Catechism of the Catholic Church - Man's Capacity for God - CCC #26-49

Catechism of the Catholic Church*
SECTION ONE

The Profession Faith
Chapter 1 Man's Capacity for God
CCC #26 - 49 A Study
 

 

"For you have made us for yourself,
and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

(Saint Augustine, Confessions; CCC #30)

 

Chapter 1 of the Catechism reflects on our response to God through faith, our desire to know God above all things and how and where we come to find him.

Man's Response to God

 

"We begin our profession of faith by saying: "I believe" or "We believe."  Before expounding the Church's faith...we must first ask what "to believe" means.  Faith is man's response to God, who reveals himself and gives himself to man...as he [man] searches for the ultimate meaning of his life." (#26)

 

 Man's Desire for God

 

"The desire for God is written
in the human heart,
because man is created
by God and for God;
and God never ceases
to draw man to himself.
Only in God will he find the truth
and happiness he
never stops searching for." (CCC #27)

All humanity is created in the image and likeness of God, (Genesis 1:27) created by God and for God (#27). Without the Creator, the creature vanishes. (#49) We are intimately bonded to God. But this bond can be "forgotten, overlooked, or even explicity rejected by man." (#29) Yet "although man can forget God or reject him, He [God] never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness." (#30)

 

"Man is by nature and vocation a religious being.  Coming from God, going toward God...Man is made to live in communion with God in whom he finds happiness." (#44-45)

 

"As the deer longs for streams of water,

so my soul longs for you, O God." (Psalms 42:2)

 

Ways of Coming to Know God

How do we know God exists?   "Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of knowing him.  These are also called proofs for the existence of God...in the sense of converging and convincing arguments...These "ways" of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure:  the physical world and the human person." (#31)

 

Through Creation

"Ever since the creation of the world,
his invisible attributes of eternal power and
divinity have been able to be understood and
perceived in what he has made."  (Romans 1:20)

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas laid out the "converging and convincing arguments," in his Summa Theologiae which I attempted to summarize in Aquinas Five Proofs.

The Catechism summarizes this in one sentence, "The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe." (#32)

 

Through the Human Person

 

The second way of approaching God is through our personhood, "With his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness...with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence.  In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul...[which] can have its origin only in God." (#33)

 



Together, "The world and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in [the] Being itself, which is without origin or end...the first cause and final end of all things, [is] a reality that everyone calls God." (#34)
 

"When he listens to the message of creation and to the voice of conscience, man can arrive at certainty about the existence of God, the cause and the end of everything." (#46)

 

"Every human person seeks to know the truth and to experience goodness.  Moral goodness appeals to us.  We treasure our freedom and strive to maintain it.  We hear the voice of our conscience and want to live by it.  We long for absolute happiness. 

 

These experiences make us aware of our souls and our spiritual nature.  The more we become aware of these truths, the more we are drawn to the reality of God who is the Supreme Good.  These are the seeds of eternity within us that have their origins only in God."**

 

If it is true that the desire for God is written in our heart, why have so many not turned to God as Savior, partner and friend?  There are many reasons for our lack of awareness or interest in God.  The amount of suffering and pain we see daily in the news might move us to rebel against the idea of an omnipotent God who would let this happen.  The immoral behavior of believers, especially those in authority such as our priests, might cause us to leave the Church.  Our own sinful conduct, our "Achilles' heel", which many times weakens our ability to assume responsibility for our own actions might cause us to attempt to hide from God. What about the times when our lives become so chaotic that we just don't have one spare moment for God?  Or possibly no one bothered to share with us the Good News of God's salvation and mercy.  

 

We all have our "excuse" for not responding to the desire written in our heart. For not responding "I believe," and really mean it.  For not responding with faith, faith in God, who daily reveals himself to us.  Yet although we forget or reject God for some reason or another, He never ceases daily to call every man to seek him, so as to find the ultimate meaning for our life and our ultimate happiness.

 

I Believe in God

 

The next time I find myself pondering the grand philosophical questions of life: Who am I?  Where did I come from?  Why do I exist now?  What is my purpose for living? I hope to remind myself that the one who created me has all the answers and put my life in His Hands. I also hope to hold this saying of Saint Augustine close to my heart, "God loves each one of us as if there
were only one of us to love." 

