Papal Encyclical Lumen Fidei: Chapter 3 faith is contagious
(Vatican Radio) In our continuing five part series on Pope Francis’ first Encyclical
letter Lumen Fidei or Light of Faith, Msgr. John Kennedy, an official at the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, takes a look at Chapter III. Msgr Kennedy tells
Tracey McClure that “Chapter three of the encyclical begins with a quotation from
the letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians. It is a short and perhaps familiar quote
that speaks of St. Paul transmitting the faith that he received to the Christian community.
“I delivered to you what I also received,” says Paul. The point here is that we
don’t keep the faith for ourselves. It is not like a badge or a collection of stamps.
What we receive from God as a gift provokes a response which spreads to others and
invites them to believe. Faith is intended to be contagious.”
Listen to the
conversation:
The title
of the encyclical is the light of faith. Light too is not something that is meant
for itself. Light always goes from itself towards others. Light never shines on
itself. It is no accident that Paul uses the image of light when describing faith:
"God… has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:6).
We might remember perhaps in this context
the Easter liturgy where we pass the light taken from the paschal candle to each other,
and very quickly the whole church is bathed in the light of many small candles. Faith
is passed on like this, by person-to-person contact like relay race. What is fascinating
is that in passing on faith, you lose nothing of what you received. In fact faith
only grows brighter.
The Pope has a great insight when he says that, when
passing on the faith in this way, the transmission of the faith not only brings light
to men and women in every place; it travels through time, passing from one generation
to another. We can imagine this when we hear about space travel in terms of lights
years. Priest and deacons see this every time they celebrate a baptism where parents,
godparents and grandparents all testify to the faith of the church in every generation.
Question:
What is the Pope highlighting when he speaks about faith in this way?
He means
that the church speaks about an unbroken chain of witnesses handing on the faith.
In many ways this should not surprise us because we too come from a long line of others
– parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on, and, even though the years
have passed, we still belong to others. Lot of people with an interest in family
history trace their roots. On finding out who they are, they discover that our knowledge
and self-awareness are relational; they are linked to others who have gone before
us.
For this reason the Pope speaks about our parents, who gave us our life
and our name. Even the language we speak comes to us from others and the same thing
holds true for faith.
Faith too has a past – that act of Jesus’ love which
brought new life to the world. Our faith in Christ goes back to this moment. The
memory of this great event has been kept alive through the memory of others. These
witnesses we call the Church.
Children who want to know things often ask a
parent about what things were like in the past and why things are the way they are.
You
might not have thought about it in this way but the Church is a Mother who teaches
us to speak the language of faith. She teaches us about our faith.
Question:
We often think these days that were are really independent, freestanding individuals,
and that we are free to do whatever we wish and that there are no limits. What does
this kind of thinking mean in relation to faith in Jesus Christ?
Put very simply,
it is impossible to believe on our own. From what we have just said, faith is not
simply an individual decision. Faith is not like a private relationship between the
"I" of the believer and the divine "Thou", between an autonomous subject and God.
Faith is about the words “we” and “us”. Faith involves what we speak of in
the Church as communion. We say “we” and “us” and “our” because in so doing this
reflects the openness of God’s own love, which is not only a relationship between
the Father and the Son, between an "I" and a "Thou", but is also, in the Spirit, a
"We", a communion of persons.
I was looking at photos of the World Youth
Day. The multitude of happy young people from all over the world is a visible reminder
that those who believe are never alone, and why faith tends to spread, as it invites
others to share in its joy.
Question: Can you tell us a little more about
how the Church passes on her faith to the future generations?
The Church is
like every family in that it passes on to her children the whole store of her memories.
It doesn’t hold anything back.
If faith were like an educational subject, let’s
say geography, all you would need is a textbook. But what is communicated in the
Church, what is handed down in her living Tradition, is more than knowledge or facts.
It is the new light born of an encounter with the true God, a light which touches
us at the core of our being and engages our minds, wills and emotions, opening us
to relationships lived in communion.
So it comes as little surprise that you
need a special way of passing down this fullness, because it engages not only the
mind but the entire person, body and spirit, the interior life and relationships with
others.
Question: How does the Church do this?
By the sacraments,
celebrated in the Church’s liturgy.
The sacraments engage the whole person
as a member of a living subject and part of a network of communitarian relationships.
In the sacraments the visible and material realities are seen to point beyond themselves
to the mystery of the eternal.
Question: When we think of sacraments we perhaps
naturally look back to our baptism. Can you tell us how this takes place, for instance,
with baptism?
