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

and space, is for all times and places. This next section of the Catechism explains how the precious deposit of faith is handed down in history, from one generation to the next, each one receiving and meditating upon the wonder of God’s visiting his people. There are four main points today’s reading makes:

      • Because it is the transmission of divine revelation, it is necessarily God’s own continuing work. This transmission to all peoples in all times is the work of the Blessed Trinity themselves (79).

      • Because God has revealed himself in order to save us, the transmission of this revelation is for the sake of the salvation of all peoples (74). The purpose of this transmission is to bring all peoples together, in unity as children, around their divine Father.

      • Because revelation is of God’s personal nature, the transmission of revelation is centered on persons, those whom he personally called and sent (76-78). It is centered on the apostles and on their successors whom they in turn personally call and send.

      • Because the divine Persons act by “deeds and words which are intrinsically bound up with each other” (53), the apostles transmit divine revelation in the same way, through their life and teaching, through the institutions they establish and their writings (76, 78). In the Church, the pedagogy of God is continued, with his revelation and gift of himself being transmitted from age to age in the words of the Holy Scriptures and in the living Tradition of the Church.

      Day 19

       CCC 80-83

      The Relationship between Tradition and Sacred Scripture

      Christ promised to remain with his Church until the end of the age. Today’s reading beautifully explains how Christ is made present in his Church and is handed down from generation to generation.

      Every new generation receives Christ in a twofold way: from Tradition and from the Sacred Scriptures. The two are intimately connected, since the apostles, and those closely associated with them, not only committed the message of salvation to writing (83), but also handed on the message through their lives, their prayer and worship, and their teaching (see Acts 2:42) — through what is described here as “Apostolic Tradition.”

      Christ is fruitfully present in his Church because of this combination of sacred words and holy acts. Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition are both handed down in the Church, from age to age, under the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, flowing from the witness of those who knew and touched and lived with Christ himself, in the flesh. We have already seen how the Catechism emphasizes that God’s saving work is characterized by the union of words with deeds. This is the unwavering pattern of divine activity. The two come together perfectly in the Person of Christ, who is the Word made flesh. Thus we can rightly expect Christ to be present in his Church today in this dual way.

      Day 20

       CCC 84-95

      The Interpretation of the Heritage of Faith

      We have been offered the beautiful image of Tradition and Scripture flowing together from a single source, intercommunicating with each other and making their way to the same goal. Their flow and communication are possible because of the banks that support and enable their movement. Without such necessary containment they would all too easily spill out and waste themselves. The importance of containment, which is, in truth, a service, is the topic of today’s reading: the Church herself receives and hands on the great stream of the Sacred Deposit, and she does so under the authoritative guidance of the Magisterium (from Latin, magister, meaning “teacher”). The great dogmas of the faith are placed like marker-points in the flowing waters — or, as the Catechism puts it, “lights along the path of faith” (89), making the travel secure. These three — Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium — belong together; they “are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others” (95).

      This portion of the Catechism also deals with growth in understanding the faith (94), or what we might call the “development of doctrine.” This is a matter of the Church making explicit things that were once just held implicitly. The deposit of faith was given once, for all, in its fullness, and the Church has always embraced this fullness and taught it as a whole. She has always grasped what the Catechism calls “the whole of the Revelation of the mystery of Christ” (90). But only gradually does the Bride of Christ make explicit her understanding of different elements in this fullness. The text refers us to Jesus’ promise that the Spirit would guide the Church into all truth (Jn 16:13) — there is always “more truth” to discover. But Jesus also told his disciples that this would not be “new” truth — rather, the Spirit would be reminding the disciples of what Jesus had told them (Jn 14:26).

      Day 21

       CCC 101-104

      Christ — the Unique Word of Sacred Scripture

      Having established that Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium belong together, supporting each other like the three legs of a single stool, the Catechism now moves on to provide us with the Church’s understanding of the Scriptures.

      The description of what the Scriptures are is a beautiful and moving one. Here we see God our Father wanting to speak to his children and accommodating himself to their language in order to do so. In eternity, God speaks just one Word; he says everything, all at once. This Word is Jesus, who is also everything that the Father wants to say to us. The Father speaks his divine Word to us, addressing us fully and completely, keeping nothing back.

      God is not in time, so he holds all truth as a single Word. This is reflected in time in the multitude of words, syllables, phrases, and sentences that we find in the Scriptures. However, the Catechism says, quoting Saint Augustine, they are all part of the “one Utterance,” the same single divine Word that is beyond time. All of the words and phrases we find in the Scriptures, then, in both the Old and the New Testament, point to him (see Jn 5:39-40; Lk 24:25-27).

      We might think of it this way: sometimes we “just know” that something is true — we have the “whole truth” in our mind; but we still have to take time and care to patiently spell this out, for ourselves or for others. Considered another way: if I fall in love, I “just know” that this love is everything and forever, and that is what my marriage vows then make explicit; but there is still the day to day living out what that “whole truth” of love actually means. We are creatures who live in time, and so God spells out for us the “whole truth” of Christ over all of the pages of the Bible so that we can come to know him gradually, day by day.

      Day 22

       CCC 105-108

      Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture

      In today’s reading we can find, first of all, a general truth about how God works with us, his creatures. God is described as the author of the Sacred Scriptures. How is he the author? He is so, in the first place, by his creation of human authors. The Christian writer George MacDonald put it like this: “Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespeare.” God loves to involve us as full agents in his creative work.

      God’s authorship of the Sacred Scriptures must mean even more than this, though; otherwise every novel and poem would be on the same “level” as the Bible. In the case of the Scriptures, then, we find something more, something unique. The Catechism, following the Scriptures themselves (see 2 Tm 3:16; 2 Pt 1:19-21, 3:15-16), teaches that God “inspired” the human authors (106). Literally, the word means that he “breathed” into them. And in doing so, he does not make the human authors less human, as though they had to be robots to be used by him; rather, he makes “full use of their own faculties and powers” (106). When God works in our lives, he makes us more, not less, human. This is why we must study the Scriptures also as human documents, seeking to understand what the human authors intended to say in their writings.

      Because the Scriptures are divinely inspired, in them we find whatever God wanted written, and no more, entirely free from