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 journeyed together toward our heavenly home. It is day 35. We're reading paragraphs 249 to 252. It's only a few short paragraphs, but they are action-packed. More on that in a second. A few reminders. Before we get started, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the foundations of the faith approach. But you can follow along in any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Also, you can download your own catechism into your reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash CIY. And lastly, you can. I don't know if you know this. You can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily notifications and daily updates.

As I said, it is Dave 35 reading paragraphs 249 to 252.

What does that look like?

Well, we've just gone from talking about how the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, or, you know, for our Eastern brothers and sisters, how the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. Again, both of those are phenomenal. But we're also talking now today, specifically, about the formation of the Trinitarian dogma. Now, that is a lot of big words. Well, I apologize, but there's going to be even more big words because at some point, from the very beginning, here's what we're going to talk about. From the beginning, God has been revealing himself as a communion of persons, right? He's been revealing himself as one, one being, right? But also God reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so over the course of time, here's the Old Testament. We already talked about those foreshadows, those kind of like, God, you know, slightly, slowly revealing himself as a, as a Trinity, but then also in Jesus and sending the Holy Spirit, okay, wow, there's a father and the son and the Holy Spirit. There's something about them, but also Paul's letters. In fact, we have his second letter to the Corinthians, his first letter to the Corinthians, and his letter to the Ephesians, where he says something like, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the

fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. So we're going to talk about that today. So there is

this revelation here of the Trinitarian dogma, right? But then in order to clarify what do we mean by

here's God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The church has started to use certain words.

So words that it's taken from philosophical traditions, words like substance and person or hypostasis or relation.

So those are some of those words that we're going to be using.

The church used them from the beginning to try to capture

what is it to say that god is both father son and holy spirit but that the father isn't the son

the son isn't the holy spirit and the holy spirit's not the father right but they all are god so

how do we capture that and so the church has used a formulation of these kinds of words. So that's what we're talking about today. In four short paragraphs, we're going to look at how that Trinitarian dogma was formulated. Tomorrow we're going to talk about more deeply the dogma of the Holy Trinity. But today, here is the formation of the Trinitarian dogma in order to just dive as deeply as we possibly can today.

Let us call upon the Trinity.

Father in heaven, we ask you, in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, to send your Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds, to enliven our hearts.

Just please help us to begin, even just begin to understand or even capture, just help us to take one

closer step into the mystery of who you are in yourself. Because who you are in yourself

is God. And we are nothing without you. And we are everything with you. So you love everything that is that we are.

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