KNOW YOUR FAITH! (UNDERSTAND YOUR “CATHOLICH FAITH”) By Malachy Jude

INTRODUCTION

 

To live the Catholic Christian life, you need to know the faith. You need to embrace it. You need to live it. You need to be ready at all time to defend it (cf. 1Pt. 3:15) because, as recorded in the scriptures, the last days will be full of defection from the faith to adhere to deceitful doctrines led by lying hypocrites (cf. 1Tim. 4:1-2) .  Before we go further, however, some explanation should be made of why we speak of losing the Catholic faith. Strictly speaking no Catholic loses the faith. To lose something is to be deprived of something you possess without intending the loss. We use the expression “losing the faith” only as a loose expression for something which never really takes place. What then do we mean when we say that persons lose their faith? We mean that they have abandoned their faith. You do not lose anything deliberately. It is the Church’s infallible teaching that once a person was baptized in the Catholic Church and had even basic instruction in the true faith, he does not lose the Catholic faith. We have to say he abandons it. What does this mean? It means that Catholics who abandon their faith do so culpably. They are responsible before God for giving up the treasure of their commitment to the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ.

There must be a reason for this sobering judgment. There are two reasons. The first is that there are no rational grounds for giving up one’s belief in the truths revealed by God and taught by the Catholic Church for two thousand years. The second reason is that God will never be wanting with His grace to sustain a professed believer in the Catholic religion.

All of this was a prelude to our principal focus, that we must understand our Catholic faith or risk the prospect of losing it. Recall the parable of the sower as described by Our Lord in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The sower went out to sow his seed. It was all good seed. But it was not all good ground on which the seed fell. There were four kinds of ground, and only the last soil produced any yield. The first ground on which the seed fell was the pathway. It was hard ground and the seed remained on the surface, just long enough for the birds of the air to come along and eat up all the seed that had been sown (cf. Mt. 13:4-8). When the disciples asked Jesus to explain the parable, He told them, “When anyone hears the words of the Kingdom without understanding, the evil one comes and carries off what was sown in his heart” (Mt. 13:19). There we have it! It is both that simple and that tragic. The revealed truth has been sown into our hearts at baptism. But that was only the beginning. We must do everything in our power to understand what we believe. Otherwise the devil will come along and steal the faith from our hearts.

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

What does it mean to know? It means to be aware of (something) through observation, inquiry or information. It is true that when you are ignorant, you oppose the faith (cf. 1Tim. 1:13). However, it is not the case to hear about your faith and not grasp knowledge of the truth (cf. 2Tim. 3:7-8).

WHAT IS FAITH?

Faith can be said to mean, the assent of the intellect to everything which God has revealed. This in conjunction with the definition of Faith given in the mini-catechism book as, a supernatural gift of God which enable us to believe without doubting whatever God has revealed; makes it clear that “faith” drives away doubt from the unset and brings in awareness, total submission and adherence to the will of God, and the teachings of Christ (passed on to us by the apostles).

UNDERSTAND YOUR CATHOLIC FAITH OR LOSE IT!

What do we mean by understanding the faith? We mean growing in our grasp of what we believe. The core of God’s revelation is the mysteries which He has shared with the human race. By definition, a Christian mystery is something which cannot be rationally conceived before revelation, or fully comprehended even after being revealed. Such are the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the Seven Sacraments. Such too are the mysteries of God’s creating the world out of nothing, His infinite love even to dying on the Cross for our salvation, His teaching on the indissolubility of Christian matrimony, His command that we love one another as a condition for a heavenly destiny, His prohibition of sexual experience outside of marriage, His promise of heavenly beatitude if we serve Him faithfully and His warning of everlasting loss of happiness if we reject His merciful love. It is one thing to believe these mysteries. It is something else to grasp them. Concretely this can be expressed in several words. We grow in our faith by making our faith: more intelligible, clearer, more certain, more effective, and more apostolic. Each of these five qualities is part of what we are calling growth in knowing the faith we profess.

