Hi, my name's Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith.

The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. It is Day 23. We're reading paragraphs 163 to 169. A few reminders before we get started. I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach, but you can follow along in that one or with any recent version of the catechism of the Catholic Church. Also, if you want to download your own catechism into your reading plan, you can visit ascensionpress.com slash cIY. And lastly, you can click follow or subscribe or whatever that word is indicating that you are following or subscribing in your podcast app for daily notifications. As I said, it is day 23, our Michael Jordan

Day, as I like to refer to it. And we're reading paragraphs 163 to 169. One thing to keep in mind is we've been following Article 1 in that section, the response, right? The I believe we've been talking about for the last number of paragraphs. Now, the last two paragraphs here, did I say two? I meant to say three, Paragraphs 163, 164, and 165 are the conclusion

of the I believe. We're going to talk about faith as the beginning of eternal life. We know that,

even though we believe. You know, faith is so good. Faith is an incredible gift. And we actually

have the one in whom we believe. And we possess the Lord. He's with us, right? We profess our faith in him and we have him. He gives himself to us at the same time. We walk by faith and not by sight. At the same time, we continue to walk in a world that's broken, in a world that that is still full of darkness. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. Those three first, those three last paragraphs, but they're first for us today, right? 163 to 165. But then we jump into 166, and that is

the second article of this section. We just finished, we will finish, I believe, and we'll start

this article two called we believe. And it's really important because not only do we profess individual

faith, we profess a faith that has been handed on to us for generations. We profess a faith that

is deeply personal, but it's not isolated. And that's one of the things that paragraph 166 says,

faith is a personal act, but faith is not an isolated act. And so we recognize that, yes,

at times we say, I believe, and that is great, and that's incredible. And there are other times

that we say we believe. In fact, you could say it like this. Every time we say I believe,

what's implied is we believe. And every time we say we believe, what's implied is I personally believe. Hope that makes

sense. Because we're going to talk about this, not only the faith that exists in us, that we place our

faith in the Lord himself, but also the faith that's been handed on to us and that we're called to

hand on to others. That's that personal but not isolated or personal but not private aspect of faith that we're called to hand on to others. That's that personal but not isolated or personal but

but not private aspect of faith that we're going to talk about a little bit today. And so let's open up

the prayer. Father in heaven, we give you praise, we give you glory. We believe in you. And also as

individuals, we can say, and I believe in you, Father.

We can say, I trust you, Jesus.

We can say, I need you, Holy Spirit.

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