ENCYCLICAL LETTER
LUMEN FIDEI
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS
TO THE BISHOPS PRIESTS AND DEACONS
CONSECRATED PERSONS
AND THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON FAITH
LUMEN FIDEI
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS
TO THE BISHOPS PRIESTS AND DEACONS
CONSECRATED PERSONS
AND THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON FAITH
An
illusory light?
2. Yet in speaking of the
light of faith, we can
almost hear the objections
of many of our
contemporaries. In modernity,
that light might have been
considered sufficient for
societies of old, but was
felt to be of no use for new
times, for a humanity come
of age, proud of its
rationality and anxious to
explore the future in novel
ways. Faith thus appeared to
some as an illusory light,
preventing mankind from
boldly setting out in quest
of knowledge. The young
Nietzsche encouraged his
sister Elisabeth to take
risks, to tread "new paths…
with all the uncertainty of
one who must find his own
way", adding that "this is
where humanity’s paths part:
if you want peace of soul
and happiness, then believe,
but if you want to be a
follower of truth, then seek".[3]
Belief would be incompatible
with seeking. From this
starting point Nietzsche was
to develop his critique of
Christianity for diminishing
the full meaning of human
existence and stripping life
of novelty and adventure.
Faith would thus be the
illusion of light, an
illusion which blocks the
path of a liberated humanity
to its future. 3. In the process, faith came to be associated with darkness. There were those who tried to save faith by making room for it alongside the light of reason. Such room would open up wherever the light of reason could not penetrate, wherever certainty was no longer possible. Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way. Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.
A light
to be recovered
4. There is an urgent
need, then, to see once
again that faith is a light,
for once the flame of faith
dies out, all other lights
begin to dim. The light of
faith is unique, since it is
capable of illuminating
every aspect of human
existence. A light this
powerful cannot come from
ourselves but from a more
primordial source: in a
word, it must
come from God. Faith is born
of an encounter with the
living God who calls us and
reveals his love, a love
which precedes us and upon
which we can lean for
security and for building
our lives. Transformed by
this love, we gain fresh
vision, new eyes to see; we
realize that it contains a
great promise of fulfilment,
and that a vision of the
future opens up before us.
Faith, received from God as
a supernatural gift, becomes
a light for our way, guiding
our journey through time. On
the one hand, it is a light
coming from the past, the
light of the foundational
memory of the life of Jesus
which revealed his perfectly
trustworthy love, a love
capable of triumphing over
death. Yet since Christ has
risen and draws us beyond
death, faith is also a light
coming from the future and
opening before us vast
horizons which guide us
beyond our isolated selves
towards the breadth of
communion. We come to see
that faith does not dwell in
shadow and gloom; it is a
light for our darkness.
Dante, in the Divine Comedy,
after professing his faith
to Saint Peter, describes
that light as a "spark,
which then becomes a burning
flame and like a heavenly
star within me glimmers".[4]
It is this light of faith
that I would now like to
consider, so that it can
grow and enlighten the
present, becoming a star to
brighten the horizon of our
journey at a time when
mankind is particularly in
need of light.
5. Christ, on the eve of his passion, assured Peter: "I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail" (Lk 22:32). He then told him to strengthen his brothers and sisters in that same faith. Conscious of the duty entrusted to the Successor of Peter, Benedict XVI proclaimed the present Year of Faith, a time of grace which is helping us to sense the great joy of believing and to renew our wonder at the vast horizons which faith opens up, so as then to profess that faith in its unity and integrity, faithful to the memory of the Lord and sustained by his presence and by the working of the Holy Spirit. The conviction born of a faith which brings grandeur and fulfilment to life, a faith centred on Christ and on the power of his grace, inspired the mission of the first Christians. In the acts of the martyrs, we read the following dialogue between the Roman prefect Rusticus and a Christian named Hierax: "‘Where are your parents?’, the judge asked the martyr. He replied: ‘Our true father is Christ, and our mother is faith in him’".[5] For those early Christians, faith, as an encounter with the living God revealed in Christ, was indeed a "mother", for it had brought them to the light and given birth within them to divine life, a new experience and a luminous vision of existence for which they were prepared to bear public witness to the end.
6. The Year of Faith was inaugurated on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. This is itself a clear indication that Vatican II was a Council on faith,[6] inasmuch as it asked us to restore the primacy of God in Christ to the centre of our lives, both as a Church and as individuals. The Church never takes faith for granted, but knows that this gift of God needs to be nourished and reinforced so that it can continue to guide her pilgrim way. The Second Vatican Council enabled the light of faith to illumine our human experience from within, accompanying the men and women of our time on their journey. It clearly showed how faith enriches life in all its dimensions.
7. These considerations on faith — in continuity with all that the Church’s magisterium has pronounced on this theological virtue[7] — are meant to supplement what Benedict XVI had written in his encyclical letters on charity and hope. He himself had almost completed a first draft of an encyclical on faith. For this I am deeply grateful to him, and as his brother in Christ I have taken up his fine work and added a few contributions of my own. The Successor of Peter, yesterday, today and tomorrow, is always called to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the priceless treasure of that faith which God has given as a light for humanity’s path.
In God’s gift of faith, a supernatural infused virtue, we realize that a great love has been offered us, a good word has been spoken to us, and that when we welcome that word, Jesus Christ the Word made flesh, the Holy Spirit transforms us, lights up our way to the future and enables us joyfully to advance along that way on wings of hope. Thus wonderfully interwoven, faith, hope and charity are the driving force of the Christian life as it advances towards full communion with God. But what is it like, this road which faith opens up before us? What is the origin of this powerful light which brightens the journey of a successful and fruitful life?
CHAPTER
ONE
WE HAVE
BELIEVED IN LOVE
(cf. 1 Jn 4:16)
(cf. 1 Jn 4:16)
Abraham,
our father in faith
8. Faith opens the way
before us and
accompanies our steps
through time. Hence, if
we want to understand
what faith is, we need
to follow the route it
has taken, the path
trodden by believers, as
witnessed first in the
Old Testament. Here a
unique place belongs to
Abraham, our father in
faith. Something
disturbing takes place
in his life: God speaks
to him; he reveals
himself as a God who
speaks and calls his
name. Faith is linked to
hearing. Abraham does
not see God, but hears
his voice. Faith thus
takes on a personal
aspect. God is not the
god of a particular
place, or a deity linked
to specific sacred time,
but the God of a person,
the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, capable
of interacting with man
and establishing a
covenant with him. Faith
is our response to a
word which engages us
personally, to a "Thou"
who calls us by name.
9. The word spoken to Abraham contains both a call and a promise. First, it is a call to leave his own land, a summons to a new life, the beginning of an exodus which points him towards an unforeseen future. The sight which faith would give to Abraham would always be linked to the need to take this step forward: faith "sees" to the extent that it journeys, to the extent that it chooses to enter into the horizons opened up by God’s word. This word also contains a promise: Your descendants will be great in number, you will be the father of a great nation (cf. Gen 13:16; 15:5; 22:17). As a response to a word which preceded it, Abraham’s faith would always be an act of remembrance. Yet this remembrance is not fixed on past events but, as the memory of a promise, it becomes capable of opening up the future, shedding light on the path to be taken. We see how faith, as remembrance of the future, memoria futuri, is thus closely bound up with hope.
10. Abraham is asked to entrust himself to this word. Faith understands that something so apparently ephemeral and fleeting as a word, when spoken by the God who is fidelity, becomes absolutely certain and unshakable, guaranteeing the continuity of our journey through history. Faith accepts this word as a solid rock upon which we can build, a straight highway on which we can travel. In the Bible, faith is expressed by the Hebrew word ’emûnāh, derived from the verb ’amān whose root means "to uphold". The term ’emûnāh can signify both God’s fidelity and man’s faith. The man of faith gains strength by putting himself in the hands of the God who is faithful. Playing on this double meaning of the word — also found in the corresponding terms in Greek (pistós) and Latin (fidelis) — Saint Cyril of Jerusalem praised the dignity of the Christian who receives God’s own name: both are called "faithful".[8] As Saint Augustine explains: "Man is faithful when he believes in God and his promises; God is faithful when he grants to man what he has promised".[9]
11. A final element of the story of Abraham is important for understanding his faith. God’s word, while bringing newness and surprise, is not at all alien to Abraham’s experience. In the voice which speaks to him, the patriarch recognizes a profound call which was always present at the core of his being. God ties his promise to that aspect of human life which has always appeared most "full of promise", namely, parenthood, the begetting of new life: "Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac" (Gen 17:19). The God who asks Abraham for complete trust reveals himself to be the source of all life. Faith is thus linked to God’s fatherhood, which gives rise to all creation; the God who calls Abraham is the Creator, the one who "calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Rom 4:17), the one who "chose us before the foundation of the world… and destined us for adoption as his children" (Eph 1:4-5). For Abraham, faith in God sheds light on the depths of his being, it enables him to acknowledge the wellspring of goodness at the origin of all things and to realize that his life is not the product of non-being or chance, but the fruit of a personal call and a personal love. The mysterious God who called him is no alien deity, but the God who is the origin and mainstay of all that is. The great test of Abraham’s faith, the sacrifice of his son Isaac, would show the extent to which this primordial love is capable of ensuring life even beyond death. The word which could raise up a son to one who was "as good as dead", in "the barrenness" of Sarah’s womb (cf. Rom 4:19), can also stand by his promise of a future beyond all threat or danger (cf. Heb 11:19; Rom 4:21).
The faith
of Israel
12. The history of the
people of Israel in the
Book of Exodus follows
in the wake of Abraham’s
faith. Faith once again
is born of a primordial
gift: Israel trusts in
God, who promises to set
his people free from
their misery. Faith
becomes a summons to a
lengthy journey leading
to worship of the Lord
on Sinai and the
inheritance of a
promised land. God’s
love is seen to be like
that of a father who
carries his child along
the way (cf. Dt 1:31). Israel’s
confession of faith
takes shape as an
account of God’s deeds
in setting his people
free and acting as their
guide (cf. Dt 26:5-11), an account
passed down from one
generation to the next.
God’s light shines for
Israel through the
remembrance of the
Lord’s mighty deeds,
recalled and celebrated
in worship, and passed
down from parents to
children. Here we see
how the light of faith
is linked to concrete life-stories, to
the grateful remembrance of
God’s mighty deeds and the
progressive fulfilment of
his promises. Gothic
architecture gave clear
expression to this: in the
great cathedrals light comes
down from heaven by passing
through windows depicting
the history of salvation.
God’s light comes to us
through the account of his
self-revelation, and thus
becomes capable of
illuminating our passage
through time by recalling
his gifts and demonstrating
how he fulfils his promises.
