Faith and Revelation: sixteen questions

Because God made us for himself. The desire for God is written in every human heart, and God never stops drawing us to himself. Only in God do we find the truth and happiness we keep looking for.

Yes. The Church teaches that God can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason. But in practice our minds meet many obstacles, so we need God to show us even some things that reason could reach. Above all we need him to show us what reason could never find by itself.

Revelation is God making himself known. Out of pure goodness he has shown us who he is and his loving plan for us: that through Christ, the Word made flesh, we may come to the Father in the Holy Spirit and share in the divine nature.

Step by step, by deeds and words that belong together. He spoke to our first parents, made a covenant with Noah, called Abraham, and formed Israel as his people through Moses and the prophets. In this way he prepared humanity, like a patient teacher, for the coming of his Son.

No new public revelation is to be expected before Christ returns in glory. Christ is the Father's one, perfect and final Word; in him God has said everything. Yet the Church keeps growing in her understanding of this Word down the centuries.

Some private revelations have been recognised by the Church, but they do not belong to the deposit of faith. They do not improve or complete what Christ revealed. At best they help people live it more fully in a certain time, and no Catholic is obliged to believe them.

Christ entrusted his Gospel to the Apostles, who handed it on by their preaching and example and in writing. It reaches us in two ways that flow from one source: Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. Both are received and honoured with the same devotion and reverence.

The living teaching office of the Church, the Magisterium: the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome. The Magisterium is not above the Word of God but serves it, and teaches only what has been handed on. Tradition, Scripture and the Magisterium are so joined that none of them stands without the others.

God is its author, and so are the human writers. God inspired men who used their own powers and gifts as true authors, so that they wrote what he wanted written. For this reason the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error the truth God wished to give us for our salvation.

First find what the human writer meant, paying attention to his time, his culture and the kind of writing he used. Then read it in the Spirit in which it was written, in three ways: keep in view the unity of the whole Bible, read it within the living Tradition of the Church, and see how each truth of faith fits with the others.

There is the literal sense, the meaning of the words, on which all the others rest. Then there is the spiritual sense in three forms: allegorical (how an event points to Christ, as the crossing of the Red Sea points to Baptism), moral (how it guides our life) and anagogical (how it points to heaven).

Seventy-three. The Church discerned the list, called the canon, by the apostolic Tradition: forty-six books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven of the New. The Old Testament is God's Word too, and Christians honour it.

Faith is our answer to God who speaks. It is a personal bond with God and, together with it, an assent to the whole truth he has revealed. Abraham is the model of this obedience of faith, and the Virgin Mary its most perfect example.

Both. Faith is a gift of God, a virtue he pours into us, and we can believe only with the help of his grace. Yet believing is truly human and goes against neither our reason nor our liberty. No one may be forced to embrace the faith.

No real contradiction is possible, because the same God reveals the mysteries of faith and gives us the light of reason. Truth cannot contradict truth. Honest research, done in a truly scientific way and with respect for moral laws, never truly conflicts with faith.

Faith is personal, but no one believes alone. We received the faith from others and must hand it on. "I believe" is the faith of the Church professed by each person, above all at Baptism; "We believe" is the faith professed by the bishops in council and by the assembly gathered in worship.