The Importance of the Trinity in Catholic Doctrine

Summary

• The Formula for Baptism
• The Centrality of the Trinity
• Understanding the Trinity
• The Role of Faith
• The Necessity of Study
• Living the Faith

The Formula for Baptism

It is notable to to to declare that our Lord Jesus Christ, when He commands the Apostles to go out, He gives them a specific formula for the for baptism, baptizing them in the name of the father, the Son of the Holy Ghost. That is an indispensable part of the ceremony of baptism. If we were to just baptize somebody with the words I baptize you, that would be invalid. It needs the invocation of all three persons of the boss of Trinity. Now we celebrate the feast of the of Trinity today. And so it's important for us to understand that we cannot use other titles. We cannot play fast and loose with the rules on this. The the formula is there. It is clear, and we must use it. Baptism is the first sacrament. It is the gateway into the faith. It is by which we receive all faith and all grace. So therefore, the formula has to be very precise. And the reason that we use the words is because the Trinity is the core and the heart of Catholic doctrine. There's a very sad case years ago in Australia of a priest who was found to be baptizing, baptizing everybody in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the sink to fire. And those are terms for the different persons of the Blessed Trinity. It's invalid. All of his baptisms were invalid when he used that formula precisely because it has to be the invocation of the persons of the Trinity, not just simply their titles. God, the father is Father. God, the son is Sun. God, the Holy Ghost is the Holy Ghost. And we must believe in them as such as persons.

The Centrality of the Trinity

I get the question many times why do we and tradition say ghost as opposed to spirit? And the reason is actually quite simple in English, especially modern times and the English. The word spirit has a much more flexible meaning, whereas the word ghost is always pertaining to a person. And so it's always a little clearer that when we say the Holy Ghost, we are talking about a specific person. We are not talking about a more general, amorphous concept of what spirit is. It's less flexible and therefore more precise and therefore is more perfect to use in invoke in invoking the Blessed Trinity. We must have this mystery of the Trinity at the very core of everything we do, because it is the first and the greatest and the most important mystery without the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. We can't have the incarnation without the incarnation. We can't have the redemption without the end redemption. We can't have the church. We can't have salvation. We can't have anything. The Holy Trinity is the core and the center of all things. This is why Hilaire Belloc referred to Islam as the great heresy. Obviously they get a lot of things wrong, but it all boils down to one thing their their core rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. Of course, you reject the Trinity. You reject everything. That is what defines the Catholic faith. We are the faith of the Trinity. And we are baptized in the name of the Trinity.

Understanding the Trinity

So maybe we can start talking a little bit about what is the Trinity? Well, unfortunately, there were a little stuck because we can't really know it. We can't know it as we can know the essence of something else. We can know it through its effects. We can know it through faith, but we cannot know it through perfect understanding. There's a famous story of Archbishop Sheen. One time he was talking to a convert and he was explaining to the person who unto a to a young man about the Trinity. And he spent two whole classes, I think, you know, on simply the subject of the Trinity, when he stopped, when he finished, he looked at the young man and said, Do you understand? The young man said, Yes, I think so. Officer Sheen said, Then I must have done something wrong. Because obviously we're not supposed to understand. It's a mystery. It's so great and incomprehensible. The same poll says the depth and the riches of the wisdom, the knowledge of God, how incomprehensible are his judgments and how on searchable his ways. We can't know God. We can't understand him, but we can believe in him. We're not supposed to know him as we can know each other or even ourselves. We have to just simply believe. It's a doctrine of faith. So then let's talk a little bit about faith. If we're going to have faith in the Blessed Trinity, we have to know how to believe.

The Role of Faith

What is faith? Well, faith is the foundational virtue. It is the first virtue. It is the one that gives life to everything else. It is the one that provides a stable foundation for everything else. So the stronger and deeper our foundation is, the more glorious an edifice of virtues we can build up on top of it. But it requires us to have a strong and deep foundation. Faith, like all virtues, can be a habitual thing. Just there. By the mere fact of being Catholics. We have the faith to some degree. The only way to kill it entirely is to sin directly against it, specifically with heresy. We are not allowed to think or to believe anything that is contrary to Catholic doctrine. We're not allowed because that kills our faith. And it kills what makes us Catholic. We can leave our faith like that. Habitual, just. They're always there. And while we don't kill it, we don't do anything to let it grow. But by doing so, we devoted our lives entirely of the entire purpose of why we exist. We have the faith so that we can live it. We have the faith so that we can know love and serve God. So that we can be happy with Him in heaven. We have the faith to understand why we live. And so long as it is just there. Our lives are dead. They're devoid of meaning, devoid of context, and there's no purpose in practicing any other virtue. There is no end. There is no goal in why I should actually discipline myself and try hard to be a good person. So it's not enough to just have habitual faith. Because faith is a virtue by which we submit our judgment. We subordinate our judgment to a truth which we cannot define or or comprehend clearly. But we still believe and accept as true. We cannot prove the bus to Trinity. We can show how it's apt. We can show how it is. It is most appropriate. How is a good thing? And almost. And we can know that it is the way things are. But we cannot know that just by reason, because there is a massive chasm between reason and faith, between reason and God's nature. So we use faith to bridge that chasm. We believe that this is who God is because this is what he told us.