13. The history of Israel also shows us the temptation of unbelief to which the people yielded more than once. Here the opposite of faith is shown to be idolatry. While Moses is speaking to God on Sinai, the people cannot bear the mystery of God’s hiddenness, they cannot endure the time of waiting to see his face. Faith by its very nature demands renouncing the immediate possession which sight would appear to offer; it is an invitation to turn to the source of the light, while respecting the mystery of a countenance which will unveil itself personally in its own good time. Martin Buber once cited a definition of idolatry proposed by the rabbi of Kock: idolatry is "when a face addresses a face which is not a face".[10] In place of faith in God, it seems better to worship an idol, into whose face we can look directly and whose origin we know, because it is the work of our own hands. Before an idol, there is no risk that we will be called to abandon our security, for idols "have mouths, but they cannot speak" (Ps 115:5). Idols exist, we begin to see, as a pretext for setting ourselves at the centre of reality and worshiping the work of our own hands. Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life-story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth. Those who choose not to put their trust in God must hear the din of countless idols crying out: "Put your trust in me!" Faith, tied as it is to conversion, is the opposite of idolatry; it breaks with idols to turn to the living God in a personal encounter. Believing means entrusting oneself to a merciful love which always accepts and pardons, which sustains and directs our lives, and which shows its power by its ability to make straight the crooked lines of our history. Faith consists in the willingness to let ourselves be constantly transformed and renewed by God’s call. Herein lies the paradox: by constantly turning towards the Lord, we discover a sure path which liberates us from the dissolution imposed upon us by idols.
14. In the faith of Israel we also encounter the figure of Moses, the mediator. The people may not see the face of God; it is Moses who speaks to YHWH on the mountain and then tells the others of the Lord’s will. With this presence of a mediator in its midst, Israel learns to journey together in unity. The individual’s act of faith finds its place within a community, within the common "we" of the people who, in faith, are like a single person — "my first-born son", as God would describe all of Israel (cf. Ex 4:22). Here mediation is not an obstacle, but an opening: through our encounter with others, our gaze rises to a truth greater than ourselves. Rousseau once lamented that he could not see God for himself: "How many people stand between God and me!"[11] … "Is it really so simple and natural that God would have sought out Moses in order to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?"[12] On the basis of an individualistic and narrow conception of conscience one cannot appreciate the significance of mediation, this capacity to participate in the vision of another, this shared knowledge which is the knowledge proper to love. Faith is God’s free gift, which calls for humility and the courage to trust and to entrust; it enables us to see the luminous path leading to the encounter of God and humanity: the history of salvation.
The
fullness of Christian faith
15. "Abraham rejoiced
that he would see my
day; he saw it and was
glad" (Jn 8:56).
According to these words
of Jesus, Abraham’s
faith pointed to him; in
some sense it foresaw
his mystery. So Saint
Augustine understood it
when he stated that the
patriarchs were saved by
faith, not faith in
Christ who had come but
in Christ who was yet to
come, a faith pressing
towards the future of
Jesus.[13]
Christian faith
is centred on Christ; it
is the confession that
Jesus is Lord and that
God has raised him from
the dead (cf. Rom 10:9). All the threads
of the Old Testament
converge on Christ; he
becomes the definitive
"Yes" to all the
promises, the ultimate
basis of our "Amen" to
God (cf. 2 Cor 1:20). The history of
Jesus is the complete
manifestation of God’s
reliability. If Israel
continued to recall
God’s great acts of
love, which formed the
core of its confession
of faith and broadened
its gaze in faith, the
life of Jesus now
appears as the locus of
God’s definitive
intervention, the
supreme manifestation of
his love for us. The
word which God speaks to
us in Jesus is not
simply one word among
many, but his eternal
Word (cf. Heb 1:1-2). God can give no
greater guarantee of his
love, as Saint Paul
reminds us (cf. Rom
8:31-39). Christian
faith is thus faith in a
perfect love, in its
decisive power, in its
ability to transform the
world and to unfold its
history. "We know and
believe the love that God has for us" (1 Jn
4:16). In the love of
God revealed in Jesus, faith
perceives the foundation on
which all reality and its
final destiny rest.16. The clearest proof of the reliability of Christ’s love is to be found in his dying for our sake. If laying down one’s life for one’s friends is the greatest proof of love (cf. Jn 15:13), Jesus offered his own life for all, even for his enemies, to transform their hearts. This explains why the evangelists could see the hour of Christ’s crucifixion as the culmination of the gaze of faith; in that hour the depth and breadth of God’s love shone forth. It was then that Saint John offered his solemn testimony, as together with the Mother of Jesus he gazed upon the pierced one (cf. Jn 19:37): "He who saw this has borne witness, so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth" (Jn 19:35). In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myskin sees a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger depicting Christ dead in the tomb and says: "Looking at that painting might cause one to lose his faith".[14] The painting is a gruesome portrayal of the destructive effects of death on Christ’s body. Yet it is precisely in contemplating Jesus’ death that faith grows stronger and receives a dazzling light; then it is revealed as faith in Christ’s steadfast love for us, a love capable of embracing death to bring us salvation. This love, which did not recoil before death in order to show its depth, is something I can believe in; Christ’s total self-gift overcomes every suspicion and enables me to entrust myself to him completely.
17. Christ’s death discloses the utter reliability of God’s love above all in the light of his resurrection. As the risen one, Christ is the trustworthy witness, deserving of faith (cf. Rev 1:5; Heb 2:17), and a solid support for our faith. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile", says Saint Paul (1 Cor 15:17). Had the Father’s love not caused Jesus to rise from the dead, had it not been able to restore his body to life, then it would not be a completely reliable love, capable of illuminating also the gloom of death. When Saint Paul describes his new life in Christ, he speaks of "faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20). Clearly, this "faith in the Son of God" means Paul’s faith in Jesus, but it also presumes that Jesus himself is worthy of faith, based not only on his having loved us even unto death but also on his divine sonship. Precisely because Jesus is the Son, because he is absolutely grounded in the Father, he was able to conquer death and make the fullness of life shine forth. Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
18. This fullness which Jesus brings to faith has another decisive aspect. In faith, Christ is not simply the one in whom we believe, the supreme manifestation of God’s love; he is also the one with whom we are united precisely in order to believe. Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing. In many areas in our lives we trust others who know more than we do. We trust the architect who builds our home, the pharmacist who gives us medicine for healing, the lawyer who defends us in court. We also need someone trustworthy and knowledgeable where God is concerned. Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who makes God known to us (cf. Jn 1:18). Christ’s life, his way of knowing the Father and living in complete and constant relationship with him, opens up new and inviting vistas for human experience. Saint John brings out the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus for our faith by using various forms of the verb "to believe". In addition to "believing that" what Jesus tells us is true, John also speaks of "believing" Jesus and "believing in" Jesus. We "believe" Jesus when we accept his word, his testimony, because he is truthful. We "believe in" Jesus when we personally welcome him into our lives and journey towards him, clinging to him in love and following in his footsteps along the way.
To enable
us to know, accept and
follow him, the Son of God
took on our flesh. In this
way he also saw the Father
humanly, within the setting
of a journey unfolding in
time. Christian faith is
faith in the incarnation of
the Word and his bodily
resurrection; it is faith in
a God who is so close to us
that he entered our human
history. Far from divorcing
us from reality, our faith
in the Son of God made man
in Jesus of Nazareth enables
us to grasp reality’s
deepest meaning and to see
how much God loves this
world and is constantly
guiding it towards himself.
This leads us, as
Christians, to live our
lives in this world with
ever greater commitment and
intensity.
Salvation
by faith
19. On the basis of this
sharing in Jesus’ way of
seeing things, Saint
Paul has left us a
description of the life
of faith. In accepting
the gift of faith,
believers become a new
creation; they receive a
new being; as God’s
children, they are now
"sons in the Son". The
phrase "Abba, Father",
so characteristic of
Jesus’ own experience,
now becomes the core of
the Christian experience
(cf.
Rom 8:15). The life
of faith, as a filial
existence, is the
acknowledgment of a
primordial and radical gift
which upholds our lives. We
see this clearly in Saint
Paul’s question to the
Corinthians: "What have you
that you did not receive?" (1
Cor 4:7). This was at
the very heart of Paul’s
debate with the Pharisees:
the issue of whether
salvation is attained by
faith or by the works of the
law. Paul rejects the
attitude of those who would
consider themselves
justified before God on the
basis of their own works.
Such people, even when they
obey the commandments and do
good works, are centred on
themselves; they fail to
realize that goodness comes
from God. Those who live
this way, who want to be the
source of their own
righteousness, find that the
latter is soon depleted and
that they are unable even to
keep the law. They become
closed in on themselves and
isolated from the Lord and
from others; their lives
become futile and their
works barren, like a tree
far from water. Saint
Augustine tells us in his
usual concise and striking
way: "Ab eo qui fecit te,
noli deficere nec ad te",
"Do not turn away from the
one who made you, even to
turn towards yourself".[15]
Once I think that by turning
away from God I will find
myself, my life begins to
fall apart (cf. Lk
15:11-24). The beginning of
salvation is openness to
something prior to
ourselves, to a primordial
gift that affirms life and
sustains it in being. Only
by being open to and
acknowledging this gift can we be
transformed, experience
salvation and bear good
fruit. Salvation by faith
means recognizing the
primacy of God’s gift. As
Saint Paul puts it: "By
grace you have been saved
through faith, and this is
not your own doing; it is
the gift of God" (Eph
2:8).20. Faith’s new way of seeing things is centred on Christ. Faith in Christ brings salvation because in him our lives become radically open to a love that precedes us, a love that transforms us from within, acting in us and through us. This is clearly seen in Saint Paul’s exegesis of a text from Deuteronomy, an exegesis consonant with the heart of the Old Testament message. Moses tells the people that God’s command is neither too high nor too far away. There is no need to say: "Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us?" or "Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us?" (Dt 30:11-14). Paul interprets this nearness of God’s word in terms of Christ’s presence in the Christian. "Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)" (Rom 10:6-7). Christ came down to earth and rose from the dead; by his incarnation and resurrection, the Son of God embraced the whole of human life and history, and now dwells in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Faith knows that God has drawn close to us, that Christ has been given to us as a great gift which inwardly transforms us, dwells within us and thus bestows on us the light that illumines the origin and the end of life.
