The Beauty and Reward of Catholic Faith
This is the faith that Catholics have in matters of religion: divine faith. We believe the truths of our most holy religion not because we can prove them or have experienced them, not because we think them reasonable or beautiful or consoling (though they are all that). These are all Protestant reasons for believing. We believe the truths of the Catholic faith solely because almighty God has taught them to us. This is what theologians call the formal cause or motive of faith: the authority of God revealing.
We have nothing whatsoever to do, in the first instance, with the intrinsic nature of the truths taught. Nor does it matter whether they are hard or easy to believe, whether they seem probable or improbable. It is enough for us that Infinite Truth has revealed them. Doubtless we know that God could never teach anything that was not beautiful and reasonable, for all his works are perfect. Yet it is not for this that we assent to them. It is not for us to question why he should have taught this, or why he should have done that. God is not obliged to explain his words or to justify his acts.
One man says, “Why should Jesus Christ have instituted the sacrament of penance? Could he not have arranged for the forgiveness of sins some other way?” I answer, “Jesus Christ has not been pleased to tell us; that is all.” But the fact that he has instituted confession remains all the same. Personally, I do not relish going to confession. Nor, so far as I know, does any Catholic. Were confession not necessary and obligatory, few would ever approach it. But we believe in it because God has revealed it, and we practice it because God has commanded it.
Another man objects, “I cannot grasp the Real Presence. I do not see the need of it. Our Lord is in heaven, and not upon earth. I cannot see how he can locate himself in the small host or how he can be present in a thousand tabernacles at one moment.” I answer again, “Your incapacity to understand these mysteries is no argument against their existence. What is more, it should be no bar to your believing in them if only your belief is grounded on the proper motive.”
We do not believe the truths of religion because we understand the why and the wherefore of them, or because they commend themselves to us by their reasonableness or suitability. We believe these truths because God has taught them to us. If he has made them known, there is no possibility of our calling them in question. Whether we like them or not, whether we understand them or not, we must bow down and accept them without a word. We do not understand them in order that we may believe, but rather, according to the beautiful saying of Anselm, “We believe in order that we may understand” (credo ut intelligam).
Perhaps the best illustration of what I mean by real Catholic faith, and of the difference between Catholic faith and Protestant want of faith, is to be found in an incident recorded by John in the sixth chapter of his Gospel. After feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fishes, our Lord fled to the mountain lest the people should take him and make him a king. Next day, however, they tracked him and found him at Capernaum. They were thinking of the loaves they had got, but Jesus wished to raise their thoughts up to the bread of life. “You were hungry yesterday,” he said in effect, “and you were fed. Today you are hungry again. You want more bread. Now, I will give you bread of which, if you eat, you will never hunger any more. And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
This announcement was the cause of immediate and deep dissension among those who heard him. The Jews were the first to murmur, and said, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” But our divine Lord repeated his doctrine more emphatically: “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.” The Jews did not understand, and therefore did not accept it. Many of the disciples of Jesus then followed their example. “It is a hard saying,” they said. “Who can hear it?” And when rebuked by their Master for their unfaithfulness, they turned back and walked no more with him. Here then we have two classes among his audience, who refused to believe what they could not understand and what they considered to be impossible.
Then it was that our blessed Lord turned to the Twelve and put their faith to the supreme test: “Will you also go away?” Now notice that the Twelve did not understand their Master’s saying about eating his flesh and drinking his blood any more than the others. They were mystified, unenlightened, awestruck. They did not pretend to understand. Yet they immediately believed. With a beautiful act of faith, with that childlike willingness so characteristic of Catholics to believe whatever God tells them whether they understand it or not, they accepted the word of Jesus. They embraced the doctrine. And why? Simply because Jesus, whom they acknowledged as their Lord, declared it.
This was what we call “blind faith.” Simon Peter, answering for the Twelve, said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” Now, here surely is the touchstone of loyalty to Jesus Christ. On which side would Protestants have ranged themselves: with the Jews or with the Twelve? In regard to the Real Presence, they are on the side of the Jews and the faithless disciples today. “It is a hard saying,” they complain. “Who can hear it?” And yet they must know if they read their New Testament that the doctrine came from the lips of the Son of God. If they have not faith, if they do not receive the dogma on his authority now, how would they have received it then?
Here, then, is the voice of the true Catholic, “O my God, I believe, not because I understand, but purely because thou hast said it.”
The Attitude of the Catholic Intellect
In the first place, we see how truly humble is the attitude of the Catholic intellect. A man of real humility acknowledges the weakness, imperfection, ignorance, and darkness of his understanding. He finds it easy and natural to submit his intellect to the teaching of almighty God. He would consider himself a fool beyond measure if he, a poor, blind creature, were to limit the truths of religion to those that only his own judgment approved or comprehended. A Catholic soul, then, is a humble soul. He prostrates himself adoringly before his God, and cries out, “O my God, I believe with all my heart whatever thou teachest me.”
