However, there remains the question of how these theological statements will be put into practice. The ongoing involvement of the Catholic Church in social matters makes it a significant potential partner in issues around development. Chapters answer the question of how the Catholic Church evaluates the concept of sustainable development as defined by the Agenda Goals, as well as assessing how and if it can contribute to shaping the contemporary concept of global development.
Examining the potential level of cooperation between the international community and the Catholic Church in the implementation of the Agenda Goals, this volume will be of keen interest to scholars of Catholic Studies, Religious Studies and the Sociology of Religion, as well as Environmental Studies and Development Studies.
Is religion a right given to us by the state? Is it an opium for the masses? Is it private opinion with no role in the public sphere? Hahn and McGinley argue that to answer questions over religious liberty, justice, and peace, we must first reject the insidious lie perpetuated by secular-liberal culture: that religion is a private matter.
Contrary to what political commentators and activists say, religion is not only relevant to justice and law, but is necessary for civilization to thrive. Recover the public nature of true religion, It Is Right and Just argues, and watch as a revolution unfolds. Handbook of Catholic Social Teaching employs a question and answer format, to better accentuate the response of the Church's message to the questions Catholics have about their social role and what the Church intends to teach about it.
Written in consultation with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Handbook should take its place alongside the Catechism of the Social Doctrine of the Church on the shelf of informed Catholics as works that can inform what we believe and do in the public sphere.
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We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. The Power of Forgiveness, Pope Francis on Reconciliation calls the reader to explore the mercy of God, received in a profound way by turning toward God in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
This heartfelt collection of the Pope's reflections on the need for repentance, awareness of sin, God's divine mercy, forgiveness of others, and confession and absolution, is a transformative read for Catholics of all vocational states! It suggests that the. Evangelii gaudium. A Companion to Public Theology. The Companion to Public Theology offers a collection of cutting-edge essays by an international group of scholars that provides a foundation for public theology as well as engagement with a wide range of public issues in dialogue with other disciplines.
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice brings together a team of distinguished scholars to provide a comprehensive and comparative account of social justice in the major religious traditions. The first publication to offer a comparative study of social justice for each of the major world religions, exploring viewpoints. The conclusion discusses tension between CSD and liberal democracy.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity individual or corporate has a copyright on the body of the work. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
Through Him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became Man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered, died, and was buried. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.
With the Father and the Son He is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. I acknowledge one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. I Believe in God the Father. The most ancient symbols of faith are the baptismal creeds. They are the Apostles' Creed which is the ancient baptismal symbol of the Church of Rome and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed which stems from the first two ecumenical Councils, that of Nicea A.
Already in Old Testament times this ineffable name of God was replaced by the divine title Lord. Since creatures have received everything they are and have from God, only God in himself is the fullness of being and of every perfection.
In revealing his name, God makes known the riches contained in the ineffable mystery of his being. He alone is from everlasting to everlasting. He is the One who transcends the world and history. It is he who made heaven and earth. He is the faithful God, always close to his people, in order to save them. He is the One who is spiritual, transcendent, omnipotent, eternal, personal, and perfect.
He is truth and love. God is Truth itself and as such he can neither deceive nor be deceived. God revealed himself to Israel as the One who has a stronger love than that of parents for their children or of husbands and wives for their spouses.
By sending his Son and the Holy Spirit, God reveals that he himself is an eternal exchange of love. To believe in the one and only God involves coming to know his greatness and majesty. It involves living in thanksgiving and trusting always in him, even in adversity. It involves knowing the unity and true dignity of all human beings, created in his image. It involves making good use of the things which he has created. The central mystery of Christian faith and life is the mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity.
Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This mystery was revealed by Jesus Christ and it is the source of all the other mysteries. He is God, one and equal with the Father and the Son. The Church expresses her trinitarian faith by professing a belief in the oneness of God in whom there are three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three divine Persons are only one God because each of them equally possesses the fullness of the one and indivisible divine nature.
They are really distinct from each other by reason of the relations which place them in correspondence to each other. Inseparable in their one substance, the three divine Persons are also inseparable in their activity.
The Trinity has one operation, sole and the same. In this one divine action, however, each Person is present according to the mode which is proper to him in the Trinity. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.
His omnipotence is universal, mysterious and shows itself in the creation of the world out of nothing and humanity out of love; but above all it shows itself in the Incarnation and the Resurrection of his Son, in the gift of filial adoption and in the forgiveness of sins.
It shows forth the almighty and wise love of God, and it is the first step toward the covenant of the one God with his people. It is the beginning of the history of salvation which culminates in Christ; and it is the first answer to our fundamental questions regarding our very origin and destiny.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the one and indivisible principle of creation even though the work of creating the world is particularly attributed to God the Father.