Pope Francis, in paragraph 41 of the encyclical, says
that the transmission of faith occurs first and foremost in baptism. There is so
much we can say about baptism. It is about newness of life, our entry into God’s
family, the reception of both of a teaching to be professed and a specific way of
life, a vocation, which demands the engagement of the whole person and sets us on
the path to goodness.
You can’t baptize yourself. In the same way no one
comes into the world by himself. Did you ever think about that? For this reason
baptism makes us see that faith is not the achievement of isolated individuals in
a do-it-yourself-approach to faith. We receive baptism. Baptism means entering into
communion with God and the Church which transmits to us as a God’s gift.
The
Pope then goes onto discuss the significant elements of baptism such as the name of
the Trinity, the meaning of our immersion in water, the dependence of infants on their
parents and godparents in bringing them up on the faith. Pope Francis ends this section
by talking about the symbolic meaning of the baptismal candle before going on to show
the connection between this sacrament and the Eucharist.
Question: Why does
Pope Francis link baptism and the Eucharist?
Catholics understand the Eucharist
as precious nourishment for faith that builds on baptism: it is an encounter with
Christ truly present in the supreme act of his love, the life-giving gift of himself.
Think of a cross for a moment. There is a line running from left to right,
a time line you could say. The other link runs from top to bottom. There is also
a point of intersection.
In the Eucharist we also find the intersection of
faith’s two dimensions. On the one hand, there is the dimension of history: the Eucharist
is an act of remembrance, a making present of the mystery in which the past, as an
event of death and resurrection. There is also an opening to the future of eternal
life.
The moment when the Eucharist is celebrated is in the here and now, at
the crossover point. On Holy Thursday you might remember how the priest says, “today”
during the words of institution, that is to say the words of consecration.
On
the other hand, we also find the dimension which leads from the visible world to the
invisible. The bread and wine, visibly they seem to be unchanged, but they are changed
into the body and blood of Christ, who becomes present in his Passover to the Father:
this movement draws us, body and soul, into the movement of all creation towards its
fulfillment in God.
Question: What does the Pope say in relation to the Creed
or the profession of faith?
In discussing this beautiful but short element
of the encyclical he says that this is another way in which the Church hands down
her memory. The creed is not just a prayer but rather a way by which believers are
invited to enter into the mystery which they profess and to be transformed by it.
The Pope adds that we cannot truthfully recite the words of the creed without
being changed, without becoming part of that history of love.
Question: We
just spoke about the Creed as a prayer. What does the Pope say about the great prayer,
the Our Father?
Continuing the theme of memory, the Pope adds that two other
elements are essential when faithfully handing on the Church’s memory. First, the
Lord’s Prayer, the "Our Father". I quote, “Here Christians learn to share in Christ’s
own spiritual experience and to see all things through his eyes. From him who is light
from light, the only-begotten Son of the Father, we come to know God and can thus
kindle in others the desire to draw near to him.”
The other element is the
Decalogue, or in other words the Ten Commandments. It is important, Pope Francis
adds, not to see the Decalogue a set of negative commands, but concrete or signposts
directions for emerging from the desert of the selfish and self-enclosed ego in order
to enter into dialogue with God.
Question: So we have talked about baptism,
the Eucharist and the Creed in the context of unity. Why is it that sometimes people
still have difficulty understanding or believing there to be a unity of faith?
This
is a really good point. We have said that the unity of the Church in time and space
is linked to the unity of the faith. Saint Paul uses a bodily image and describes
the Church as being "one body and one Spirit… one faith" (Eph 4:4-5).
I mentioned
the example of football fans earlier being a body of supporters. Think too of social
network bonding everyone together in a virtual way. Why, Pope Francis asks, do we
find it hard to conceive of a unity in one truth?
He admits that some people
think that a unity of this sort is incompatible with freedom of thought and personal
autonomy. His reply to this objection is that “the experience of love shows us that
a common vision is possible, for through love we learn how to see reality through
the eyes of others, not as something which impoverishes but instead enriches our vision.
Genuine love, after the fashion of God’s love, ultimately requires truth, and the
shared contemplation of the truth which is Jesus Christ enables love to become deep
and enduring. This is also the great joy of faith: a unity of vision in one body and
one spirit.”
Continuing the image of the body, we see that the unity of faith,
then, is the unity of a living body. Faith is thus shown to be universal, catholic,
because its light expands in order to illumine the entire cosmos and all of history.
A sign of the unity of the Church and the faith is apostolic succession. In this way
the continuity of the Church’s memory is ensured. We are in continuity with the origins.
Look
out next week for the 5th and final part of our series on Pope Francis’
Encyclical Lumen Fidei when Msgr. Kennedy examines the last Chapter: IV