More Intelligible: What we believe are mysteries which only God fully understands. Even an eternity in heaven will not give us a complete grasp of these revealed truths. However, it is one thing to say that we cannot comprehend, which means fully understand; it is something else to say that we cannot understand what we believe. To grow in our knowledge and understanding of the faith means to make it more meaningful, more deeply grasped, and more real in our lives. Take the mystery of the Real Presence. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Protestants who separated from the Catholic Church had no less than two hundred interpretations of Our Lord’s words at the Last Supper, “This is my body – This is my blood.” There is only one meaning to the Real Presence. It is Jesus Christ. It is the Son of God who became the son of Mary, who died on Calvary, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is now on earth in every tabernacle of every Catholic Church in the world. When we receive the Holy Eucharist, Jesus Christ is in our bodies no less than he was in the womb of His blessed Mother the moment she conceived Him at Nazareth.

Clearer: Growing in the knowledge of our faith also means growing in the clearness of our understanding of the mysteries that we believe. Take such a truth as sin, which we believe incurs guilt before God. What a difference it makes to know that sin is the source of guilt and know what guilt really is. The Catholic Church has no doubt in this matter. Guilt means the loss of God’s grace. Every sin we commit always deprives us, in greater or less measure of the grace we possessed before we had sinned. On these terms, mortal sin is a loss of sanctifying grace that we need to reach heaven. Venial sin is a loss of more or less of God’s friendship, without losing the title to eternal glory. Moreover, every sin carries with it a debt of suffering which is incurred. Mortal sin deserves eternal separation from God. Venial sin deserves a greater or less degree of what we call temporal punishment. Most people simply take for granted that sin is sin. Our Catholic faith tells us that God became man precisely to teach us what is right and what is wrong; what is virtue and what is vice. If there is one area of faith that we must grow in understanding it is how we are to use our wills in obedience to the will of God.

More Certain: To be certain means to be sure that something is true. Thus I am certain that I exist. I am certain that I live. I am certain that if I want people to love me, I must love them. Is it possible for a person to believe that sacramental, consummated marriage cannot be dissolved by any human power on earth, and yet not be absolutely certain that this is true? Not only is it possible but, this is one of the basic reasons for so many professed Catholics getting divorces and soliciting annulments. They have not been absolutely convinced of Christ’s teaching that two Christians who marry become two in one flesh and have His own guarantee of grace to persevere in marital fidelity until death.

More Effective: Our faith is not only a virtue in the mind. We define faith as the assent of the intellect to everything which God has revealed. But that is not enough. We are to put our faith into practice. We are to make it effective in our moral lives. As Catholics, we recognize the bishop of Rome as the Vicar of Christ. We believe that he has supreme authority to preserve and explain Christ’s teaching for all times. At the same time, what do we see? We see the authority of the Holy Father widely ignored, even openly rejected in circles that are professedly Catholic. We are saying that our faith must become more effective. This is not rhetoric. It is plain reality. Why? Because it requires humility of mind to believe and humility of will to do what we believe is the will of God. As our culture becomes more academically sophisticated, Catholic believers must become more spiritually childlike. Either we grow in this child likeness, which Christ told us is a condition for reaching heaven, or we may advertise ourselves as Catholics but we become Catholics only in name – without knowing and practicing our faith.

More Apostolic: Nothing that we receive from God is to be kept just to ourselves. We are to share God’s gifts with those whom He places into our lives. Among the gifts of God, none is more fundamental than the virtue of faith. According to St. Paul, “Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that are not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Is there anything more precious that we can share with others than this gift of faith? It is the foundation of everything the human heart can hope for. It is the proof that everything in this world is only a means to reach that eternal home where Christ and His Mother are waiting for us. Our mind should be in desperate need for God’s truth. It is almost twenty centuries since Christ proclaimed the Gospel to the world.

Yet to this day only a fraction of the human race has even heard that God became man and died on the Cross so we might enjoy Him in heavenly eternity. Our Lord told us that He will proclaim us before His heavenly Father if we proclaim Him before men here on earth. This is both a promise and a warning. It is not enough for us to believe. We must labour and exhaust ourselves, to share the riches of God’s truth with others. No one gets to heaven alone. Either we help others reach their heavenly destiny by our apostolic zeal, or we risk our own celestial destiny.