The world was created for the glory of God who wished to show forth and communicate his goodness, truth and beauty. God created the universe freely with wisdom and love. The world is not the result of any necessity, nor of blind fate, nor of chance.
God preserves his creation in being and sustains it, giving it the capacity to act and leading it toward its fulfillment through his Son and the Holy Spirit. Divine Providence consists in the dispositions with which God leads his creatures toward their ultimate end. God is the sovereign Master of his own plan. To carry it out, however, he also makes use of the cooperation of his creatures.
For God grants his creatures the dignity of acting on their own and of being causes for each other. To this question, as painful and mysterious as it is, only the whole of Christian faith can constitute a response. God is not in any way - directly or indirectly - the cause of evil.
He illuminates the mystery of evil in his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose in order to vanquish that great moral evil, human sin, which is at the root of all other evils. Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil. This was realized in a wondrous way by God in the death and resurrection of Christ.
In fact, from the greatest of all moral evils the murder of his Son he has brought forth the greatest of all goods the glorification of Christ and our redemption.
The Church in her profession of faith proclaims that God is the Creator of everything, visible and invisible, of all spiritual and corporeal beings, that is, of angels and of the visible world and, in a special way, of man. The angels are purely spiritual creatures, incorporeal, invisible, immortal, and personal beings endowed with intelligence and will. They ceaselessly contemplate God face-to-face and they glorify him.
They serve him and are his messengers in the accomplishment of his saving mission to all. The Church joins with the angels in adoring God, invokes their assistance and commemorates some in her liturgy. Every single thing owes its very existence to God from whom it receives its goodness and perfection, its proper laws and its proper place in the universe. The human person is the summit of visible creation in as much as he or she is created in the image and likeness of God.
There exist an interdependence and a hierarchy among creatures as willed by God. At the same time, there is also a unity and solidarity among creatures since all have the same Creator, are loved by him and are ordered to his glory.
Respecting the laws inscribed in creation and the relations which derive from the nature of things is, therefore, a principle of wisdom and a foundation for morality.
The work of creation culminates in the still greater work of redemption, which in fact gives rise to a new creation in which everything will recover its true meaning and fulfillment. The human person is created in the image of God in the sense that he or she is capable of knowing and of loving their Creator in freedom. Human beings are the only creatures on earth that God has willed for their own sake and has called to share, through knowledge and love, in his own divine life.
All human beings, in as much as they are created in the image of God, have the dignity of a person. A person is not something but someone, capable of self-knowledge and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with God and with other persons. God has created everything for them; but he has created them to know, serve and love God, to offer all of creation in this world in thanksgiving back to him and to be raised up to life with him in heaven.
Only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of the human person come into true light. All people form the unity of the human race by reason of the common origin which they have from God. All have but one Savior and are called to share in the eternal happiness of God. The human person is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. In man spirit and matter form one nature. This unity is so profound that, thanks to the spiritual principle which is the soul, the body which is material, becomes a living human body and participates in the dignity of the image of God.
It does not perish at the moment when it is separated from the body in death and it will be once again reunited with the body at the moment of the final resurrection. Man and woman have been created by God in equal dignity insofar as they are human persons.
At the same time, they have been created in a reciprocal complementarity insofar as they are masculine and feminine. God has willed them one for the other to form a communion of persons.
In creating man and woman God had given them a special participation in his own divine life in holiness and justice. In the plan of God they would not have had to suffer or die. Furthermore, a perfect harmony held sway within the human person, a harmony between creature and Creator, between man and woman, as well as between the first human couple and all of creation. Sin is present in human history. This reality of sin can be understood clearly only in the light of divine revelation and above all in the light of Christ the Savior of all.
Where sin abounded, he made grace to abound all the more. This expression indicates that Satan and the other demons, about which Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church speak, were angels, created good by God. They were, however, transformed into evil because with a free and irrevocable choice they rejected God and his Kingdom, thus giving rise to the existence of hell. They try to associate human beings with their revolt against God. However, God has wrought in Christ a sure victory over the Evil One.
When tempted by the devil, the first man and woman allowed trust in their Creator to die in their hearts. Thus, Adam and Eve immediately lost for themselves and for all their descendants the original grace of holiness and justice. Original sin, in which all human beings are born, is the state of deprivation of original holiness and justice.
This transmission remains a mystery which we cannot fully understand. In consequence of original sin human nature , without being totally corrupted , is wounded in its natural powers. It is subject to ignorance, to suffering, and to the dominion of death and is inclined toward sin. This inclination is called concupiscence. After the first sin the world was inundated with sin but God did not abandon man to the power of death.
