1. The Holy Father has just called for a ‘Year of Faith,’ under the auspices of St. Paul who was the apostle who wrote most eloquently and extensively on Faith. The papal instruction was sent to Bishops to be shared with parish priests and their parishioners. The goal was to ask each Catholic to find out if they have Faith. With the culmination of the Year of Faith many Catholics have not answered this question.
2. The steps towards eternal life may be summarized into four steps; first, to live a life of repentance, secondly, to live a life of Faith. Thirdly, to live a life of Hope and fourthly to live a life of Charity. Faith brings us into the Church, into the Mystical Body of Christ and in some way gives us Hope for our salvation, “he who believes is already saved.”
3. During the Year of Faith the Pope is asking us to find out if we have reached the second step, Faith. The Catechism gives a concise definition of Faith and St. Thomas gives a clear and elaborate description of it. But most of us do not have the time to study this.
4. So why don’t we just read the ‘prayer’ of Faith at the end of the Compendium of the Catholic Catechism by Pope Benedict XVI. His prayer goes this way: “Domine Deus, firma fide credo et confiteor omnia et singula quae sancta Ecclesia Catholica proponit, quia tu Deus, ea omnia revelasti, qui es aeterna veritas et sapientia quae nec fallere nec falli potest. In hac fide vivere et mori statuo. Amen.”
5. The prayer says :’ I believe all and every truth that you (Christ) have revealed because You are the eternal truth.’ Do we really know ‘all and every truth’ Christ has revealed in Scriptures? How many truths are there in Divine Revelation? Putting aside the Doctrinal truths, let us just look at the so-called ‘Commandments of Christ.’ In Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Matthew in the so-called ‘Sermon on the Mount’, aside from the Beatitudes, Christ enumerates around 35 commands. In the entire Gospel of St. Matthew there are more than 80 commands. If we add to this the commands in the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John plus the commands of Christ as described in the Epistles, Acts and Apocaplypse guess how many commands there could be? And we are not supposed to study these commands directly from Scriptures. We must learn and believe these commands as proposed by the Magisterium of the Church. That is practically hinting that we must know how the Fathers of the Church or Tradition interpreted these commands. Does that sound like having a degree on Exegesis and Patrology? Not really. There is a way of learning these in a faster and shorter way which the Holy Father had been hinting since the beginning of his pontificate.
6. Faith is an act of the intellect. It is knowing, with the help of grace all the commands of Christ and how to obey them. But it is chaos if every priest interprets these commands. So Christ gave the role of interpreting these commands to His Church with the Holy Father as its official spokesman. And so Faith is believing with our intellect the teachings of Christ ‘as proposed by the Church’ through her spokesman, the Pope. And the reason for believing the Pope is because Christ who revealed the truths ‘cannot deceive nor be deceived.’
7. The crisis of Faith is caused by ignorance of those commands the knowledge of which is the object of Faith. Some wh0 know ‘what’ are the commands do not know the ‘how’. Knowledge of both is necessary for the act of Faith.
8. The act of Faith is not possible until all the commands of Christ are known by the intellect. That is the only time when the soul can see that put together all the commands make up the command ‘To love God and neighbor’. Knowing this the soul can now motivate his Faith with the virtue of Charity. Thus the Pope’s 3rd encyclical Caritas in veritate simply states that Charity can only be attained by knowing the truths that lead to Faith.
9. If at the end of the Year of Faith we have not yet known if we have the true faith or not that would be a sign that we do not have Faith. Because with the virtue comes the certainty that we have it.
8. During the year of Faith few were able to find out if they had Faith. Most do not know how to check on it though they could have checked it basing it on the Year of the Liturgy (during the 24 Sundays between Pentecost and Christ the King.) If the people are doubtful if they had Faith who is to blame? The Bishops and priest who were commanded by Christ to instill the knowledge that brings about Faith. So a Year of the priest should be in place….for the priest to find out if they have Faith.
9. So now in the ‘Year of the Priest’ the Holy Father is calling on all priests, religious, nuns and laymen to go once more through the steps that enable us to enter the Church and find out once and for all if we are inside or still outside the Catholic Church.