Hi, my name is 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

to the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read all the way through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering

our identity in God's family as we journeyed together toward our heavenly home. It is day 26. We're reading, not only are we reading paragraphs 185 to 192, we are also reading the creed, creeds, two of them, the Apostles Creed, and the Nicene Creed today. That's what we're doing today. So again, day 26, we're reading the creeds as well as paragraphs 185 to 192. As always, I'm using the Ascension Edition of the Catechism, which includes the foundations of faith approach. You can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your catechism into your reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash CI. And also, you might know this, but you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast to receive daily updates, daily notifications. It would be incredible. As I said, oh my gosh, today we're going to go through both the Apostles Crete and the Nicene Crete. That's how we're going to kick things off. And so just keep that in mind when you're saying,

wait, these are different. Yes, of course, they're different. And secondly, they're also the introduction, basically, to this new section. We're going into a section two on the creed. And this is really incredible. If you have the Ascension's version of the catechism, you'll be able to see that, Okay, here we are, part one, still profession of faith.

What we are,

part one, still, profession of faith.

What we believe, the creed is section two, the profession of the Christian faith, and it's divided into kind of three main areas, the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. In fact, one of the things that the next couple paragraphs we read today are going to talk about is, yeah, the creed is kind of in three, quote,

they use the word chapters, chapter one being God the Father, chapter two being God the son,

and chapter three being God the Holy Spirit. And so that's what we're going to launch into today.

Also, it's kind of an interesting thing. Again, if you have the ascension edition of the catechism,

you can see that the first section here on the God the Father is from paragraphs 185 to 421. So like almost 250 paragraphs. It was a big chunk of change. So it's really cool. In fact, as I've been reading ahead a little bit, you know, I've been trying to brush up on what we're going to be talking about. And we get to dive deeply. And not today, not necessarily tomorrow, but the third day from now, we're going to really dive deeply into, okay, here is the identity of God the Father. Here's the identity of God himself. And that's so exciting. And then we're going to do that again with God the Son and also God the Holy Spirit. So that's, I don't know, I get pretty excited about that

kind of thing. We're also going to talk about a couple different words I want you to kind of

listen for as we're reading through paragraphs 185 to 192. The first, of course we have the word

creed, right, which means credo, I believe. That's what we call them creeds, because the first

words are typically creedo, I believe, or we believe. But also the word symbol. And we're going to define this

word symbol. I don't know if you've ever stopped to wonder, wait, what does the word symbol mean?

Well, we're going to hear that. The Greek word simblon meant half of a broken object, like a seal that was broken.

And so, like, you'd have one half of the seal, kind of like those friendship necklaces,

you know, say friends forever and they're like half of a heart.

And then the other best friend has the other half of the heart.

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