This was the first proclamation of the Messiah and Redeemer. From the very beginning the first disciples burned with the desire to proclaim Jesus Christ in order to lead all to faith in him.
Even today, from the loving knowledge of Christ there springs up in the believer the desire to evangelize and catechize, that is, to reveal in the Person of Christ the entire design of God and to put humanity in communion with him. Jesus is the Christ because he is consecrated by God and anointed by the Holy Spirit for his redeeming mission. He is the Messiah awaited by Israel, sent into the world by the Father. From the name Christ comes our name of Christian.
Jesus is the Son of God in a unique and perfect way. He is the central figure of apostolic preaching. In the Bible this title regularly designates God as Sovereign. Jesus ascribed this title to himself and revealed his divine sovereignty by his power over nature, over demons, over sin, and over death, above all by his own Resurrection.
He is the Lord of the world and of history, the only One to whom we must completely submit our personal freedom. For us men and for our salvation, the Son of God became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Faith in the Incarnation is a distinctive sign of the Christian faith. Jesus is inseparably true God and true man in the unity of his divine Person. The Church confesses that Jesus Christ is true God and true man, with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, not confused with each other but united in the Person of the Word.
Therefore, in the humanity of Jesus all things - his miracles, his suffering, and his death - must be attributed to his divine Person which acts by means of his assumed human nature. The Son of God assumed a body animated by a rational human soul. With his human intellect Jesus learned many things by way of experience; but also as man the Son of God had an intimate and immediate knowledge of God his Father.
Jesus had a divine will and a human will. In his earthly life the Son of God humanly willed all that he had divinely decided with the Father and the Holy Spirit for our salvation. The human will of Christ followed without opposition or reluctance the divine will or, in other words, it was subject to it. Christ assumed a true human body by means of which the invisible God became visible. This is the reason why Christ can be represented and venerated in sacred images.
Jesus knew us and loved us with a human heart. His Heart, pierced for our salvation, is the symbol of that infinite love with which he loves the Father and each one of us. This expression means that the Virgin Mary conceived the eternal Son in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit without the cooperation of a man.
He is God himself. God freely chose Mary from all eternity to be the Mother of his Son. In order to carry out her mission she herself was conceived immaculate. This means that, thanks to the grace of God and in anticipation of the merits of Jesus Christ, Mary was preserved from original sin from the first instant of her conception.
By the grace of God Mary was kept free from every personal sin her whole life long. Mary thus gave herself entirely to the person and work of her Son Jesus, espousing wholeheartedly the divine will regarding salvation.
The virginal conception of Jesus means that Jesus was conceived in the womb of the Virgin solely by the power of the Holy Spirit without the intervention of a man. He is the Son of the heavenly Father according to his divine nature and the Son of Mary according to his human nature. He is, however, truly the Son of God in both natures since there is in him only one Person who is divine.
Mary had only one Son, Jesus, but in him her spiritual motherhood extends to all whom he came to save. Obediently standing at the side of the new Adam, Jesus Christ, the Virgin is the new Eve , the true mother of all the living, who with a mother's love cooperates in their birth and their formation in the order of grace. Virgin and Mother, Mary is the figure of the Church, its most perfect realization.
The entire life of Christ is a revelation. Furthermore, even though salvation comes completely from the cross and the resurrection, the entire life of Christ is a mystery of redemption because everything that Jesus did, said, and suffered had for its aim the salvation of fallen human beings and the restoration of their vocation as children of God.
God prepared for the coming of his Son over the centuries. He awakened in the hearts of the pagans a dim expectation of this coming and he prepared for it specifically through the Old Testament, culminating with John the Baptist who was the last and greatest of the prophets.
We relive this long period of expectancy in the annual liturgical celebration of the season of Advent. At Christmas the glory of heaven is shown forth in the weakness of a baby; the circumcision of Jesus is a sign of his belonging to the Hebrew people and is a prefiguration of our Baptism; the Epiphany is the manifestation of the Messiah King of Israel to all the nations; at the presentation in the temple, Simeon and Anna symbolise all the anticipation of Israel awaiting its encounter with its Savior; the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents proclaim that the entire life of Christ will be under the sign of persecution; the departure from Egypt recalls the exodus and presents Jesus as the new Moses and the true and definitive liberator.
In the course of his hidden life in Nazareth Jesus stayed in the silence of an ordinary existence. This allows us to enter into fellowship with him in the holiness to be found in a daily life marked by prayer, simplicity, work and family love. His obedience to Mary and to Joseph, his foster father, is an image of his filial obedience to the Father. Mary and Joseph accepted with faith the mystery of Jesus even though they did not always understand it. The baptism of Jesus is a prefiguring of our baptism.