21. We come to see the difference, then, which faith makes for us. Those who believe are transformed by the love to which they have opened their hearts in faith. By their openness to this offer of primordial love, their lives are enlarged and expanded. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20). "May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith" (Eph 3:17). The self-awareness of the believer now expands because of the presence of another; it now lives in this other and thus, in love, life takes on a whole new breadth. Here we see the Holy Spirit at work. The Christian can see with the eyes of Jesus and share in his mind, his filial disposition, because he or she shares in his love, which is the Spirit. In the love of Jesus, we receive in a certain way his vision. Without being conformed to him in love, without the presence of the Spirit, it is impossible to confess him as Lord (cf. 1 Cor 12:3).
The
ecclesial form of faith
22. In this way, the
life of the believer
becomes an ecclesial
existence, a life lived
in the Church. When
Saint Paul tells the
Christians of Rome that
all who believe in
Christ make up one body,
he urges them not to
boast of this; rather,
each must think of
himself "according to
the measure of faith
that God has assigned" (Rom
12:3). Those who believe come to
see themselves in the light
of the faith which they
profess: Christ is the
mirror in which they find
their own image fully
realized. And just as Christ
gathers to himself all those
who believe and makes them
his body, so the Christian
comes to see himself as a
member of this body, in an
essential relationship with
all other believers. The
image of a body does not
imply that the believer is
simply one part of an
anonymous whole, a mere cog
in great machine; rather, it
brings out the vital union
of Christ with believers,
and of believers among
themselves (cf. Rom
12:4-5) Christians are "one"
(cf. Gal 3:28), yet
in a way which does not make
them lose their
individuality; in service to
others, they come into their
own in the highest degree.
This explains why, apart
from this body, outside this
unity of the Church in
Christ, outside this Church
which — in the words of
Romano Guardini — "is the
bearer within history of the
plenary gaze of Christ on
the world"[16]
— faith loses its "measure";
it no longer finds its
equilibrium, the space
needed to sustain itself.
Faith is necessarily
ecclesial; it is professed
from within the body of
Christ as a concrete
communion of believers. It
is against this ecclesial
backdrop that faith opens
the individual Christian
towards all others. Christ’s
word, once heard, by virtue
of its inner power at work
in the heart of the Christian, becomes
a response, a spoken word, a
profession of faith. As
Saint Paul puts it: "one
believes with the heart ...
and confesses with the lips"
(Rom 10:10). Faith is
not a private matter, a
completely individualistic
notion or a personal
opinion: it comes from
hearing, and it is meant to
find expression in words and
to be proclaimed. For "how
are they to believe in him
of whom they have never
heard? And how are they to
hear without a preacher?" (Rom
10:14). Faith becomes
operative in the Christian
on the basis of the gift
received, the love which
attracts our hearts to
Christ (cf. Gal 5:6),
and enables us to become
part of the Church’s great
pilgrimage through history
until the end of the world.
For those who have been
transformed in this way, a
new way of seeing opens up,
faith becomes light for
their eyes.
CHAPTER
TWO
UNLESS YOU
BELIEVE,
YOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND
(cf. Is 7:9)
Faith and
truthYOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND
(cf. Is 7:9)
23. Unless you believe, you will not understand (cf. Is 7:9). The Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint translation produced in Alexandria, gives the above rendering of the words spoken by the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz. In this way, the issue of the knowledge of truth became central to faith. The Hebrew text, though, reads differently; the prophet says to the king: "If you will not believe, you shall not be established". Here there is a play on words, based on two forms of the verb ’amān: "you will believe" (ta’amînû) and "you shall be established" (tē’āmēnû). Terrified by the might of his enemies, the king seeks the security that an alliance with the great Assyrian empire can offer. The prophet tells him instead to trust completely in the solid and steadfast rock which is the God of Israel. Because God is trustworthy, it is reasonable to have faith in him, to stand fast on his word. He is the same God that Isaiah will later call, twice in one verse, the God who is Amen, "the God of truth" (cf. Is 65:16), the enduring foundation of covenant fidelity. It might seem that the Greek version of the Bible, by translating "be established" as "understand", profoundly altered the meaning of the text by moving away from the biblical notion of trust in God towards a Greek notion of intellectual understanding. Yet this translation, while certainly reflecting a dialogue with Hellenistic culture, is not alien to the underlying spirit of the Hebrew text. The firm foundation that Isaiah promises to the king is indeed grounded in an understanding of God’s activity and the unity which he gives to human life and to the history of his people. The prophet challenges the king, and us, to understand the Lord’s ways, seeing in God’s faithfulness the wise plan which governs the ages. Saint Augustine took up this synthesis of the ideas of "understanding" and "being established" in his Confessions when he spoke of the truth on which one may rely in order to stand fast: "Then I shall be cast and set firm in the mould of your truth".[17] From the context we know that Augustine was concerned to show that this trustworthy truth of God is, as the Bible makes clear, his own faithful presence throughout history, his ability to hold together times and ages, and to gather into one the scattered strands of our lives.[18]
24. Read in this light, the prophetic text leads to one conclusion: we need knowledge, we need truth, because without these we cannot stand firm, we cannot move forward. Faith without truth does not save, it does not provide a sure footing. It remains a beautiful story, the projection of our deep yearning for happiness, something capable of satisfying us to the extent that we are willing to deceive ourselves. Either that, or it is reduced to a lofty sentiment which brings consolation and cheer, yet remains prey to the vagaries of our spirit and the changing seasons, incapable of sustaining a steady journey through life. If such were faith, King Ahaz would be right not to stake his life and the security of his kingdom on a feeling. But precisely because of its intrinsic link to truth, faith is instead able to offer a new light, superior to the king’s calculations, for it sees further into the distance and takes into account the hand of God, who remains faithful to his covenant and his promises.
25. Today more than ever, we need to be reminded of this bond between faith and truth, given the crisis of truth in our age. In contemporary culture, we often tend to consider the only real truth to be that of technology: truth is what we succeed in building and measuring by our scientific know-how, truth is what works and what makes life easier and more comfortable. Nowadays this appears as the only truth that is certain, the only truth that can be shared, the only truth that can serve as a basis for discussion or for common undertakings. Yet at the other end of the scale we are willing to allow for subjective truths of the individual, which consist in fidelity to his or her deepest convictions, yet these are truths valid only for that individual and not capable of being proposed to others in an effort to serve the common good. But Truth itself, the truth which would comprehensively explain our life as individuals and in society, is regarded with suspicion. Surely this kind of truth — we hear it said — is what was claimed by the great totalitarian movements of the last century, a truth that imposed its own world view in order to crush the actual lives of individuals. In the end, what we are left with is relativism, in which the question of universal truth — and ultimately this means the question of God — is no longer relevant. It would be logical, from this point of view, to attempt to sever the bond between religion and truth, because it seems to lie at the root of fanaticism, which proves oppressive for anyone who does not share the same beliefs. In this regard, though, we can speak of a massive amnesia in our contemporary world. The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path.
Knowledge of the truth and love
26. This being the case, can Christian faith provide a service to the common good with regard to the right way of understanding truth? To answer this question, we need to reflect on the kind of knowledge involved in faith. Here a saying of Saint Paul can help us: "One believes with the heart" (Rom 10:10). In the Bible, the heart is the core of the human person, where all his or her different dimensions intersect: body and spirit, interiority and openness to the world and to others, intellect, will and affectivity. If the heart is capable of holding all these dimensions together, it is because it is where we become open to truth and love, where we let them touch us and deeply transform us. Faith transforms the whole person precisely to the extent that he or she becomes open to love. Through this blending of faith and love we come to see the kind of knowledge which faith entails, its power to convince and its ability to illumine our steps. Faith knows because it is tied to love, because love itself brings enlightenment. Faith’s understanding is born when we receive the immense love of God which transforms us inwardly and enables us to see reality with new eyes.
27. The explanation of the connection between faith and certainty put forward by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is well known. For Wittgenstein, believing can be compared to the experience of falling in love: it is something subjective which cannot be proposed as a truth valid for everyone.[19] Indeed, most people nowadays would not consider love as related in any way to truth. Love is seen as an experience associated with the world of fleeting emotions, no longer with truth.
But is this an adequate description of love? Love cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away from self-centredness and towards another person, in order to build a lasting relationship; love aims at union with the beloved. Here we begin to see how love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment and be sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions and cannot stand the test of time. True love, on the other hand, unifies all the elements of our person and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great and fulfilled life. Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond; it cannot liberate our isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to create life and bear fruit.
If love needs truth, truth also needs love. Love and truth are inseparable. Without love, truth becomes cold, impersonal and oppressive for people’s day-to-day lives. The truth we seek, the truth that gives meaning to our journey through life, enlightens us whenever we are touched by love. One who loves realizes that love is an experience of truth, that it opens our eyes to see reality in a new way, in union with the beloved. In this sense, Saint Gregory the Great could write that "amor ipse notitia est", love is itself a kind of knowledge possessed of its own logic.[20] It is a relational way of viewing the world, which then becomes a form of shared knowledge, vision through the eyes of another and a shared vision of all that exists. William of Saint-Thierry, in the Middle Ages, follows this tradition when he comments on the verse of the Song of Songs where the lover says to the beloved, "Your eyes are doves" (Song 1:15).[21] The two eyes, says William, are faith-filled reason and love, which then become one in rising to the contemplation of God, when our understanding becomes "an understanding of enlightened love".[22]
28. This discovery of love as a source of knowledge, which is part of the primordial experience of every man and woman, finds authoritative expression in the biblical understanding of faith. In savouring the love by which God chose them and made them a people, Israel came to understand the overall unity of the divine plan. Faith-knowledge, because it is born of God’s covenantal love, is knowledge which lights up a path in history. That is why, in the Bible, truth and fidelity go together: the true God is the God of fidelity who keeps his promises and makes possible, in time, a deeper understanding of his plan. Through the experience of the prophets, in the pain of exile and in the hope of a definitive return to the holy city, Israel came to see that this divine "truth" extended beyond the confines of its own history, to embrace the entire history of the world, beginning with creation. Faith-knowledge sheds light not only on the destiny of one particular people, but the entire history of the created world, from its origins to its consummation.
Faith as hearing and sight
29. Precisely because faith-knowledge is linked to the covenant with a faithful God who enters into a relationship of love with man and speaks his word to him, the Bible presents it as a form of hearing; it is associated with the sense of hearing. Saint Paul would use a formula which became classic: fides ex auditu, "faith comes from hearing" (Rom 10:17). Knowledge linked to a word is always personal knowledge; it recognizes the voice of the one speaking, opens up to that person in freedom and follows him or her in obedience. Paul could thus speak of the "obedience of faith" (cf. Rom 1:5; 16:26).[23] Faith is also a knowledge bound to the passage of time, for words take time to be pronounced, and it is a knowledge assimilated only along a journey of discipleship. The experience of hearing can thus help to bring out more clearly the bond between knowledge and love.
