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 it 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 and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. It is day 45. We're reading paragraphs 315 to 324. I'm using the Ascension edition of the catechism, which includes the foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Also, you can download your catechism into your reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com

slash C-I-Y, and you can follow or you can subscribe to this podcast in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications.

Also, just two things.

I want to thank you.

Everyone who's supported the production of this podcast with prayers and financial gifts, we couldn't do it without you. And also, thank you for being with us. I mean, I know, you know, this is a nugget day. I don't know if you know that. Today's a nugget day. Nugget day at the end of this whole section. We're going to have the in brief of paragraphs 315 to 324. It's incredible because we summarize, the catechism summarizes in these short paragraphs, everything we've been diving deeply into for the last number of days. But also, I am so grateful because here we go. Like, I kind of feel like, and I don't know if I keep saying this. I don't know if you feel this way too, but I just, gosh, it's like we're finally underway. It feels like we're really moving.

I don't know if it feels like that to you, but we are moving. And it feels like, so I don't know,

hey guys, by the way, if you like angels, we're talking about angels tomorrow. And I know people are like, oh my gosh, let's talk about angels. Let's hear about those. Why are we talking about angels tomorrow? Well, we're talking about angels tomorrow because we talked about creation for the last few days.

And among the first things that God created are the angels, which is amazing.

Maybe even the very first thing. The very first thing we know about, I guess. Anyways, let's open this idea up with a prayer. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to kind of highlight what the nuggets are, the in brief. And then we're going to launch into them today. Let's pray, Father in heaven, we give you praise and thanks.

Thank you for continuing to reveal yourself to us.

Thank you for continuing to speak to us.

Thank you for giving us your word in scripture.

And thank you for giving us the way to clearly understand your word through the interpretive lens of the church and the voice of the church that continues to speak truth in this world.

We thank you. Thank you for creating this world. Thank you for creating us. Thank you for walking with us, even in the midst of our pain and our suffering, our grief and our loss. We trust in you this day. We love you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. As I said, we're just kind of some summary of the summary. We're going to cover the fact that, yes,

God created the world on his own without any help. He didn't need any help and didn't take any help, didn't ask for any help,

but also this recognition that God created this world good in order to show forth his glory,

to communicate himself, right, to actually be able

to give himself to his creatures. This is one of the things that we've been highlighting that

scripture declares and the church reminds us of is that God didn't create this world arbitrarily,

...