CDF issues Year of Faith Note

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a Note today offering practical suggestions for making the most of the upcoming Year of Faith.
The Note contains more than 3 dozen concrete proposals on all levels of the life of the Church, from the Universal, to the Bishops’ Conferences, to individual Dioceses, and within these, to Communities, Associations and Movements, involving initiatives aimed at fostering Christian unity, to faith formation and renewal, and especially evangelization.
Fr. Hermann Geissler is responsible for the Doctrinal Office at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
He says the purpose of the Note is threefold: the first is to help the faithful to rediscover the nucleus of the faith, the foundation of the faith, which is the personal encounter with Christ, the personal encounter with the Lord who loves us, sustains us, forgives us, encourages us and shows us a great future… The second is that of helping the faithful to rediscover the meaning, and the documents of the II Vatican Council. “Many people talk about Vatican II,” says Fr. Geissler, “but when we really begin to get into it, we discover that only a very few people are really familiar with the texts of this great and most recent Council.” Finally, the note has the purpose of helping the faithful throughout the whole year to rediscover the integrity of the faith in all its beauty. “For this,” says Fr. Greissler, “the Catechism of the Catholic Church can be of great help to us.”
In fact, the 20^th anniversary of the completion of the Catechism and the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the II Vatican Council are focal points of the Year of Faith, which begins a half-century to the day from the Council’s opening. Following the Holy Father’s Apostolic Letter Porta fidei with which he proclaimed the Year of Faith, the Note recalls that the Catechism is an authentic fruit of the Council and an integral part of the “renewal in continuity” with the Church’s ancient and changeless Tradition of which the Conciliar documents are a most authoritative expression.
The Note expresses the hopeful intention of making the Year of Faith a propitious occasion to make the II Vatican Council and the Catechism of the Catholic Church more widely and more deeply known. Listen to Chris Altieri's report