The temptations of Jesus in the desert recapitulate the temptation of Adam in Paradise and the temptations of Israel in the desert. Satan tempts Jesus in regard to his obedience to the mission given him by the Father.
Christ, the new Adam, resists and his victory proclaims that of his passion which is the supreme obedience of his filial love. The Church unites herself to this mystery in a special way in the liturgical season of Lent.
Who is invited to come into the Kingdom of God proclaimed and brought about by Jesus? All are invited by Jesus to enter the Kingdom of God.
Even the worst of sinners is called to convert and to accept the boundless mercy of the Father. Already here on earth, the Kingdom belongs to those who accept it with a humble heart.
To them the mysteries of the Kingdom are revealed. Jesus accompanied his words with signs and miracles to bear witness to the fact that the Kingdom is present in him, the Messiah.
Although he healed some people, he did not come to abolish all evils here below but rather to free us especially from the slavery of sin. Jesus chose the twelve , the future witnesses of his Resurrection, and made them sharers of his mission and of his authority to teach, to absolve from sins, and to build up and govern the Church. At the established time Jesus chose to go up to Jerusalem to suffer his passion and death, and to rise from the dead.
As the Messiah King who shows forth the coming of the Kingdom, he entered into his city mounted on a donkey.
Hosanna save us! The liturgy of the Church opens Holy Week by celebrating this entry into Jerusalem. The Paschal Mystery of Jesus, which comprises his passion, death, resurrection, and glorification, stands at the center of the Christian faith because God's saving plan was accomplished once for all by the redemptive death of his Son Jesus Christ.
Some of the leaders of Israel accused Jesus of acting against the law, the temple in Jerusalem, and in particular against faith in the one God because he proclaimed himself to be the Son of God. For this reason they handed him over to Pilate so that he might condemn him to death. Jesus did not abolish the Law given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai but he fulfilled it by giving it its definitive interpretation. He himself was the divine Legislator who fully carried out this Law.
Jesus was accused of hostility to the temple. However, he also foretold its destruction in connection with his own death and he presented himself as the definitive dwelling place of God among men. Jesus never contradicted faith in the one God, not even when he performed the stupendous divine work which fulfilled the messianic promises and revealed himself as equal to God, namely the pardoning of sins. However, the call of Jesus to believe in him and to be converted makes it possible to understand the tragic misunderstanding of the Sanhedrin which judged Jesus to be worthy of death as a blasphemer.
The passion and death of Jesus cannot be imputed indiscriminately either to all the Jews that were living at that time or to their descendants. Every single sinner, that is, every human being is really the cause and the instrument of the sufferings of the Redeemer; and the greater blame in this respect falls on those above all who are Christians and who the more often fall into sin or delight in their vices. To reconcile to himself all who were destined to die because of sin God took the loving initiative of sending his Son that he might give himself up for sinners.
The entire life of Christ was a free offering to the Father to carry out his plan of salvation. His suffering and death showed how his humanity was the free and perfect instrument of that divine love which desires the salvation of all people.
Jesus freely offered his life as an expiatory sacrifice, that is, he made reparation for our sins with the full obedience of his love unto death. The paschal sacrifice of Christ, therefore, redeems humanity in a way that is unique, perfect, and definitive; and it opens up for them communion with God.
By calling his disciples to take up their cross and follow him Jesus desires to associate with his redeeming sacrifice those who are to be its first beneficiaries.
Christ underwent a real death and a true burial. However, the power of God preserved his body from corruption. It was the state of all those, righteous and evil, who died before Christ.
With his soul united to his divine Person Jesus went down to the just in hell who were awaiting their Redeemer so they could enter at last into the vision of God. The Resurrection of Jesus is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ and represents along with his cross an essential part of the Paschal Mystery. Along with the essential sign of the empty tomb, the Resurrection of Jesus is witnessed to by the women who first encountered Christ and proclaimed him to the apostles. The apostles could not have invented the story of the resurrection since it seemed impossible to them.
As a matter of fact, Jesus himself upbraided them for their unbelief. While being an historical event, verifiable and attested by signs and testimonies, the Resurrection, insofar as it is the entrance of Christ's humanity into the glory of God, transcends and surpasses history as a mystery of faith. For this reason the risen Christ did not manifest himself to the world but to his disciples, making them his witnesses to the people.
The Resurrection of Christ was not a return to earthly life. His risen body is that which was crucified and bears the marks of his passion. However it also participates in the divine life, with the characteristics of a glorified body. Because of this the risen Jesus was utterly free to appear to his disciples how and where he wished and under various aspects.
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