At times, where knowledge of the truth is concerned, hearing has been opposed to sight; it has been claimed that an emphasis on sight was characteristic of Greek culture. If light makes possible that contemplation of the whole to which humanity has always aspired, it would also seem to leave no space for freedom, since it comes down from heaven directly to the eye, without calling for a response. It would also seem to call for a kind of static contemplation, far removed from the world of history with its joys and sufferings. From this standpoint, the biblical understanding of knowledge would be antithetical to the Greek understanding, inasmuch as the latter linked knowledge to sight in its attempt to attain a comprehensive understanding of reality.
This alleged antithesis does not, however, correspond to the biblical datum. The Old Testament combined both kinds of knowledge, since hearing God’s word is accompanied by the desire to see his face. The ground was thus laid for a dialogue with Hellenistic culture, a dialogue present at the heart of sacred Scripture. Hearing emphasizes personal vocation and obedience, and the fact that truth is revealed in time. Sight provides a vision of the entire journey and allows it to be situated within God’s overall plan; without this vision, we would be left only with unconnected parts of an unknown whole.
30. The bond between seeing and hearing in faith-knowledge is most clearly evident in John’s Gospel. For the Fourth Gospel, to believe is both to hear and to see. Faith’s hearing emerges as a form of knowing proper to love: it is a personal hearing, one which recognizes the voice of the Good Shepherd (cf. Jn 10:3-5); it is a hearing which calls for discipleship, as was the case with the first disciples: "Hearing him say these things, they followed Jesus" (Jn 1:37). But faith is also tied to sight. Seeing the signs which Jesus worked leads at times to faith, as in the case of the Jews who, following the raising of Lazarus, "having seen what he did, believed in him" (Jn 11:45). At other times, faith itself leads to deeper vision: "If you believe, you will see the glory of God" (Jn 11:40). In the end, belief and sight intersect: "Whoever believes in me believes in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me" (Jn 12:44-45). Joined to hearing, seeing then becomes a form of following Christ, and faith appears as a process of gazing, in which our eyes grow accustomed to peering into the depths. Easter morning thus passes from John who, standing in the early morning darkness before the empty tomb, "saw and believed" (Jn 20:8), to Mary Magdalene who, after seeing Jesus (cf. Jn 20:14) and wanting to cling to him, is asked to contemplate him as he ascends to the Father, and finally to her full confession before the disciples: "I have seen the Lord!" (Jn 20:18).
How does one attain this synthesis between hearing and seeing? It becomes possible through the person of Christ himself, who can be seen and heard. He is the Word made flesh, whose glory we have seen (cf. Jn 1:14). The light of faith is the light of a countenance in which the Father is seen. In the Fourth Gospel, the truth which faith attains is the revelation of the Father in the Son, in his flesh and in his earthly deeds, a truth which can be defined as the "light-filled life" of Jesus.[24] This means that faith-knowledge does not direct our gaze to a purely inward truth. The truth which faith discloses to us is a truth centred on an encounter with Christ, on the contemplation of his life and on the awareness of his presence. Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks of the Apostles’ oculata fides — a faith which sees! — in the presence of the body of the Risen Lord.[25] With their own eyes they saw the risen Jesus and they believed; in a word, they were able to peer into the depths of what they were seeing and to confess their faith in the Son of God, seated at the right hand of the Father.
31. It was only in this way, by taking flesh, by sharing our humanity, that the knowledge proper to love could come to full fruition. For the light of love is born when our hearts are touched and we open ourselves to the interior presence of the beloved, who enables us to recognize his mystery. Thus we can understand why, together with hearing and seeing, Saint John can speak of faith as touch, as he says in his First Letter: "What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life" (1 Jn 1:1). By his taking flesh and coming among us, Jesus has touched us, and through the sacraments he continues to touch us even today; transforming our hearts, he unceasingly enables us to acknowledge and acclaim him as the Son of God. In faith, we can touch him and receive the power of his grace. Saint Augustine, commenting on the account of the woman suffering from haemorrhages who touched Jesus and was cured (cf. Lk 8:45-46), says: "To touch him with our hearts: that is what it means to believe".[26] The crowd presses in on Jesus, but they do not reach him with the personal touch of faith, which apprehends the mystery that he is the Son who reveals the Father. Only when we are configured to Jesus do we receive the eyes needed to see him.
The dialogue between faith and reason
32. Christian faith, inasmuch as it proclaims the truth of God’s total love and opens us to the power of that love, penetrates to the core of our human experience. Each of us comes to the light because of love, and each of us is called to love in order to remain in the light. Desirous of illumining all reality with the love of God made manifest in Jesus, and seeking to love others with that same love, the first Christians found in the Greek world, with its thirst for truth, an ideal partner in dialogue. The encounter of the Gospel message with the philosophical culture of the ancient world proved a decisive step in the evangelization of all peoples, and stimulated a fruitful interaction between faith and reason which has continued down the centuries to our own times. Blessed John Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, showed how faith and reason each strengthen the other.[27] Once we discover the full light of Christ’s love, we realize that each of the loves in our own lives had always contained a ray of that light, and we understand its ultimate destination. That fact that our human loves contain that ray of light also helps us to see how all love is meant to share in the complete self-gift of the Son of God for our sake. In this circular movement, the light of faith illumines all our human relationships, which can then be lived in union with the gentle love of Christ.
33. In the life of Saint Augustine we find a significant example of this process whereby reason, with its desire for truth and clarity, was integrated into the horizon of faith and thus gained new understanding. Augustine accepted the Greek philosophy of light, with its insistence on the importance of sight. His encounter with Neoplatonism introduced him to the paradigm of the light which, descending from on high to illumine all reality, is a symbol of God. Augustine thus came to appreciate God’s transcendence and discovered that all things have a certain transparency, that they can reflect God’s goodness. This realization liberated him from his earlier Manichaeism, which had led him to think that good and evil were in constant conflict, confused and intertwined. The realization that God is light provided Augustine with a new direction in life and enabled him to acknowledge his sinfulness and to turn towards the good.
All the same, the decisive moment in Augustine’s journey of faith, as he tells us in the Confessions, was not in the vision of a God above and beyond this world, but in an experience of hearing. In the garden, he heard a voice telling him: "Take and read". He then took up the book containing the epistles of Saint Paul and started to read the thirteenth chapter of the Letter to the Romans.[28] In this way, the personal God of the Bible appeared to him: a God who is able to speak to us, to come down to dwell in our midst and to accompany our journey through history, making himself known in the time of hearing and response.
Yet this encounter with the God who speaks did not lead Augustine to reject light and seeing. He integrated the two perspectives of hearing and seeing, constantly guided by the revelation of God’s love in Jesus. Thus Augustine developed a philosophy of light capable of embracing both the reciprocity proper to the word and the freedom born of looking to the light. Just as the word calls for a free response, so the light finds a response in the image which reflects it. Augustine can therefore associate hearing and seeing, and speak of "the word which shines forth within".[29] The light becomes, so to speak, the light of a word, because it is the light of a personal countenance, a light which, even as it enlightens us, calls us and seeks to be reflected on our faces and to shine from within us. Yet our longing for the vision of the whole, and not merely of fragments of history, remains and will be fulfilled in the end, when, as Augustine says, we will see and we will love.[30] Not because we will be able to possess all the light, which will always be inexhaustible, but because we will enter wholly into that light.
34. The light of love proper to faith can illumine the questions of our own time about truth. Truth nowadays is often reduced to the subjective authenticity of the individual, valid only for the life of the individual. A common truth intimidates us, for we identify it with the intransigent demands of totalitarian systems. But if truth is a truth of love, if it is a truth disclosed in personal encounter with the Other and with others, then it can be set free from its enclosure in individuals and become part of the common good. As a truth of love, it is not one that can be imposed by force; it is not a truth that stifles the individual. Since it is born of love, it can penetrate to the heart, to the personal core of each man and woman. Clearly, then, faith is not intransigent, but grows in respectful coexistence with others. One who believes may not be presumptuous; on the contrary, truth leads to humility, since believers know that, rather than ourselves possessing truth, it is truth which embraces and possesses us. Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a journey; it enables witness and dialogue with all.
Nor is the light of faith, joined to the truth of love, extraneous to the material world, for love is always lived out in body and spirit; the light of faith is an incarnate light radiating from the luminous life of Jesus. It also illumines the material world, trusts its inherent order and knows that it calls us to an ever widening path of harmony and understanding. The gaze of science thus benefits from faith: faith encourages the scientist to remain constantly open to reality in all its inexhaustible richness. Faith awakens the critical sense by preventing research from being satisfied with its own formulae and helps it to realize that nature is always greater. By stimulating wonder before the profound mystery of creation, faith broadens the horizons of reason to shed greater light on the world which discloses itself to scientific investigation.
Faith and the search for God
35. The light of faith in Jesus also illumines the path of all those who seek God, and makes a specifically Christian contribution to dialogue with the followers of the different religions. The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the witness of those just ones who, before the covenant with Abraham, already sought God in faith. Of Enoch "it was attested that he had pleased God" (Heb 11:5), something impossible apart from faith, for "whoever would approach God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb 11:6). We can see from this that the path of religious man passes through the acknowledgment of a God who cares for us and is not impossible to find. What other reward can God give to those who seek him, if not to let himself be found? Even earlier, we encounter Abel, whose faith was praised and whose gifts, his offering of the firstlings of his flock (cf. Heb 11:4), were therefore pleasing to God. Religious man strives to see signs of God in the daily experiences of life, in the cycle of the seasons, in the fruitfulness of the earth and in the movement of the cosmos. God is light and he can be found also by those who seek him with a sincere heart.
An image of this seeking can be seen in the Magi, who were led to Bethlehem by the star (cf. Mt 2:1-12). For them God’s light appeared as a journey to be undertaken, a star which led them on a path of discovery. The star is a sign of God’s patience with our eyes which need to grow accustomed to his brightness. Religious man is a wayfarer; he must be ready to let himself be led, to come out of himself and to find the God of perpetual surprises. This respect on God’s part for our human eyes shows us that when we draw near to God, our human lights are not dissolved in the immensity of his light, as a star is engulfed by the dawn, but shine all the more brightly the closer they approach the primordial fire, like a mirror which reflects light. Christian faith in Jesus, the one Saviour of the world, proclaims that all God’s light is concentrated in him, in his "luminous life" which discloses the origin and the end of history.[31] There is no human experience, no journey of man to God, which cannot be taken up, illumined and purified by this light. The more Christians immerse themselves in the circle of Christ’s light, the more capable they become of understanding and accompanying the path of every man and woman towards God.
