What Catholics Believe:  A Popular Overview of Catholic Teaching  by Leonard Foley, O.F.M.

 

If you are Catholic, this is post-Vatican II wrap-up and short catechism, and an invitation to deeper faith. If you are a no-longer-practicing Catholic, this is an invitation to take a fresh look at your old family.  If you come from a different religious tradition, welcome to this overview of what Catholics stand for.  If you have no religion, we hope this will be a new opening to God. 

Welcome to Our Catholic Faith!

1.  Who God is

 

2.  What God did

 

3.  Who Jesus is

 

4.  What Jesus did

 

5.  Who the Spirit is

 

6.  Who we are as Christ’s Mystical Body

Jesus said, "I am the Vine, you are the branches. He who lives in me and I in him, will produce abundantly, for apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). There is a flow of life between Jesus and his followers, a mystical union, forming the "inside" of the Church. It is called grace because it is totally gratis, a gift, unearnable. As a result of sharing God's own life, the love in Jesus' followers is actually God's love literally "indwelling" in them.

A new life. Thus Jesus spoke of our being "born again" by baptism in faith. In this new birth, "original sin" is destroyed. This is not our personal sin, but the fact of being born a member of the human race that cut itself off from God by sin. (A crude comparison: Through no fault of its own, a baby is born poor because its grandfather squandered the family fortune as a riverboat gambler.) But there is also what we might call "original love": God's love surrounds the baby more powerfully than anything else. "...[God] wills everyone to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). Therefore, God will give this baby—any baby or adult—the opportunity to be saved. No one is lost but by his or her own choice.

7.  Who we are as visible Church

 

8.  What we are called to do as followers of Jesus

 

9.  What we do as the whole Church

 

10. ‘As we wait in joyful hope…’