads to the invisible mystery of his divine sonship” (515).

      As human beings, we live in both worlds — the angelic, invisible world and the corporeal, visible world (327). Our nature is made up of both orders. In the Church’s Tradition a term given to this understanding is that the human person is a “microcosm,” a small world, because in our nature we sum up all the levels and types of being — we share intelligence with the angels, the life of the senses and the capacity for movement with animals, simple life with the plant kingdom, and existence itself with all that is inanimate. When the Son of God took human nature to himself, he thereby embraced the whole of creation in that nature. In his redemption of our nature, he restored the whole world (see Eph 1:9-10).

      Day 49

       CCC 328-336

      The Angels

      This beautiful text takes us through the ways in which angels appear in the three main periods of salvation history, using a structure frequently used in the Catechism because it corresponds to the revelation of the Persons of the Trinity. The first period — when the Father is revealed, but the Son and Spirit are more hidden — is the time before Christ. It is described as the time of the Old Covenant, or Old Testament, or of “the promises” (since the Son, who fulfills all the promises of God, has not yet come). The second period is that of the Son, when he takes on flesh and dwells among us. It is often called the period when time was fulfilled, the time of the New Covenant. The third period is our own, in which the Spirit is fully revealed. It is the age of the Church, or the “end times.”

      You will see that this section on the angels follows this basic structure. After explaining who angels are (328-330), we have teaching on angels in the time of the Old Testament (332), then the New Testament (333), and then the time of the Church (334-336). You will find this structure is used often to help us into God’s way of looking at things – by learning about different aspects of the faith in this way, we follow his timing of how he reveals himself and his plan of love.

      One other point you will have noticed in this teaching on angels is that they are always to be understood in relation to Christ (331). The Church’s teaching, we remember, “speaks of God, and when it also speaks of man and of the world it does so in relation to God” (199). We are not so much learning about angels, as about God’s angels, Christ’s angels. CCC 331 makes this explicit: angels can be understood only in relation to him. We, also, can be understood only in relation to him, as we shall see.

      Day 50