Because faith is a way, it also has to do with the lives of those men and women who, though not believers, nonetheless desire to believe and continue to seek. To the extent that they are sincerely open to love and set out with whatever light they can find, they are already, even without knowing it, on the path leading to faith. They strive to act as if God existed, at times because they realize how important he is for finding a sure compass for our life in common or because they experience a desire for light amid darkness, but also because in perceiving life’s grandeur and beauty they intuit that the presence of God would make it all the more beautiful. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons tells how Abraham, before hearing God’s voice, had already sought him "in the ardent desire of his heart" and "went throughout the whole world, asking himself where God was to be found", until "God had pity on him who, all alone, had sought him in silence".[32] Any-one who sets off on the path of doing good to others is already drawing near to God, is already sustained by his help, for it is characteristic of the divine light to brighten our eyes whenever we walk towards the fullness of love.
Faith and theology
36. Since faith is a light, it draws us into itself, inviting us to explore ever more fully the horizon which it illumines, all the better to know the object of our love. Christian theology is born of this desire. Clearly, theology is impossible without faith; it is part of the very process of faith, which seeks an ever deeper understanding of God’s self-disclosure culminating in Christ. It follows that theology is more than simply an effort of human reason to analyze and understand, along the lines of the experimental sciences. God cannot be reduced to an object. He is a subject who makes himself known and perceived in an interpersonal relationship. Right faith orients reason to open itself to the light which comes from God, so that reason, guided by love of the truth, can come to a deeper knowledge of God. The great medieval theologians and teachers rightly held that theology, as a science of faith, is a participation in God’s own knowledge of himself. It is not just our discourse about God, but first and foremost the acceptance and the pursuit of a deeper understanding of the word which God speaks to us, the word which God speaks about himself, for he is an eternal dialogue of communion, and he allows us to enter into this dialogue.[33] Theology thus demands the humility to be "touched" by God, admitting its own limitations before the mystery, while striving to investigate, with the discipline proper to reason, the inexhaustible riches of this mystery.
Theology also shares in the ecclesial form of faith; its light is the light of the believing subject which is the Church. This implies, on the one hand, that theology must be at the service of the faith of Christians, that it must work humbly to protect and deepen the faith of everyone, especially ordinary believers. On the other hand, because it draws its life from faith, theology cannot consider the magisterium of the Pope and the bishops in communion with him as something extrinsic, a limitation of its freedom, but rather as one of its internal, constitutive dimensions, for the magisterium ensures our contact with the primordial source and thus provides the certainty of attaining to the word of Christ in all its integrity.
CHAPTER
THREE
I
DELIVERED TO YOU
WHAT I ALSO RECEIVED
(cf. 1 Cor 15:3)
WHAT I ALSO RECEIVED
(cf. 1 Cor 15:3)
The
Church, mother of our faith
37. Those who have
opened their hearts to
God’s love, heard his
voice and received his
light, cannot keep this
gift to themselves.
Since faith is hearing
and seeing, it is also
handed on as word and
light. Addressing the
Corinthians, Saint Paul
used these two very
images. On the one hand
he says: "But just as we
have the same spirit of
faith that is in
accordance with
scripture — ‘I believed,
and so I spoke’ — we
also believe, and so we
speak" (2 Cor
4:13). The word, once
accepted, becomes a
response, a confession
of faith, which spreads
to others and invites
them to believe. Paul
also uses the image of
light: "All of us, with
unveiled faces, seeing
the glory of the Lord as
though reflected in a
mirror, are being
transformed into the
same image" (2 Cor
3:18). It is a light
reflected from one face
to another, even as
Moses himself bore a
reflection of God’s
glory after having
spoken with him: "God…
has shone in our hearts
to give the light of the
knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of
Christ" (2 Cor
4:6). The light of
Christ shines, as in a
mirror, upon the face of
Christians; as it
spreads, it comes down
to us, so that we too
can share in that vision
and reflect that light
to others, in the same way that, in the
Easter liturgy, the light of
the paschal candle lights
countless other candles.
Faith is passed on, we might
say, by contact, from one
person to another, just as
one candle is lighted from
another. Christians, in
their poverty, plant a seed
so rich that it becomes a
great tree, capable of
filling the world with its
fruit. 38. The transmission of the faith not only brings light to men and women in every place; it travels through time, passing from one generation to another. Because faith is born of an encounter which takes place in history and lights up our journey through time, it must be passed on in every age. It is through an unbroken chain of witnesses that we come to see the face of Jesus. But how is this possible? How can we be certain, after all these centuries, that we have encountered the "real Jesus"? Were we merely isolated individuals, were our starting point simply our own individual ego seeking in itself the basis of absolutely sure knowledge, a certainty of this sort would be impossible. I cannot possibly verify for myself something which happened so long ago. But this is not the only way we attain knowledge. Persons always live in relationship. We come from others, we belong to others, and our lives are enlarged by our encounter with others. Even our own knowledge and self-awareness are relational; they are linked to others who have gone before us: in the first place, our parents, who gave us our life and our name. Language itself, the words by which we make sense of our lives and the world around us, comes to us from others, preserved in the living memory of others. Self-knowledge is only possible when we share in a greater memory. The same thing holds true for faith, which brings human understanding to its fullness. Faith’s past, that act of Jesus’ love which brought new life to the world, comes down to us through the memory of others — witnesses — and is kept alive in that one remembering subject which is the Church. The Church is a Mother who teaches us to speak the language of faith. Saint John brings this out in his Gospel by closely uniting faith and memory and associating both with the working of the Holy Spirit, who, as Jesus says, "will remind you of all that I have said to you" (Jn 14:26). The love which is the Holy Spirit and which dwells in the Church unites every age and makes us contemporaries of Jesus, thus guiding us along our pilgrimage of faith.
39. It is impossible to believe on our own. Faith is not simply an individual decision which takes place in the depths of the believer’s heart, nor a completely private relationship between the "I" of the believer and the divine "Thou", between an autonomous subject and God. By its very nature, faith is open to the "We" of the Church; it always takes place within her communion. We are reminded of this by the dialogical format of the creed used in the baptismal liturgy. Our belief is expressed in response to an invitation, to a word which must be heard and which is not my own; it exists as part of a dialogue and cannot be merely a profession originating in an individual. We can respond in the singular — "I believe" — only because we are part of a greater fellowship, only because we also say "We believe". This openness to the ecclesial "We" reflects the openness of God’s own love, which is not only a relationship between the Father and the Son, between an "I" and a "Thou", but is also, in the Spirit, a "We", a communion of persons. Here we see why those who believe are never alone, and why faith tends to spread, as it invites others to share in its joy. Those who receive faith discover that their horizons expand as new and enriching relationships come to life. Tertullian puts this well when he describes the catechumens who, "after the cleansing which gives new birth" are welcomed into the house of their mother and, as part of a new family, pray the Our Father together with their brothers and sisters.[34]
The
sacraments and the
transmission of faith
40. The Church, like
every family, passes on
to her children the
whole store of her
memories. But how does
this come about in a way
that nothing is lost,
but rather everything in
the patrimony of faith
comes to be more deeply
understood? It is
through the apostolic
Tradition preserved in
the Church with the
assistance of the Holy
Spirit that we enjoy a
living contact with the
foundational memory. What
was handed down by the
apostles — as the Second
Vatican Council states —
"comprises everything that
serves to make the people of
God live their lives in
holiness and increase their
faith. In this way the
Church, in her doctrine,
life and worship,
perpetuates and transmits to
every generation all that
she herself is, all that she
believes".[35]
Faith, in
fact, needs a setting in
which it can be witnessed to
and communicated, a means
which is suitable and
proportionate to what is
communicated. For
transmitting a purely
doctrinal content, an idea
might suffice, or perhaps a
book, or the repetition of a
spoken message. But what is
communicated in the Church,
what is handed down in her
living Tradition, is the new
light born of an encounter
with the true God, a light
which touches us at the core
of our being and engages our
minds, wills and emotions,
opening us to relationships
lived in communion. There is
a special means for passing
down this fullness, a means
capable of engaging the
entire person, body and
spirit, interior life and
relationships with others.
It is the sacraments,
celebrated in the Church’s
liturgy. The sacraments
communicate an incarnate
memory, linked to the times
and places of our lives,
linked to all our senses; in them the whole person is
engaged as a member of a
living subject and part of a
network of communitarian
relationships. While the
sacraments are indeed
sacraments of faith,[36] it can also be said that
faith itself possesses a
sacramental structure. The
awakening of faith is linked
to the dawning of a new
sacramental sense in our
lives as human beings and as
Christians, in which visible
and material realities are
seen to point beyond
themselves to the mystery of
the eternal.
41. The transmission of
faith occurs first and
foremost in baptism.
Some might think that
baptism is merely a way
of symbolizing the
confession of faith, a
pedagogical tool for
those who require images
and signs, while in
itself ultimately
unnecessary. An
observation of Saint
Paul about baptism
reminds us that this is
not the case. Paul
states that "we were
buried with him by
baptism into death, so
that, just as Christ was
raised from the dead by
the glory of the Father,
we too might walk in
newness of life" (Rom
6:4). In baptism we
become a new creation
and God’s adopted
children. The Apostle
goes on to say that
Christians have been
entrusted to a "standard
of teaching" (týpos
didachés), which
they now obey from the
heart (cf. Rom 6:17). In baptism we
receive both a teaching
to be professed and a
specific way of life
which demands the
engagement of the whole
person and sets us on
the path to goodness. Those who
are baptized are set in a
new context, entrusted to a
new environment, a new and
shared way of acting, in the
Church. Baptism makes us
see, then, that faith is not
the achievement of isolated
individuals; it is not an
act which someone can
perform on his own, but
rather something which must
be received by entering into
the ecclesial communion
which transmits God’s gift.
No one baptizes himself,
just as no one comes into
the world by himself.
Baptism is something we
receive.42. What are the elements of baptism which introduce us into this new "standard of teaching"? First, the name of the Trinity — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit — is invoked upon the catechumen. Thus, from the outset, a synthesis of the journey of faith is provided. The God who called Abraham and wished to be called his God, the God who revealed his name to Moses, the God who, in giving us his Son, revealed fully the mystery of his Name, now bestows upon the baptized a new filial identity. This is clearly seen in the act of baptism itself: immersion in water. Water is at once a symbol of death, inviting us to pass through self-conversion to a new and greater identity, and a symbol of life, of a womb in which we are reborn by following Christ in his new life. In this way, through immersion in water, baptism speaks to us of the incarnational structure of faith. Christ’s work penetrates the depths of our being and transforms us radically, making us adopted children of God and sharers in the divine nature. It thus modifies all our relationships, our place in this world and in the universe, and opens them to God’s own life of communion. This change which takes place in baptism helps us to appreciate the singular importance of the catechumenate — whereby growing numbers of adults, even in societies with ancient Christian roots, now approach the sacrament of baptism — for the new evangelization. It is the road of preparation for baptism, for the transformation of our whole life in Christ.
