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, and it is on the Apostles’ Creed that the remainder of this part is built. If you glance ahead to CCC 199, 430, 456, and 571, you will see in each case that these paragraphs mark the beginning of “articles.” There are twelve in all, corresponding to the twelve divisions of the Apostles’ Creed. CCC 194 explains the origin of this Creed and that it is “rightly considered to be a faithful summary of the apostles’ faith.”
You will see that both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, reproduced in the Catechism alongside today’s paragraphs, are structured around the three Persons of the Trinity. When we profess our faith, we are professing faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The foundation of our faith is in the divine Persons. After that we profess our faith in their acts. The Persons make up the other main structuring principle of this part of the Catechism — it is divided into three chapters. You may find it helpful to spend a little time looking back over the contents pages for Part One and identifying the chapter and article headings.
This rich section explains the character of the Creeds. They are deliberate summaries of the faith — compact, memorizable syntheses needing unpacking and explaining. That is what the Catechism does for us here, in addition to showing that the elements in the Creed are connected — that they belong together. The word “article” derives from the Latin “articulus” — a joint or connecting part of the body. Notice how the Creeds are described in CCC 186 as “organic and articulated summaries” — they are summaries in which everything is linked together, making up a single whole. Finally, notice the emphasis placed on their immense spiritual importance: read CCC 197.
Day 33
CCC 198-202
“I Believe in One God”
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the King explains to Alice how to tell a story: “‘Begin at the beginning’,, the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’” The Creed tells the story in just this way. It begins at the beginning, and the beginning is God; everything else flows from this. Notice that the same is said of the commandments: every commandment is an unpacking of the first one (see CCC 2083).
At the beginning, then, we find God. We also find his oneness. The remainder of today’s reading is concerned with this. First, the importance of this element of our faith is emphasized — believing in God’s oneness is “equally fundamental” (200) to believing in his existence. Why? The answer is given in the following paragraphs which present the two meanings of “one” God.
• “God is one” means that he is the only one (201). God has no rival; he is the “one and only God.” Because there is only one God, our lives belong entirely to him. We owe him everything. We do not divide our loyalties.
• “God is one” means that there is no division in him (202). We believe in three Persons — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — but that does not mean we have divided God into three parts and shared him among the three. In the case of human beings, we