 

Questions to Reflect Upon***

 

Where do I look for happiness apart from God? (CCC #29)
How do I know that my search for true happiness is a search for union with God? (CCC #27-30)
Where will I find evidence of God's desire for my happiness?  (CCC #31-35)

 

   Meditation

Where did I find you, that I came to know you?  You were not within my memory before I learned of you.  Where, then, did I find you before I came to know you, if not within yourself, far above me?...

Late have I love you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!...Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.  O eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity.  You are my God. To you I sigh day and night...You were with me but I was not with you.  Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.  You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness.  You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.  You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you.  I have tasted you; now I hunger and thrist for more.  You touched me, and I burn for your peace.  Saint Augustine, The Confessions book 10, chapter 26, 27.37

Next: The Profession of Faith
Chapter 2 God Comes to Meet Man - CCC #50-141
God Reveals His Holy Name - CCC#50 - 73

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Art  and Credits
Michelangelo - Creation of Adam - Sistine Chapel
God the Son - Viktor Vasnetsov
Creation of the Animals - Christoph Unterberger - Raphael Loggias Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
God the Father - Pompeo Batoni
Adam and Eve - Peter Paul Rubens
Christ the Good Shepherd - Philippede Champaigne
*Cathechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) - Vatican site
**United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, USCCB, pg. 4
***Study Guide for the U.S. Adult Catholic Catechism, Jem Sullivan, Ph.D., pg. 11
Original Post of Catechism of the Catholic Church with index



 

Cathechism of the Catholic Church - Introduction

Cathechism of the Catholic Church
Introduction

 

"God, in his love, creates within us - through the action of the Holy Spirit - the appropriate conditions for us to recognize his Word."
(Pope Benedict XVI)

"Today I would like to introduce the new series of Catecheses that will develop throughout the Year of Faith...Precisely so that the Church might renew the enthusiasm of believing in Jesus Christ the one Saviour of the world...
This is not an encounter with an idea or with a project of life, but with a living Person who transforms our innermost selves, revealing to us our true identity as children of God...
Having faith in the Lord...involves...our whole self:  feelings, heart, intelligence, will, corporeity, emotions and human relationships.  With faith everything truly changes, in us and for us, and our future destiny is clearly revealed, the truth of our vocation in history, the meaning of life, the pleasure of being pilgrims bound for the heavenly Homeland."

Pope Benedict XVI opened his Year of Faith weekly audience catechesis in Saint Peter's Square with these words.  He then went on to challenge us to increase our faith, thereby transforming our lives.  We might accomplish this, by first truly understanding what we profess when we pray the Creed.

Some, Pope Benedict XVI stated, may say the Creed "merely as an intellectual operation," by rote mechanical repetition.  Whereas we should strive to "discover the deep bond between the truth we profess in the Creed and our daily existence, so that these truths may truly and in practice be - as they have always been - light for our steps through life."

In other words, to begin our journey Pope Benedict XVI suggests we start at the beginning of the Catechism with our profession of faith in the Creed.  With this foundation we might better achieve our Baptismal promise which is: "It is the duty of the Church to transmit the faith, to communicate the Gospel, so that the Christian truths may be a light in the new cultural transformations and that Christians may be able to account for the hope that is in them (cf. 1 Peter 3:15).

Before beginning this journey through the catechism it is helpful to understand how the catechism is composed.  "The plan of the catechism is inspired by the great tradition of catechisms which build catechesis on four pillars:  the baptismal profession of faith (the Creed), the sacraments of faith, the life of faith (the Commandments), and the prayer of the believer (the Lord's Prayer)." (#13)

Basically the Catechism of the Catholic Church is divided into 4 sections.  The first, the baptismal profession of faith which reflects on the Creed, is broken down into two sections. One, how God gives himself to man through revelation and how man responds in faith to this revelation. And second a summary of the Creed in relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Let's begin.

