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

that of many others, together with various tests that have been performed; and the veracity of such tests lies, in part, in the reliability and honesty of the persons conducting them and in the human powers of unbiased observation and reasoning.

      We rely on such natural faith in persons countless times every day, though we are also aware of the weaknesses that can afflict any part of this chain of evidence, so that — as the Catechism says — it would be “futile and false” (150) to entrust ourselves absolutely to any human person. Ultimately, though, we believe in the whole “system” of evidence collection, and in the capacity of the mind to discover truth, and such a belief must point us to the ultimate personal ground of the universe — to the One who finally says, “I am Truth. Believe Me.” All seeking must end in our finding the personal Being who is the Source of all truth-seeking and finding.

      The whole Christian life, then, can be summed up as our daily walk of faith with each of the divine Persons. Notice how the Catechism describes the life of faith: it is only by sharing in the Holy Spirit that we are able to believe in Jesus (152), and only by faith in Jesus that we can come to the Father (151). Thus we are led to entrust ourselves “wholly to God” (150), the unshakeable bedrock of our lives.

      Day 28

       CCC 153-165

      The Characteristics of Faith

      In this rich section, the Catechism places three essential points before us.

      First, faith is a divine gift (153). It must be so, because God is so far beyond us. Just as God’s revelation of himself is his gratuitous free act, so he lovingly cleanses our sight and gradually enlarges our heart so that we can respond in faith.

      Second, faith involves the full use of all our powers (154-159). Faith is the work the Lord asks of us (see Jn 6:29), and it is work that stretches our mind and involves every ounce of will. There is immense satisfaction in this: just as physical exercise leaves us feeling tired but fitter, so the spiritual exercise of acting out of faith fittingly employs all of our natural powers of imagination and understanding, of desire and will. Through the exercise of the gift of faith, we experience God calling us forth and crowning all of the natural powers with which he created us.

      Third, the exercise of faith is necessary for salvation (161-165). This is not an arbitrary requirement. The obedience of faith is our response to the Lord’s gracious invitation to us to share in his divine life. It is to the happiness of an eternity of trusting love and self-gift, mirroring his own gift of Self, that we are invited — what Jesus conveys to us in the image of a banquet of fine food (see Lk 14:15-24). God will not force us to enter the banqueting hall or to eat. Through the work of faith, he teaches us to want and to have the taste for the rich fare he has prepared. But what of those who have never heard of this invitation? Will they be denied entrance? No, there is a way — the way of conscience (see 162 and the cross-reference there) — and the Catechism will look at this later. The heavenly Father gives every person a means of responding to his call.

      Day 29

       CCC 166-169

      “Lord, Look upon the Faith of Your Church”

      Today’s reading helps us to grasp a simple, but essential, distinction: faith is a personal act, but never an individual one.

      It is personal in the sense that I must freely believe for myself; no one can believe for me. Only I can give my heart, my very self, to God, in response to his gift of himself to me. My heart is mine alone to give (see 160, and also 368 and 2563).

      But the personal nature of faith must not lead us to think of ourselves as isolated in this act of self-gift. It is not as individuals cut off from others that we come to believe. On the contrary, we are carried and supported by the faith of others. The text speaks of how each of us is “a link in the great chain of believers” (166), echoing the famous words of Blessed John Henry Newman in one of his meditations written in 1848: “I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons.” Or, as another great English believer put it, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Just as each of us receives life itself through others, and is then supported day by day by others in that life, so it is with faith — the new life of the soul is brought to birth in us through the Church, who then nourishes us and feeds us, raises us and educates us.

      Day 30

       CCC 170-171

      The Language of Faith

      In CCC 170, the Catechism helps us to understand how to think about the relationship between words about God and the reality of God himself. What it says here is paralleled in CCC 2132 in a passage concerned with religious images. When we look at an image of Jesus — a painting, or a statue, for example — we do not adore the statue itself. The statue is not Jesus, but rather points us to Jesus. It helps us to adore him. Just so in the case of words: we do not believe in the words themselves, but in what they point us to. Like images, they help us to “approach” divine realities and also help us to “express” these realities. Words and images are both precious to us for this reason. But they are not to be mistaken for God himself.

      CCC 171 reminds us of how we learn language, how we learn to speak and express ourselves. In their home, children hear language spoken and gradually learn to express themselves; they realize how to use phrases and which words refer to different objects around them. In God’s adopted family, the Church — our spiritual mother — is the primary teacher of the “language of faith.” The language she teaches us comes from Jesus himself; it is God’s own language, expressed in human words. Received from Jesus by the apostles, this language of faith is now handed on to each new generation who are spiritually born in the waters of Baptism and raised in the household of the Church.

      Day 31

       CCC 172-175

      Only One Faith

      This short group of paragraphs has immense importance. Three of the four paragraphs are taken from a single Church Father, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, from his work Against Heresies, probably written around AD 180. Irenaeus could trace his spiritual lineage back to the first apostles — to Saint Polycarp and thence back to Saint John the Evangelist.

      From the very birth of the Church, as we find in the teaching of those first apostles, the central proclamation was that God had worked in his beloved Son, Jesus, to restore the unity that had been lost since the world had preferred self to the loving will of the Father. Pentecost was the great event of the unleashing of the unifying power of the Holy Spirit so that the confusion reigning since Babel could be reversed and all could hear the one Gospel in their own language. Through the grace of the Holy Spirit, the diversity of languages and cultures was able to be united in a rich, single Tradition so that “the same way of salvation” (174) might be preached and received in all the nations.

      The very opening paragraph of the Catechism, summing up the essence of the Gospel, makes this intention of God clear to us: through the sending of his Son and Spirit, the Father was calling together every person “scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family” (1). This was the Father’s work from the beginning: “The gathering together of the People of God began at the moment when sin destroyed the communion of men with God” (761). The work reaches its culmination in the death and resurrection of Christ and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. Now there is one “deposit of great price” (175) handed down through one unified Tradition “with a unanimous voice” (173), calling every person into the single home of the Church, to be united there with one heart and soul.

      Day 32

       CCC 185-197

      The Creeds

      This short section is particularly important for helping us understand all that will follow in the rest of Part One of the Catechism, because here we have the introduction to the Creeds,