To
appreciate this link between
baptism and faith, we can
recall a text of the prophet
Isaiah, which was associated
with baptism in early
Christian literature: "Their
refuge will be the
fortresses of rocks… their
water assured" (Is
33:16).[37]
The baptized, rescued from
the waters of death, were
now set on a "fortress of
rock" because they had found
a firm and reliable
foundation. The waters of
death were thus transformed
into waters of life. The
Greek text, in speaking of
that water which is
"assured", uses the word
pistós, "faithful". The
waters of baptism are indeed
faithful and trustworthy,
for they flow with the power
of Christ’s love, the source
of our assurance in the
journey of life.
43. The structure of
baptism, its form as a
rebirth in which we
receive a new name and a
new life, helps us to
appreciate the meaning and
importance of infant
baptism. Children are not
capable of accepting the
faith by a free act, nor are
they yet able to profess
that faith on their own;
therefore the faith is
professed by their parents
and godparents in their
name. Since faith is a
reality lived within the
community of the Church,
part of a common "We",
children can be supported by
others, their parents and
godparents, and welcomed
into their faith, which is
the faith of the Church;
this is symbolized by the
candle which the child’s
father lights from the
paschal candle. The
structure of baptism, then,
demonstrates the critical
importance of cooperation
between Church and family in
passing on the faith.
Parents are called, as Saint
Augustine once said, not
only to bring children into
the world but also to bring
them to God, so that through
baptism they can be reborn
as children of God and
receive the gift of faith.[38] Thus, along with life,
children are given a
fundamental orientation and
assured of a good future;
this orientation will be
further strengthened in the
sacrament of Confirmation
with the seal of the Holy
Spirit. 44. The sacramental character of faith finds its highest expression in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a precious nourishment for faith: an encounter with Christ truly present in the supreme act of his love, the life-giving gift of himself. In the Eucharist we find the intersection of faith’s two dimensions. On the one hand, there is the dimension of history: the Eucharist is an act of remembrance, a making present of the mystery in which the past, as an event of death and resurrection, demonstrates its ability to open up a future, to foreshadow ultimate fulfilment. The liturgy reminds us of this by its repetition of the word hodie, the "today" of the mysteries of salvation. On the other hand, we also find the dimension which leads from the visible world to the invisible. In the Eucharist we learn to see the heights and depths of reality. The bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, who becomes present in his passover to the Father: this movement draws us, body and soul, into the movement of all creation towards its fulfilment in God.
45. In the celebration of the sacraments, the Church hands down her memory especially through the profession of faith. The creed does not only involve giving one’s assent to a body of abstract truths; rather, when it is recited the whole of life is drawn into a journey towards full communion with the living God. We can say that in the creed believers are invited to enter into the mystery which they profess and to be transformed by it. To understand what this means, let us look first at the contents of the creed. It has a trinitarian structure: the Father and the Son are united in the Spirit of love. The believer thus states that the core of all being, the inmost secret of all reality, is the divine communion. The creed also contains a christological confession: it takes us through all the mysteries of Christ’s life up to his death, resurrection and ascension into heaven before his final return in glory. It tells us that this God of communion, reciprocal love between the Father and the Son in the Spirit, is capable of embracing all of human history and drawing it into the dynamic unity of the Godhead, which has its source and fulfillment in the Father. The believer who professes his or her faith is taken up, as it were, into the truth being professed. He or she cannot truthfully recite the words of the creed without being changed, without becoming part of that history of love which embraces us and expands our being, making it part of a great fellowship, the ultimate subject which recites the creed, namely, the Church. All the truths in which we believe point to the mystery of the new life of faith as a journey of communion with the living God.
Faith,
prayer and the Decalogue
46. Two other elements
are essential in the
faithful transmission of
the Church’s memory.
First, the Lord’s
Prayer, the "Our
Father". Here Christians
learn to share in
Christ’s own spiritual
experience and to see
all things through his
eyes. From him who is
light from light, the
only-begotten Son of the
Father, we come to know God and can thus kindle
in others the desire to draw
near to him.
Similarly
important is the link
between faith and the
Decalogue. Faith, as we have
said, takes the form of a
journey, a path to be
followed, which begins with
an encounter with the living
God. It is in the light of
faith, of complete
entrustment to the God who
saves, that the Ten
Commandments take on their
deepest truth, as seen in
the words which introduce
them: "I am the Lord your
God, who brought you out of
the land of Egypt" (Ex
20:2). The Decalogue is
not a set of negative
commands, but concrete
directions for emerging from
the desert of the selfish
and self-enclosed ego in
order to enter into dialogue
with God, to be embraced by
his mercy and then to bring
that mercy to others. Faith
thus professes the love of
God, origin and upholder of
all things, and lets itself
be guided by this love in
order to journey towards the
fullness of communion with
God. The Decalogue appears
as the path of gratitude,
the response of love, made
possible because in faith we
are receptive to the
experience of God’s
transforming love for us.
And this path receives new
light from Jesus’ teaching
in the Sermon on the Mount
(cf. Mt 5-7).
These,
then, are the four elements
which comprise the
storehouse of memory which
the Church hands down: the
profession of faith, the
celebration of the
sacraments, the path of the
ten commandments, and
prayer. The Church’s
catechesis has traditionally
been structured around these
four elements; this includes
the Catechism of
the
Catholic Church, which
is a fundamental aid for
that unitary act with which
the Church communicates the
entire content of her faith:
"all that she herself is,
and all that she
believes".[39]
The unity
and integrity of faith
47. The unity of the
Church in time and space
is linked to the unity
of the faith: "there is
one body and one Spirit…
one faith" (Eph
4:4-5). These days we
can imagine a group of
people being united in a
common cause, in mutual
affection, in sharing
the same destiny and a
single purpose. But we
find it hard to conceive
of a unity in one truth.
We tend to think that a
unity of this sort is
incompatible with
freedom of thought and
personal autonomy. Yet
the experience of love
shows us that a common
vision is possible, for
through love we learn
how to see reality
through the eyes of
others, not as something
which impoverishes but
instead enriches our
vision. Genuine love,
after the fashion of
God’s love, ultimately
requires truth, and the
shared contemplation of
the truth which is Jesus
Christ enables love to
become deep and
enduring. This is also
the great joy of faith:
a unity of vision in one
body and one spirit.
Saint Leo the Great
could say: "If faith is
not one, then it is not
faith".[40]
What is
the secret of this unity?
Faith is "one", in the first
place, because of the
oneness of the God who is
known and confessed. All the
articles of faith speak of
God; they are ways to know
him and his works.
Consequently, their unity is
far superior to any possible
construct of human reason.
They possess a unity which
enriches us because it is
given to us and makes us
one.
Faith is
also one because it is
directed to the one Lord, to
the life of Jesus, to the
concrete history which he
shares with us. Saint
Irenaeus of Lyons made this
clear in his struggle
against Gnosticism. The
Gnostics held that there are
two kinds of faith: a crude,
imperfect faith suited to
the masses, which remained
at the level of Jesus’ flesh
and the contemplation of his
mysteries; and a deeper,
perfect faith reserved to a
small circle of initiates
who were intellectually
capable of rising above the
flesh of Jesus towards the
mysteries of the unknown
divinity. In opposition to
this claim, which even today
exerts a certain attraction
and has its followers, Saint
Irenaeus insisted that there
is but one faith, for it is
grounded in the concrete
event of the incarnation and
can never transcend the
flesh and history of Christ,
inasmuch as God willed to
reveal himself fully in that
flesh. For this reason, he
says, there is no difference
in the faith of "those able
to discourse of it at
length" and "those who speak
but little", between the
greater and the less: the
first cannot increase the
faith, nor the second
diminish it.[41]
Finally,
faith is one because it is
shared by the whole Church,
which is one body and one
Spirit. In the communion of
the one subject which is the
Church, we receive a common
gaze. By professing the same
faith, we stand firm on the
same rock, we are
transformed by the same
Spirit of love, we radiate
one light and we have a
single insight into reality.
48. Since faith is one,
it must be professed in
all its purity and
integrity. Precisely
because all the articles
of faith are
interconnected, to deny
one of them, even of
those that seem least
important, is tantamount
to distorting the whole.
Each period of history
can find this or that
point of faith easier or
harder to accept: hence
the need for vigilance
in ensuring that the
deposit of faith is
passed on in its
entirety (cf. 1 Tim
6:20) and that all
aspects of the
profession of faith are
duly emphasized. Indeed,
inasmuch as the unity of
faith is the unity of
the Church, to subtract
something from the faith
is to subtract something
from the veracity of
communion. The Fathers
described faith as a
body, the body of truth
composed of various
members, by analogy with
the body of Christ and
its prolongation in the
Church.[42]
The integrity
of the faith was also
tied to the image of the
Church as a virgin and
her fidelity in love for
Christ her spouse;
harming the faith means
harming communion with
the Lord.[43]
The unity of faith, then, is the
unity of a living body; this
was clearly brought out by
Blessed John Henry Newman
when he listed among the
characteristic notes for
distinguishing the
continuity of doctrine over
time its power to assimilate
everything that it meets in
the various settings in
which it becomes present and
in the diverse cultures
which it encounters,[44] purifying all things and
bringing them to their
finest expression. Faith is
thus shown to be universal,
catholic, because its light
expands in order to illumine
the entire cosmos and all of
history.49. As a service to the unity of faith and its integral transmission, the Lord gave his Church the gift of apostolic succession. Through this means, the continuity of the Church’s memory is ensured and certain access can be had to the wellspring from which faith flows. The assurance of continuity with the origins is thus given by living persons, in a way consonant with the living faith which the Church is called to transmit. She depends on the fidelity of witnesses chosen by the Lord for this task. For this reason, the magisterium always speaks in obedience to the prior word on which faith is based; it is reliable because of its trust in the word which it hears, preserves and expounds.[45] In Saint Paul’s farewell discourse to the elders of Ephesus at Miletus, which Saint Luke recounts for us in the Acts of the Apostles, he testifies that he had carried out the task which the Lord had entrusted to him of "declaring the whole counsel of God" (Acts 20:27). Thanks to the Church’s magisterium, this counsel can come to us in its integrity, and with it the joy of being able to follow it fully.