Next:  The Profession Faith
Chapter 1 - Man's Capacity for God - CCC#26-49
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Art
Holy Spirit - Gian Lorenzo Bernini - Saint Peter's Rome
Original Post of the Catechism of the Catholic Church with Index

Catechism of the Catholic Church - The Year of Faith

Catechism of the Catholic Church
and
The Year of Faith

My Challenging Journey

 

Apostolic Letter
 Porta Fidei
For the Indiction of the Year of Faith

“The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church…To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime.  It begins with baptism…and it ends with the passage through death to eternal life. (Porta Fidei 1)

Ever since the start of my ministry as Successor of Peter, I have spoken of the need to rediscover the journey of faith so as to shed ever clearer light on the joy and renewed enthusiasm of the encounter with Christ. (2)

I have decided to announce a Year of Faith.  It will begin on 11 October 2012, the fiftieth (50^th ) anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and it will end on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King, on 24 November 2013.  The starting date of 11 October 2012 also marks the twentieth (20^th) anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a text promulgated by my Predecessor, Blessed John Paul II with a view to illustrating for all the faithful the power and beauty of the faith. (4)

We want this year to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the faith in fullness…It will also be a good opportunity to intensify the celebration of the faith in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharist, which is “the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed;…and also the source from which all its power flows.” (9)

In order to arrive at a systematic knowledge of the content of the faith, all can find in the Catechism of the Catholic Church a precious and indispensable tool.  It is one of the most important fruits of the Second Vatican Council…Here, in fact, we see the wealth of the teaching that the Church has received, safeguarded and proposed in her two thousand years of history. (11)

 “That the word of the Lord may speed on and triumph” (2 Thessalonians 3:1): may this Year of Faith make our relationship with Christ the Lord increasingly firm, since only in him is there the certitude for looking to the future and the guarantee of an authentic and lasting love.” (15) Pope Benedict XVI 11 October 2011

Taking this challenge to heart I hope to deepen my faith by spending The Year of Faith studying the Catechism of the Catholic Church using the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults and its companion Study Guide.  Each blog will have an active link below.  Here is my journey. 

My Challenging Journey 

The Year of Faith, Introduction
Part One:  The First Pillar - The Profession of Faith
Section One - CCC #26-184 Profession of Faith
  Chapter 1 Man's Capacity for God - CCC #26-49
  Chapter 2 God Comes to Meet Man - CCC #50-141
        God Reveals His Holy Name - CCC#50 -73
        Proclaim the Gospel to Every Creature - CCC #74-141
  Chapter 3 Man's Response to God - CCC #142-184
Section Two - CCC #185 - 1065 Profession of Faith: Creed
  Chapter 1 I Believe in God The Father - CCC #199 - 354
        I Believe in One God - CCC #199 - 231
        The Father - CCC #232 - 267

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Art
Christ Pantocrator - Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine - Sinai, Egypt (encaustic on panel - 1st half of the 6th century)

John Chapter 6 - The Bread of Life Discourse and the Holy Eucharist

 John Chapter 6
The Bread of Life Discourse and the Holy Eucharist

"The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life,” and "the sum and summary of our faith." (CCC 1324, 1327)  The following five blogs are a discussion of the relationship between the Bread of Life Discourse given by Jesus in John Chapter 6 and the Holy Eucharist. 

“The hand of the Lord feeds us;
he answers all our needs.” (Psalm 145:16)

Part I The Miracle of the Loaves John:6 1-15.  In this miracle, Jesus foreshadows the institution of the Holy Eucharist.

  "Whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
(John 6: 35)

Part II The Bread of Life John 6:24-35.  The people ask for another sign so that they might believe.    

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever." (John 6:51)

Part III I am the Bread of Life John 6:41-51. Jesus' sign is misunderstood.  

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I give is my flesh for the life of the world." (John 6:51)

 

Part IV Whoever Eats this bread will Live Forever John 6: 51-58 .  Jesus establishes the words of Eucharistic consecration.
 

"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him." (John 6:56)

 

Part V Jesus' Flesh is True Food, His Blood True Drink  John 6:60-69. The Holy Sacrament of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is made present at the Table of the Eucharist.  

"Jesus said:  "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever;...he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and ...abides in me, and I in him." (John 6:51, 54, 56, CCC 1406)