Copyright © 2006 By Doug Lawrence. All Rights Reserved.
Catechism Of The Catholic Church Reprinted With Permission.
- 25 -
God’s Truth From
The Catechism Of The Catholic Church
ARTICLE 2
WE BELIEVE
166 Faith is a personal act - the free response of the human person to the initiative of God who
reveals himself. But faith is not an isolated act. No one can believe alone, just as no one can live
alone. You have not given yourself faith as you have not given yourself life. The believer has
received faith from others and should hand it on to others. Our love for Jesus and for our neighbor
impels us to speak to others about our faith. Each believer is thus a link in the great chain of
believers. I cannot believe without being carried by the faith of others, and by my faith I help
support others in the faith.
167 "I believe" (Apostles' Creed) is the faith of the Church professed personally by each believer,
principally during Baptism. "We believe" (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) is the faith of the
Church confessed by the bishops assembled in council or more generally by the liturgical assembly
of believers. "I believe" is also the Church, our mother, responding to God by faith as she teaches
us to say both "I believe" and "We believe".
I. "LORD, LOOK UPON THE FAITH OF YOUR CHURCH"
168 It is the Church that believes first, and so bears, nourishes and sustains my faith. Everywhere,
it is the Church that first confesses the Lord: "Throughout the world the holy Church acclaims you",
as we sing in the hymn "Te Deum"; with her and in her, we are won over and brought to confess: "I
believe", "We believe". It is through the Church that we receive faith and new life in Christ by
Baptism. In the Rituale Romanum, the minister of Baptism asks the catechumen: "What do you ask
of God's Church?" And the answer is: "Faith." "What does faith offer you?" "Eternal life."
54
169 Salvation comes from God alone; but because we receive the life of faith through the Church,
she is our mother: "We believe the Church as the mother of our new birth, and not in the Church as
if she were the author of our salvation."
55
Because she is our mother, she is also our teacher in the
faith.
II. THE LANGUAGE OF FAITH
170 We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to
touch. "The believer's act [of faith] does not terminate in the propositions, but in the realities [which
they express]."
56
All the same, we do approach these realities with the help of formulations of the
faith which permit us to express the faith and to hand it on, to celebrate it in community, to
assimilate and live on it more and more.
171 The Church, "the pillar and bulwark of the truth", faithfully guards "the faith which was once for
all delivered to the saints". She guards the memory of Christ's words; it is she who from generation
to generation hands on the apostles' confession of faith.
57
As a mother who teaches her children to
speak and so to understand and communicate, the Church our Mother teaches us the language of
faith in order to introduce us to the understanding and the life of faith.
III. ONLY ONE FAITH
172 Through the centuries, in so many languages, cultures, peoples and nations, the Church has
constantly confessed this one faith, received from the one Lord, transmitted by one Baptism, and
grounded in the conviction that all people have only one God and Father.
58
St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a
witness of this faith, declared:
 |
 |
 |