CHAPTER
FOUR
GOD
PREPARES A CITY FOR THEM
(cf. Heb 11:16)
(cf. Heb 11:16)
Faith and
the common good
50. In presenting the
story of the patriarchs
and the righteous men
and women of the Old
Testament, the Letter to
the Hebrews highlights
an essential aspect of
their faith. That faith
is not only presented as
a journey, but also as a
process of building, the
preparing of a place in
which human beings can
dwell together with one
another. The first
builder was Noah who
saved his family in the
ark (Heb 11:7).
Then comes Abraham, of
whom it is said that by
faith he dwelt in tents,
as he looked forward to
the city with firm
foundations (cf. Heb
11:9-10). With faith
comes a new reliability,
a new firmness, which
God alone can give. If
the man of faith finds
support in the God of
fidelity, the God who is
Amen (cf. Is 65:16), and thus becomes
firm himself, we can now
also say that firmness
of faith marks the city
which God is preparing
for mankind. Faith
reveals just how firm
the bonds between people
can be when God is
present in their midst.
Faith does not merely
grant interior firmness,
a steadfast conviction
on the part of the
believer; it also sheds
light on every human
relationship because it
is born of love and
reflects God’s own love.
The God who is himself
reliable gives us a city
which is reliable.51. Precisely because it is linked to love (cf. Gal 5:6), the light of faith is concretely placed at the service of justice, law and peace. Faith is born of an encounter with God’s primordial love, wherein the meaning and goodness of our life become evident; our life is illumined to the extent that it enters into the space opened by that love, to the extent that it becomes, in other words, a path and praxis leading to the fullness of love. The light of faith is capable of enhancing the richness of human relations, their ability to endure, to be trustworthy, to enrich our life together. Faith does not draw us away from the world or prove irrelevant to the concrete concerns of the men and women of our time. Without a love which is trustworthy, nothing could truly keep men and women united. Human unity would be conceivable only on the basis of utility, on a calculus of conflicting interests or on fear, but not on the goodness of living together, not on the joy which the mere presence of others can give. Faith makes us appreciate the architecture of human relationships because it grasps their ultimate foundation and definitive destiny in God, in his love, and thus sheds light on the art of building; as such it becomes a service to the common good. Faith is truly a good for everyone; it is a common good. Its light does not simply brighten the interior of the Church, nor does it serve solely to build an eternal city in the hereafter; it helps us build our societies in such a way that they can journey towards a future of hope. The Letter to the Hebrews offers an example in this regard when it names, among the men and women of faith, Samuel and David, whose faith enabled them to "administer justice" (Heb 11:33). This expression refers to their justice in governance, to that wisdom which brings peace to the people (cf. 1 Sam 12:3-5; 2 Sam 8:15). The hands of faith are raised up to heaven, even as they go about building in charity a city based on relationships in which the love of God is laid as a foundation.
Faith and
the family
52. In Abraham’s journey
towards the future city,
the Letter to the
Hebrews mentions the
blessing which was
passed on from fathers
to sons (cf. Heb 11:20-21). The first
setting in which faith
enlightens the human
city is the family. I
think first and foremost
of the stable union of
man and woman in
marriage. This union is
born of their love, as a
sign and presence of
God’s own love, and of
the acknowledgment and
acceptance of the
goodness of sexual
differentiation, whereby
spouses can become one
flesh (cf. Gen 2:24) and are enabled to
give birth to a new
life, a manifestation of
the Creator’s goodness,
wisdom and loving plan.
Grounded in this love, a
man and a woman can
promise each other
mutual love in a gesture
which engages their
entire lives and mirrors
many features of faith.
Promising love for ever
is possible when we
perceive a plan bigger
than our own ideas and
undertakings, a plan
which sustains us and
enables us to surrender our
future entirely to the one
we love. Faith also helps us
to grasp in all its depth
and richness the begetting
of children, as a sign of
the love of the Creator who
entrusts us with the mystery
of a new person. So it was
that Sarah, by faith, became
a mother, for she trusted in
God’s fidelity to his
promise (cf. Heb
11:11).53. In the family, faith accompanies every age of life, beginning with childhood: children learn to trust in the love of their parents. This is why it is so important that within their families parents encourage shared expressions of faith which can help children gradually to mature in their own faith. Young people in particular, who are going through a period in their lives which is so complex, rich and important for their faith, ought to feel the constant closeness and support of their families and the Church in their journey of faith. We have all seen, during World Youth Days, the joy that young people show in their faith and their desire for an ever more solid and generous life of faith. Young people want to live life to the fullest. Encountering Christ, letting themselves be caught up in and guided by his love, enlarges the horizons of existence, gives it a firm hope which will not disappoint. Faith is no refuge for the fainthearted, but something which enhances our lives. It makes us aware of a magnificent calling, the vocation of love. It assures us that this love is trustworthy and worth embracing, for it is based on God’s faithfulness which is stronger than our every weakness.
A light
for life in society
54. Absorbed and
deepened in the family,
faith becomes a light
capable of illumining
all our relationships in
society. As an
experience of the mercy
of God the Father, it
sets us on the path of
brotherhood. Modernity
sought to build a
universal brotherhood
based on equality, yet
we gradually came to
realize that this
brotherhood, lacking a
reference to a common
Father as its ultimate
foundation, cannot
endure. We need to
return to the true basis
of brotherhood. The
history of faith has
been from the beginning
a history of brotherhood,
albeit not without
conflict. God calls
Abraham to go forth from
his land and promises to
make of him a great
nation, a great people
on whom the divine
blessing rests (cf. Gen
12:1-3). As
salvation history
progresses, it becomes
evident that God wants
to make everyone share
as brothers and sisters
in that one blessing,
which attains its
fullness in Jesus, so
that all may be one. The
boundless love of our
Father also comes to us,
in Jesus, through our
brothers and sisters.
Faith teaches us to see
that every man and woman
represents a blessing
for me, that the light
of God’s face shines on
me through the faces of
my brothers and sisters.
How many
benefits has the gaze of
Christian
faith brought to the city of
men for their common life!
Thanks to faith we have come
to understand the unique
dignity of each person,
something which was not
clearly seen in antiquity.
In the second century the
pagan Celsus
reproached Christians for an
idea that he considered
foolishness and delusion:
namely, that God created the
world for man, setting human
beings at the pinnacle of
the entire cosmos. "Why
claim that [grass] grows for
the benefit of man, rather
than for that of the most
savage of the brute beasts?"[46]
"If we look down to Earth
from the heights of heaven,
would there really be any
difference between our
activities and those of the
ants and bees?"[47] At the heart of biblical faith is
God’s love, his concrete
concern for every person,
and his plan of salvation
which embraces all of
humanity and all creation,
culminating in the
incarnation, death and
resurrection of Jesus
Christ. Without insight into
these realities, there is no
criterion for discerning
what makes human life
precious and unique. Man
loses his place in the
universe, he is cast adrift
in nature, either renouncing
his proper moral
responsibility or else
presuming to be a sort of
absolute judge, endowed with
an unlimited power to
manipulate the world around
him.
55. Faith, on the other
hand, by revealing the
love of God the Creator,
enables us to respect
nature all the more, and
to discern in it a
grammar written by the
hand of God and a
dwelling place entrusted
to our protection and
care. Faith also helps
us to devise models of
development which are
based not simply on
utility and profit, but consider creation
as a gift for which we are
all indebted; it teaches us
to create just forms of
government, in the
realization that authority
comes from God and is meant
for the service of the
common good. Faith likewise
offers the possibility of
forgiveness, which so often
demands time and effort,
patience and commitment.
Forgiveness is possible once
we discover that goodness is
always prior to and more
powerful than evil, and that
the word with which God
affirms our life is deeper
than our every denial. From
a purely anthropological
standpoint, unity is
superior to conflict; rather
than avoiding conflict, we
need to confront it in an
effort to resolve and move
beyond it, to make it a link
in a chain, as part of a
progress towards unity.
When
faith is weakened, the
foundations of humanity also
risk being weakened, as the
poet T.S. Eliot warned: "Do
you need to be told that
even those modest
attainments / As you can
boast in the way of polite
society / Will hardly
survive the Faith to which
they owe their significance?"[48] If we remove faith in God
from our cities, mutual
trust would be weakened, we
would remain united only by
fear and our stability would
be threatened. In the Letter
to the Hebrews we read that
"God is not ashamed to be
called their God; indeed, he
has prepared a city for them"
(Heb 11:16). Here the
expression "is not ashamed" is
associated with public
acknowledgment. The
intention is to say that
God, by his concrete
actions, makes a public
avowal that he is present in
our midst and that he
desires to solidify every
human relationship. Could it
be the case, instead, that
we are the ones who are
ashamed to call God our God?
That we are the ones who
fail to confess him as such
in our public life, who fail
to propose the grandeur of
the life in common which he
makes possible? Faith
illumines life and society.
If it possesses a creative
light for each new moment of
history, it is because it
sets every event in
relationship to the origin
and destiny of all things in
the Father.
Consolation and strength
amid suffering
56. Writing to the
Christians of Corinth
about his sufferings and
tribulations, Saint Paul
links his faith to his
preaching of the Gospel.
In himself he sees
fulfilled the passage of
Scripture which reads:
"I believed, and so I
spoke" (2 Cor
4:13). The reference is
to a verse of Psalm 116,
in which the psalmist
exclaims: "I kept my
faith, even when I said,
‘I am greatly
afflicted’" (v. 10). To
speak of faith often
involves speaking of
painful testing, yet it
is precisely in such
testing that Paul sees
the most convincing
proclamation of the
Gospel, for it is in
weakness and suffering
that we discover God’s
power which triumphs
over our weakness and
suffering. The apostle
himself experienced a
dying which would become
life for Christians (cf.
2 Cor 4:7-12). In
the hour of trial faith brings light,
while suffering and weakness
make it evident that "we do
not proclaim ourselves; we
proclaim Jesus Christ as
Lord" (2 Cor 4:5).
The eleventh chapter of the
Letter to the Hebrews
concludes with a reference
to those who suffered for
their faith (cf. Heb
11:35-38); outstanding among
these was Moses, who
suffered abuse for the
Christ (cf. v. 26).
Christians know that
suffering cannot be
eliminated, yet it can have
meaning and become an act of
love and entrustment into
the hands of God who does
not abandon us; in this way
it can serve as a moment of
growth in faith and love. By
contemplating Christ’s union
with the Father even at the
height of his sufferings on
the cross (cf. Mk
15:34), Christians learn to
share in the same gaze of
Jesus. Even death is
illumined and can be
experienced as the ultimate
call to faith, the ultimate
"Go forth from your land" (Gen
12:1), the ultimate
"Come!" spoken by the
Father, to whom we abandon
ourselves in the confidence
that he will keep us
steadfast even in our final
passage.57. Nor does the light of faith make us forget the sufferings of this world. How many men and women of faith have found mediators of light in those who suffer! So it was with Saint Francis of Assisi and the leper, or with Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and her poor. They understood the mystery at work in them. In drawing near to the suffering, they were certainly not able to eliminate all their pain or to explain every evil. Faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey. To those who suffer, God does not provide arguments which explain everything; rather, his response is that of an accompanying presence, a history of goodness which touches every story of suffering and opens up a ray of light. In Christ, God himself wishes to share this path with us and to offer us his gaze so that we might see the light within it. Christ is the one who, having endured suffering, is "the pioneer and perfecter of our faith" (Heb 12:2).