The Necessity of Study

So what is the material of faith? The material of faith is revelation. Now I say that and everyone's ears perk up, not talk about private revelation that actually doesn't enter into it. Revelation, essentially when it comes down to it is based upon two simple columns scripture and tradition. That is it. There cannot be one without the other. Sola Scriptura. The idea of just scripture is a heresy and a very deep one. Scripture does not tell us everything and it can be interpreted in many different ways, although it is an essential part of every life. We need tradition to be able to balance it out. We need tradition to be able to, to, uh, to critique it and understand it. We need tradition to be able to interpret it for us and to apply it in our lives and to define it more clearly. The two of them work together, scripture and tradition. They hold up the entire edifice of our faith. So we need to get to know scripture and we need to bind ourselves to tradition. Let's not make the mistake of thinking that this is all about our journey. Our journey is based upon the route and with the materials that the church has given us. It is based upon the truths of faith, not what we see or what we interpret or what we want. It is all about what God gives us. So we must know the faith. How do we know the faith? How do we know the material of faith in revelation? Well, there's a very simple solution to that study. We need to study. We need to study and we need to study well. The question is, what do we study? Every home, every Catholic home should have the catechism of the Council of Trent and the Baltimore catechism, or the Spanish equivalent of the Baltimore catechism. I reckon I recommend the FTT, by the way, the one we published in South America. We need a good, solid catechism in our home. The catechism of the Council of Trent is the most universal. It is the most perfect. It is the one that we should base our knowledge on. For those who are more scholastic, I do highly recommend, of course, the symmetry theological Saint Thomas Aquinas. For those who want to get to know the Bible better. First, read the Bible. Everyone should be reading the Bible. Parents, be careful with the Old Testament teaching it to your kids. There are a few. Things that need a lot of explanation. But everyone should know the Bible. Everyone should have the Bible in their home and everyone should make it a daily practice of reading it, even if just a little bit. It's recommended to us that we read three chapters of the Old Testament and one of the new every day. It's not a bad practice and it doesn't take that long. But read it, get to know it. And then when you have done that, when you have become familiar with it, read a good commentary on it. I highly cannot more highly recommend Cornelius sloppy day. His his commentary is the most perfect. Cornelia Sloppy De.

