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

needs to provide for us in order to save us; the truth that we need to hear and to receive in order to be able to respond to his loving invitation.

      Day 23

       CCC 109-119

      The Holy Spirit, Interpreter of Scripture

      The Christian Tradition gives us a beautiful phrase for the way we read this unique book: “divine reading” (in Latin, Lectio Divina). Reading Scripture is always a divine reading, since “Sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written” (111). The Holy Spirit, who inspired the human authors to write the Father’s saving truth for his children, also enlightens us to understand that truth. Without the Holy Spirit’s assistance in interpreting the text, it remains a “dead letter.”

      The Spirit’s interpretation builds on our human reading of the text. We use our natural faculties to try to understand what the human authors wanted to say. The many types of writing in the Bible — proverbs, poetry, codes of conduct, historical passages, prophecies, and so on — communicate truth in different ways.

      Passages in Scripture always mean what the human authors meant to say. However, because God is the author of Scripture, passages can also mean more than this. The Scriptures — and the realities they convey — have a rich meaning within God’s loving plan. They can have many “senses,” or meanings: they can illuminate our faith in Christ and in God’s plan; they can encourage us to greater love; and they can inspire us by supporting our hope (116-118). These three virtues are connected to the “allegorical,” “moral,” and “anagogical” meanings, as you can see. The Catechism asks us to be guided by three overarching principles of interpretation as the Spirit helps us discover this richer meaning:

      • the unity of Scripture: the single loving mind and heart of God has inspired the whole text, so we can read different parts of Scripture in the light of other passages;

      • the unity between Scripture and Tradition: Tradition shows us how the Church has interpreted the Scriptures through the centuries;

      • the analogy of faith: the teachings of the Church across the ages are grounded in the Scriptures and cohere with each other (see also 89-90).

      Day 24

       CCC 120-130

      The Canon of Scripture

      The center of the Holy Scriptures is unequivocally presented here: the four Gospels. Because Christ is the fullness of revelation and the center of God’s saving plan, the Gospels that narrate his life and teachings, death, Resurrection, and sending of the Holy Spirit are the heart of the Holy Scriptures (125-127).

      The Scriptures have a center; but this does not mean that the “edges” are unimportant or merely peripheral. All Scripture speaks of Christ — the New Testament in an obvious way, the Old Testament more subtly. It is by and from Christ’s life and teachings, therefore, that the Church reads and interprets all of the Scriptures. Nothing is redundant. The Church uses “typology” to connect the Old Testament to the New; all of the realities in the Old Testament are images (or “types”) of Christ, his redeeming work, and the Church (128-130). Thus the waters of creation point to the recreating water of Baptism and the water that Christ turns into the wine of his new life, while David the Shepherd-King is an image, or “type,” of Christ, and Jerusalem an image of his Church-Bride. Why does the Church read the Scriptures in this way? In answer, we remember the unity of God’s plan, revealed across the centuries, in which his promises were fulfilled beyond expectation in the reality of his coming in the flesh. God reveals his plan gradually to us. The text uses the word “pedagogy” again (122) — God is leading us as his children who need to be introduced slowly into the full, glorious truth he wants to give us.

      Having established the “Canon” of the inspired Scriptures, the Church has firmly resisted all attempts to add or remove any books. “Canon” means “rule” or “measuring point” — the Church used her ancient “rule of faith” to decide which writings constituted the inspired Scriptures (120). The books are listed here in detail since the full Canon, agreed upon around the year 400, is not accepted by all.

      Day 25

       CCC 131-133

      Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church

      As you read today’s paragraphs, notice how many words in these brief paragraphs convey the sense of how God’s transforming power is present in the Holy Scriptures. The Church “forcefully” (133) exhorts all of us to read the Scriptures regularly, precisely because of the “force and power” of those same Scriptures (131).

      We are encouraged both to a personal reading of the Scriptures and to an attentiveness to hearing them read and explained to us in the liturgy and sacraments and in catechesis. We are being reminded that the Scriptures have been entrusted to the Church and that we are being invited into a reading and understanding of them that flows from our membership of the Body of Christ. It is as “children of the Church” (131) that we are fed with the inspired Scriptures.

      We have already mentioned the Scriptural Index at the end of the Catechism. You may want to make it your practice, when reading a passage from the Scriptures, to turn to the Index and find the passage there, following the references found there to the paragraphs in the Catechism. For example, for Mark 1:1 you would go to CCC 422 and 515. In this way, you will find yourself being constantly referred to the way in which the Church has been “reading” the Holy Scriptures across the centuries, informing her prayer, her faith, and her life with this “pure and lasting fount of spiritual life” (131).

      Day 26

       CCC 142-149

      The Obedience of Faith

      Let us begin with the title. Through the use of this simple biblical phrase, “The obedience of faith,” we are gently steered beyond any thought that we should choose between faith and works. One who listens to the Lord is called to respond, to act (see Jas 1:22ff). Faith, if it is authentic, always seeks what the Catechism calls “embodiment” (144). It seeks to express itself, to “become flesh” (Jn 1:14).

      Because of this, when the Catechism wishes to help us understand faith, it chooses to do so, not abstractly, but by presenting us with living examples — of saints from the Old and New Testaments and from the rich history of the Church. Here we find a great “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1; see CCC 165) who help us to understand the nature of faith by the way they lived. Abraham and the Blessed Virgin are offered to us as the models of this faith.

      The obedience of faith, therefore, involves our “whole being” (143). It entails both the assent of the mind and the determined commitment of the will. The mind assents to God as the supreme reality, as the firm foundation for our lives, while the will gladly embraces God as our supreme happiness.

      The challenge of faith is that it seems too good to be true. Can we really trust that the bedrock of our lives is a heavenly Father who wills and can bring about our complete good if we place ourselves wholeheartedly into his hands — even if through sacrifice and suffering — since “with God nothing will be impossible” (Lk 1:37)? It is precisely this obedient faith that enabled Abraham to move towards the Promised Land and Mary to welcome the divine Savior into her life.

      Day 27

       CCC 150-152

      “I Know Whom I Have Believed”

      We might think that faith primarily means believing in certain true propositions. This short section reminds us that the truths of faith are ultimately about the divine Persons. We believe in the Father, in Jesus the only-begotten Son, and in the Holy Spirit.

      This is not as strange as it might sound. All beliefs that something is the case ultimately turn out to involve belief in persons. For example, let us say that I have