In the eyes of the world, it is absurd to believe what you cannot understand. Not so in the eyes of God. “Unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” A Catholic possesses this childlike faith. A child does not criticize or dispute or call into question or demand to know the reasons for everything he is taught. He accepts it without suspicion on the authority of his teachers or his parents who are, to the young mind, virtually infallible.
To us almighty God is absolutely infallible. We believe God with the simplicity of little children. In so doing, we are not afraid of being thought infantile, weak, slavish, or unmanly. People who apply these epithets to us do not know the nature of true faith, nor do they possess it. They are but pronouncing their own condemnation, according to the scriptural standard. With our unhesitating, unquestioning, loving, adoring faith, like that of innocent children, we as Catholics are happy; and we know that it is immensely pleasing to God.
And how do we know this? Because our unquestioning belief honors and glorifies God. It is the noblest testimony our intellect can pay to him. It is the proof of our limitless faith in his veracity. To give an instantaneous “Credo,” even when he announces the most stupendous and impenetrable mysteries, surely demonstrates our sublime trust in him.
“If some person,” says Fr. St. Jure, S.J., in his beautiful Treatise on the Knowledge and Love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, “asked me to believe for his sake that the sun is luminous, I do not think he would be greatly indebted to me for believing it, since my eyes deprive me of the power of doubting it. But if he wished me to believe that the sun is not luminous, I should testify great affection for him if, on his word, I admitted as true what my reason and will prove to be false. I should give him the most signal tokens of the entire reliance I placed on his opinion, his judgment, the perfection of his sight. We therefore testify great love for God by believing simply, like children, all the mysteries of faith in which our reason is lost, and that our eyes not only see not but often seem to see the contrary. Thus Paul says, ‘Charity believeth all things’” (vol. 2, ch. 20).
We know too from our Lord himself how pleasing this simple faith is to him. You remember the touching incident on the apparition of the risen Savior to Thomas, one of the Twelve (cf. John 20:24–29). Thomas was not present when our Lord appeared to the apostles the first Easter night. When they told him, “We have seen the Lord,” he refused to believe it, and declared, “Unless I shall see and handle him, I will not believe.” Hence he is called “doubting Thomas.”
To satisfy him, our Lord graciously condescended to appear before him the following Sunday. Jesus invited him, saying, “Put thy finger hither and see my hands, and bring hither thy hand and put it into my side; and be not faithless but believing.” On this Thomas believed, saying, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to Thomas, “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
In this sentence, our Lord pronounced a divine eulogy on an act of faith. To believe without seeing, without proving—this is what pleases God. For believing in Christ’s Resurrection after seeing him risen, Thomas was deserving of no praise and no benediction. He could not help believing then. To have believed it before proving it with his own eyes, to have assented to the word of his fellow apostles—in short, to have taken it on faith—this would have won Thomas praise and blessing. But he missed the blessing because, before believing, he insisted on having proof and demonstration. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed.”
Not only is there no blessing and praise, but there is no merit, no credit, no reward for believing a thing after you have proved and tested and tried it. There is no merit, for example, in believing in the ebb and flow of the tide, or in the law of gravitation, or in the existence of flying machines, because we can prove the truth of these things any day for ourselves. We know they are facts from the evidence of our senses. In the same way, the angels and saints in heaven are deserving of no reward and no merit for believing all the truths revealed by God, because they see God face to face and all truth in him. They know it, as theologians say, intuitively. They are constrained to believe, as they are constrained to love. The beatific vision is itself their reward. There is no room for faith in heaven: Faith is changed to sight. But to believe the dogmas of religion that are not susceptible of being tested by the senses, and whose mysteries we cannot fathom, to believe unhesitatingly in the reality of persons and places and things we never saw and cannot prove by natural reason or evidence—this is something altogether different, something wonderful and sublime. It is worthy of all reward because it is so contrary to our natural inclinations, and because it brings into play so much higher and nobler an act of man’s intelligence.
To believe, for example, with your whole heart and soul, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, that the sacred host is your Creator and your God under the species of bread—and that in Communion you receive God’s precious body and soul into your own body and soul—requires faith. To believe that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without that guilt and stain of sin that has rested on every other human being who ever lived requires faith. To believe in the existence of souls in purgatory and that indulgences can be applied by the living to assist them requires faith. To believe all this, and much else that the Catholic Church teaches, requires faith: intense, profound, stupendous faith—in short, divine faith, and nothing less.
Such faith is not an ordinary act of the intellect. It is extraordinary and supernatural. The Catholic accepts these truths of revelation only because God has taught them to him, and for that reason God will reward him. He is not compelled to believe these truths against his will, as he is compelled to believe mathematical truths. Twice two are four; the whole is greater than the part. You have no choice there. It is what we call a “geometrical necessity.” But the Immaculate Conception, purgatory, the Real Presence—a man is free to reject these and take the consequences. Thousands and millions, as a matter of fact, have rejected them. In so doing they sin, more or less. In accepting them, you merit a reward exceeding great. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”