WHY CATHOLICS LEAVE THEIR FAITH?

We began earlier by making the blunt statement, “Understand your Catholic faith or lose it.” There is a painfully obvious reason for saying this. Never in the history of our nation has there been such a loss of Catholics leaving the Church as in our generation.

In my judgment the root cause is that so many once believing Catholics have given up their fidelity to the one true Church because they have not understood the precious treasure of their faith. Once believing Catholics have abandoned their faith because they did not understand what they presumably believed. There is a second parable in the same chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel about the sowing of seed (cf. Mt. 13:24-30).

No doubt the basic reason for the massive drainage in Nigerian Catholicism is that so many academically educated Catholics had not grown up in the understanding of their faith.

But there is a parallel cause for this mass exodus of Catholics in our nation. It is the sowing of the weeds of untruth and the cockle of pseudo-Catholicism in our society.

Is it any wonder that so many Catholics have given up their faith? The wonder is that there are still Catholics who remain faithful to the teachings of Christ and the Church He founded.

What is the solution? It is nothing less than an organized effort to re-educate people in understanding their faith. This faith, we know, is no abstraction. It is the truth revealed by God who became man and who identified himself as the Truth. Christ tells us, “If you abide in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn. 8: 31-32). As we grow in the understanding of our faith, we grow in our understanding of Jesus Christ. As we grow in understanding Him, we grow in our freedom to love Him with all our hearts and enjoy Him, already here on earth, with something of the happiness that awaits us in eternity.

We should always bear in mind that, “reason based in man’s finitude, cannot comprehend the infinite mysteries of faith, and even while pointing towards them, however indistinctly.” When you have faith, and you know your faith, and put it to practice; you are carrying out its goal which is Theosis – participation in the divine nature (cf. CCC 460; 2Pt. 1:4). St. Augustine admitted, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” Before we are sacramentally initiated and confirmed, we first professed our faith; and then, came to a gradual understanding of the faith, so as to be ready at all times to give answer when we are called upon to account for the hope we have, and faith we profess (cf. 1Pt. 3:15).

It follows also that, when you know your faith, and you hold on to it, no one can confuse or deceive nor convince you wrongly (cf. 1Tim. 1:6-7). One can also follow the good examples of great women of faith in the bible, like: Mary (the Mother of Christ) Ruth, Sarah, Pricilla and Aquila (cf. Rom. 16:3-4; Acts 18:3), Miriam, Esther, Naomi, Deborah, Lydia (cf. Acts 16:14-15),  Mary Magdalene, and St. Ann (Mary’s mother); and many more. However, these women were recorded in history as credible and trustworthy witnesses to the faith. They never loosed faith.

CONCLUSION

Many Catholics are familiar with the insinuation; “Doctrine will not save you! Doctrine will not save you!” One fundamental question most Catholics tend to forget to ask is, “are these insinuators, then, implying that the Christian religion has no doctrinal component?” For the Lord Jesus Christ, it was not always miracles, miracles and more miracles. He always found time to teach. When He said, “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10:30), the Lord was teaching doctrine (The Trinity). When He empowered His apostles after His resurrection saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven, if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (Jn. 20:22), He was most certainly teaching doctrine (Confession and Reconciliation). When He told the proud Jews, “….unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you,” there can be no doubt at all that the Lord Jesus was teaching doctrine (The Eucharist). Also, His Apostle, Paul, was to instruct Timothy on doctrine as follows, “Watch your life and doctrine (teaching/faith) closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1Tim. 4:16). And another fundamental question sets in, “how then do these people imagine that the doctrine a Christian holds, whether sound or otherwise, does not affect his/her salvation?” From all that has been prelisted and explained, I wish and pray, as St. Paul solicited with Timothy; he said, “Timothy, my son, I command you to fight the good fight, fulfilling the prophetic words pronounced over you. Hold onto faith and a good conscience, unlike those who, ignoring conscience, have finally wrecked their faith” (1Tim. 1:18-19).

Malachy Tamunotonye Jude