Suffering reminds us that faith’s service to the common good is always one of hope — a hope which looks ever ahead in the knowledge that only from God, from the future which comes from the risen Jesus, can our society find solid and lasting foundations. In this sense faith is linked to hope, for even if our dwelling place here below is wasting away, we have an eternal dwelling place which God has already prepared in Christ, in his body (cf. 2 Cor 4:16-5:5). The dynamic of faith, hope and charity (cf. 1 Th 1:3; 1 Cor 13:13) thus leads us to embrace the concerns of all men and women on our journey towards that city "whose architect and builder is God" (Heb 11:10), for "hope does not disappoint" (Rom 5:5).
In union
with faith and charity, hope
propels us towards a sure
future, set against a
different horizon with
regard to the illusory
enticements of the
idols of this world yet
granting new momentum and
strength to our daily lives.
Let us refuse to be robbed
of hope, or to allow our
hope to be dimmed by facile
answers and solutions which
block our progress,
"fragmenting" time and
changing it into space. Time
is always much greater than
space. Space hardens
processes, whereas time
propels towards the future
and encourages us to go
forward in hope.
Blessed
is she who believed
(Lk 1:45)58. In the parable of the sower, Saint Luke has left us these words of the Lord about the "good soil": "These are the ones who when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience endurance" (Lk 8:15). In the context of Luke’s Gospel, this mention of an honest and good heart which hears and keeps the word is an implicit portrayal of the faith of the Virgin Mary. The evangelist himself speaks of Mary’s memory, how she treasured in her heart all that she had heard and seen, so that the word could bear fruit in her life. The Mother of the Lord is the perfect icon of faith; as Saint Elizabeth would say: "Blessed is she who believed" (Lk 1:45).
In Mary,
the Daughter of Zion, is
fulfilled the
long history of faith of the
Old Testament, with its
account of so many faithful
women, beginning with Sarah:
women who, alongside the
patriarchs, were those in
whom God’s promise was
fulfilled and new life
flowered. In the fullness
of time, God’s word was
spoken to Mary and she
received that word into her
heart, her entire being, so
that in her womb it could
take flesh and be born as
light for humanity. Saint
Justin Martyr, in his
dialogue with Trypho, uses a
striking expression; he
tells us that Mary,
receiving the message of the
angel, conceived "faith and
joy".[49] In the Mother of
Jesus, faith demonstrated
its fruitfulness; when our
own spiritual lives bear
fruit we become filled with
joy, which is the clearest
sign of faith’s grandeur. In
her own life Mary completed
the pilgrimage of faith,
following in the footsteps
of her Son.[50] In her the
faith journey of the Old
Testament was thus taken up
into the following of
Christ, transformed by him
and entering into the gaze
of the incarnate Son of God.
59. We can say that in
the Blessed Virgin Mary
we find something I
mentioned earlier,
namely that the believer
is completely taken up
into his or her
confession of faith.
Because of her close
bond with Jesus, Mary is
strictly connected to
what we believe. As
Virgin and Mother, Mary
offers us a clear sign
of Christ’s divine
sonship. The eternal
origin of Christ is in
the Father. He is the
Son in a total and
unique sense, and so he
is born in time without
the intervention of a man. As the Son, Jesus
brings to the world a new
beginning and a new light,
the fullness of God’s
faithful love bestowed on
humanity. But Mary’s true
motherhood also ensures for
the Son of God an authentic
human history, true flesh in
which he would die on the
cross and rise from the
dead. Mary would accompany
Jesus to the cross (cf.
Jn 19:25), whence her
motherhood would extend to
each of his disciples (cf.
Jn 19:26-27). She
will also be present in the
upper room after Jesus’
resurrection and ascension,
joining the apostles in
imploring the gift of the
Spirit (cf. Acts
1:14). The movement of love
between Father, Son and
Spirit runs through our
history, and Christ draws us
to himself in order to save
us (cf. Jn 12:32). At
the centre of our faith is
the confession of Jesus, the
Son of God, born of a woman,
who brings us, through the
gift of the Holy Spirit, to
adoption as sons and
daughters (cf. Gal
4:4).60. Let us turn in prayer to Mary, Mother of the Church and Mother of our faith.
Mother, help our faith!
Open our ears to hear God’s word and to recognize his voice and call.
Awaken in us a desire to follow in his footsteps, to go forth from our own land and to receive his promise.
Help us to be touched by his love, that we may touch him in faith.
Help us to entrust ourselves fully to him and to believe in his love, especially at times of trial, beneath the shadow of the cross, when our faith is called to mature.
Sow in our faith the joy of the Risen One.
Remind us that those who believe are never alone.
Teach us to see all things with the eyes of Jesus, that he may be light for our path. And may this light of faith always increase in us, until the dawn of that undying day which is Christ himself, your Son, our Lord!
Given in
Rome, at Saint Peter’s, on
29 June, the Solemnity of
the Holy Apostles Peter and
Paul, in the year 2013, the
first of my pontificate.
FRANCISCUS
[1] Dialogus cum Tryphone Iudaeo, 121, 2: PG 6, 758.
[2] Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, IX: PG 8, 195.
[3] Brief an Elisabeth Nietzsche (11 June 1865), in: Werke in drei Bänden, München, 1954, 953ff.
[4] Paradiso XXIV, 145-147.
[5] Acta Sanctorum, Junii, I, 21.
[6] "Though the Council does not expressly deal with faith, it speaks of it on every page, it recognizes its living, supernatural character, it presumes it to be full and strong, and it bases its teachings on it. It is sufficient to recall the Council’s statements… to see the essential importance which the Council, in line with the doctrinal tradition of the Church, attributes to faith, the true faith, which has its source in Christ, and the magisterium of the Church for its channel" (Paul VI, General Audience [8 March 1967]: Insegnamenti V [1967], 705).
[7] Cf., for example, First Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith Dei Filius, Ch. 3: DS 3008-3020; Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 5: Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nos. 153-165.
[8] Cf. Catechesis V, 1: PG 33, 505A.
[9] In Psal. 32, II, s. I, 9: PL 36, 284.
[10] M. Buber, Die Erzählungen der Chassidim, Zürich, 1949, 793.
[11] Émile, Paris, 1966, 387.
[12] Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, Lausanne, 1993, 110.
[13] Cf. In Ioh. Evang., 45, 9: PL 35, 1722-1723.
[14] Part II, IV.
[15] De Continentia, 4, 11: PL 40, 356.
[16] "Vom Wesen katholischer Weltanschauung" (1923), in Unterscheidung des Christlichen. Gesammelte Studien 1923-1963, Mainz, 1963, 24.
[17] XI, 30, 40: PL 32, 825.
[18] Cf. ibid., 825-826.
[19] Cf. Vermischte Bemerkungen / Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright, Oxford, 1991, 32-33; 61-64.
[20] Homiliae in Evangelia, II, 27, 4: PL 76, 1207.
[21] Cf. Expositio super Cantica Canticorum, XVIII, 88: CCL, Continuatio Mediaevalis 87, 67.
[22] Ibid., XIX, 90: CCL, Continuatio Mediaevalis 87, 69.
[23] "The obedience of faith (Rom 16:26; compare Rom 1:5, 2 Cor 10:5-6) must be our response to the God who reveals. By faith one freely submits oneself entirely to God making the full submission of intellect and will to God who reveals, and willingly assenting to the revelation given by God. For this faith to be accorded, we need the grace of God, anticipating it and assisting it, as well as the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, and opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth. The same Holy Spirit constantly perfects faith by his gifts, so that revelation may be more and more deeply understood" (Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 5).
[24] Cf. H. Schlier, Meditationen über den Johanneischen Begriff der Wahrheit, in Besinnung auf das Neue Testament. Exegetische Aufsätze und Vorträge 2, Freiburg, Basel, Wien, 1959, 272.
[25] Cf. S. Th. III, q. 55, a. 2, ad 1.
[26] Sermo 229/L (Guelf. 14), 2 (Miscellanea Augustiniana 1, 487/488): "Tangere autem corde, hoc est credere".
[27] Cf. Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio (14 September 1998), 73: AAS (1999), 61-62.
[28] Cf. Confessiones, VIII, 12, 29: PL 32, 762.
[29] De Trinitate, XV, 11, 20: PL 42, 1071: "verbum quod intus lucet ".
[30] Cf. De Civitate Dei, XXII, 30, 5: PL 41, 804.
[31] Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Dominus Iesus (6 August 2000), 15: AAS 92 (2000), 756.
[32] Demonstratio Apostolicae Predicationis, 24: SC 406, 117.
[33] Cf. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, prol.: Opera Omnia, V, Quaracchi 1891, 201; In I Sent., proem, q. 1, resp.: Opera Omnia, I, Quaracchi 1891, 7; Thomas Aquinas, S. Th I, q.1.
[34] Cf. De Baptismo, 20, 5: CCL 1, 295.
[35] Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 8.
[36] Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, 59.
[37] Cf. Epistula Barnabae, 11, 5: SC 172, 162.
[38] Cf. De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia I, 4, 5: PL 44, 413: "Habent quippe intentionem generandi regenerandos, ut qui ex eis saeculi filii nascuntur in Dei filios renascantur".
[39] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 8.
[40] In Nativitate Domini Sermo, 4, 6: SC 22, 110.
[41] Cf. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I, 10, 2: SC 264, 160.
[42] Cf. ibid., II, 27, 1: SC 294, 264.
[43] Cf. Augustine, De Sancta Virginitate, 48, 48: PL 40, 424-425: "Servatur et in fide inviolata quaedam castitas virginalis, qua Ecclesia uni viro virgo casta coaptatur".
[44] Cf. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Uniform Edition: Longmans, Green and Company, London, 1868-1881), 185-189.
[45] Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 10.
[46] Origen, Contra Celsum, IV, 75: SC 136, 372.
[47] Ibid., 85: SC 136, 394.
[48] "Choruses from The Rock", in The Collected Poems and Plays 1909-1950, New York, 1980, 106.
[49] Cf. Dialogus cum Tryphone Iudaeo, 100, 5: PG 6, 710.
[50] Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 58.
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