Living the Faith

But also it isn't just by knowledge alone. We can know that God exists. We can prove that God exists. We can do so much about the fact that God is. We can even prove that the Catholic faith is the one true faith. We can have all knowledge. But if it is not formed and informed by charity and by the love of God and by a personal relationship with God, as Protestant as that sounds, they stole it from us. A personal relationship with God through prayer. Then it is just words. It is just a shell. We need true prayer to be able to enliven our faith and to let faith have its deep impact on us. So when we pray, we are submitting ourselves our will and our intellect and our emotions to God and letting Him in and letting him speak and letting him guide and letting him influence us. That is what true prayer needs to be. Which is why it's important that we meditate and meditate every day. I recommend meditation be between 15 minutes and a half hour. Very few are up to the same. Theresa, you know, one hour, twice a day. That's a lot. We're not seen Teresa of Avila, but hopefully one day we can get to her level to some degree anyway. But at the very least, 15 minutes of quiet meditation every day. And again, parents, you have all my sympathy trying to find quiet time with the kids and everything else. Manage it, please. For your souls and for the souls of your children. The more contact you have with God, the more intimate contact you have with God, the better parents you'll be, the more perfect you'll be able to guide them and help them through the turbulence of trying to figure out their own spiritual lives. But in order for us to have a guided mental prayer, it's important that we have spiritual reading to. Archbishop Lefever insisted on this. He said The food that sustains our prayer life is spiritual reading. What we meditate and what we read one day should be our meditation the next. And there are so many books about the interior life that we can use. I don't entirely recommend the lives of saints for that, for our prayer life. They're good examples, but they don't the simply the lives of saints don't often give us a guidebook of how to pray or how to love God better. They give us a beautiful anecdote of somebody who achieved wonderful things with the love of God. And it's very uplifting and very important. And we should have a little bit of a diet of that. But I do recommend guidebooks instead. For example, Introduction to the Devout Life by Saint Francis de Sales. I think it's indispensable reading to get to know our blessed mother better and to be able to pray to her better. Maybe we could try the glories of Mary by saying Alphonsus. The one book of his I actually recommend. There's so many things that we can read and so many beautiful works the spiritual way, by and by. Saint Teresa of Avila. After we've gone through a lot spiritually, we can talk about Saint John of the Cross and others. But these are good basics. Stick to the traditional old time books. Anything before anything before 1950, you can guess is probably safe. Anything by a saint before that time especially is very good. Anything after that? Come and talk to me first. Just to be on the safe side. We have to make sure that what we are receiving is good food. As Archbishop Lefevre pointed out. It is the food for our souls. Yes, it is the food for meditation. But it has to be good food. It has to be something that is free of poison. And something that is not going to do us damage in the long term may seem good at first. All of this is on the one hand, we need to make sure that our faith is being enlivened and quickened and fed through our prayer life and through our studies We have to make sure that we are robust in our prayer life, we are regular in our prayer life, that we have a time for meditation, a time for the rosary, a time for our morning and evening prayers. This should be part of our everyday lives. We also need to have short little parties where we can. We can read the Bible or a commentary on the Bible, where we can read our spiritual reading and where we can study. Even if it's 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever you can give. Just find a little bit of time for all of these things every day. If we put order and structure in our lives, it's amazing how many little moments of the day we can find. But we need to make sure that we use them correctly. One of the biggest problems that we have today is that we waste so much time on frivolities. It's been so much time. And this is my first indictment. About the Internet. Very powerful, very good tool that can do a lot of good, but is used for so much foolery, as my grandmother used to call it. Nothing that means anything. Nothing that feeds the soul or helps us toward heaven. It's just filling the empty hours. And we cannot do that during an apparition. And yes, I'm using a private revelation to emphasize my point. During an apparition of a soul in purgatory to a friend. The priest who is the friend asked What is the worst regret that the souls in purgatory have? And the soul responded. All the wasted moments, all the wasted time, every opportunity that I could be using to getting closer to God and that I used for something really foolish. That is a mentality we need to drive home to ourselves. There's so much we can do, and if we're physically or mentally incapable of managing things that are this heavy, that's okay. But we do what we can manage, and we fill our time with productive efforts. If we are too ill to actually be able to study, if we have a migraine or whatever else and we're unable to study, it hurts too much. That's fine. But at the very least, don't waste the time that you have. Use it constructively. Whatever it may be, whatever is available to us, we must use the faith is too delicate and too important. Again, going back to the foundation analogy, it is the foundation stone upon which all is built. And if we want to deepen it, we study. If we want to make it strong, we pray. And everything else is built on top of it. Our faith must be so rock hard that nothing, no storm, no problems. No matter how much weight is piled on top, it will not shake. It will not crack. It will not move. No matter the storms and the conditions, no matter the the earthquakes and the and the tempests, no matter what it will stand. But in order for that to happen, we must have a true, solid, deep faith. And we must never question. The world hates faith. We've all seen that now very clearly. The world hates the faith and it hates people of faith. It hates us and it should hate us. We are its enemy. And that is a good thing. The faith is so important. It is so beautiful. And the Holy Trinity is the thing that binds all of it together. They're at the core of our spiritual life because they he the bus the bus of Trinity is one God. All three persons in the Trinity bind us to him. Unite us to him. Grace is him in our soul. Knowing and loving each other and including us in that process. And when we pray, that is who we are with. When we pray in our meditation, that is who we are with. When we study, we are knowing them. We are learning about them. And him. And we are uniting ourselves to him perfectly so that we disappear and he dominates. Every virtue grows out of faith. Why on earth are the Ten Commandments important? Because it is God himself saying this, these ten simple, obvious commandments. Ah, my law and the way to come to me if they don't have that weight of God's word behind it and the promise of God at the end of it, they don't have the same weight. But the mere fact that they are from him and they are to help us get to him inspires us to overcome the weaknesses and the temptations to be able to pursue that. God himself has spoken. We must respond and obey. God himself has shown us the way. He has given us indications and clear ones at that. He has given us absolute clarity about how we are supposed to behave. And so now we follow not because we're scared of the punishment, not because we're selfish beings, but because of the simple fact that God himself is the one who has given this guideline to us. And that is who we pursue, and that is who we love. And that is to whom we wish to be united. And so let us move our lives through study and prayer to grow and virtue to increase in every possible way, to be able to discipline ourselves and our law and our lives, to be able to know God so that we may serve Him in this world by loving him more perfectly. By doing so, we may be able to be perfectly united, part of the eternal procession of the three divine persons in the Blessed Trinity. So that and and be eternally happy sharing their happiness together as one.

In the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Ghost Amen.