Tag: trinity

  • The Holy Spirit

    The Biggest Heresy You Rarely Hear About

    https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/the-biggest-heresy-you-rarely-hear-about

    Where Does the Bible Teach That the Holy Spirit is God?

    https://stpaulcenter.com/posts/where-does-the-bible-teach-that-the-holy-spirit-is-god

    The heresy of Pneumatomachi

    https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/pneumatomachi

    The 21 Ecumenical Councils

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-21-ecumenical-councils&lang=en

    Pneumatomachianism Refuted: Defending the Divinity of the Holy Ghost

    Pneumatomachi

    https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/pneumatomachi

    Holy Ghost – The Third Person of the Holy Trinity

    https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/holy-ghost

    The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed Explained

    Understanding the Holy Spirit – BISHOP BARRON

    The Holy Spirit is a person, it’s not an impersonal force. It is The Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity.

    In theology a person is an individual substance of a rational nature and so the Holy Spirit is a person, it is of the same essence of God The Father and of God The Son, it is the same Divine Essence, the same Divinity therefore it is God but it has its own intellect and will.

    A careful study of the Holy Scriptures perfectly shows that the Holy Spirit speaks, the Holy Spirit says, the Holy Spirit prevented Paul from going to Asia (Acts 16: 6), the Holy Spirit moves into action, the Holy Spirit is saddened…. the Holy Spirit is quoted in dozens of texts in specific action cleary proving that He is a rational person with an intellect.

    A person is a substance with a will and an intellect with a rational nature is the same difference between a human person and an animal: we would never say that an animal is a person because, although it has some instinct and even feelings,it doesn’t has an intellect nor a rationality and neither an intelligent will. An animal doesn’t reflect upon itself. Most animals don’t even know that they are their own entity: a cat may mistake his own image for another cat in the mirror they don’t have this intellectual concept of their individuality, they don’t have a will, they don’t plan the future as we do, they don’t worry, they don’t study, they don’t rationalize as we do that’s why we do not consider animals as “persons”.

    Yes they do have a body therefore having a body doesn’t define a person, having an intellect and a will does.

    Likewise, angels are persons. Every single angel is an individual person.

    Also God is one God ,only one Divine Essence, only one Divine Nature, it’s not three Gods, there is ONLY ONE GOD but in three persons:

    God The Father, God The Son and God The Holy Spirit do have their own individualities within the Holy Trinity and this Divine Holy Family forms the Family we are called to belong to, to be Sons and Daughters of the Holy Trinity. They become hosts of our souls and we are to receive the Holy Trinity inside the temple of our body, blood soul and humanity. Inside each of our own human inner personal universe, we are to receive the Holy Trinity as a guest into our souls.

    SEE SECTION ON “THE HOLY TRINITY” AND ARTICLES “DEFINITION OF A PERSON” – https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=35539&randomterm=false#:~:text=AND https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11726a.htm

    We get to pray for the Holy Spirit to come, to enlighten us, to guide us, to impart to us His 7 gifts as recorded in Isaiah 11:1 -3. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are, according to the Catholic Tradition: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God. Starting to develop a personal relationship with God The Holy Spirit adds a whole other dimension in our relationship with God!!!

    SEE ARTICLES “The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit – What are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and why do they matter?” https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-seven-gifts-of-the-holy-spirit AND https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_gifts_of_the_Holy_Spirit#:~:text=

    DEFINITION OF A “PERSON”

    In Catholic theology, a person is fundamentally an individual substance of a rational nature, defined by intelligence, will, distinctiveness, and self-subsistence (incommunicability), meaning they are complete in themselves but called to communion with others. This definition applies analogously to God (the Trinity), angels, and humans, but for humans, personhood also involves being a body-soul composite, uniquely reflecting God’s image through intellect and love in relationship, and possessing inherent dignity from conception. 

    Core Characteristics

    • Individual Substance: A complete, self-existing entity, not a part of something else.
    • Rational Nature: Possesses intellect and will, enabling knowledge and love, distinguishing persons from animals or inanimate objects.
    • Incommunicability: Each person is unique and distinct, unable to be completely merged into another.
    • Openness to Others: While distinct, persons are made for communion, not isolation, finding fulfillment in relationships, especially with God. 

    Types of Persons in Theology

    • God: The Holy Trinity is three distinct Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) in one divine nature.
    • Angels: Purely spiritual, intellectual beings, existing as individual persons.
    • Humans: A unique composite of a rational soul and a body, made in God’s image, with inherent dignity from the first moment of existence. 

    Key Distinctions for Humans

    • Body-Soul Union: Humans are not just spirits but are embodied, allowing for unique forms of thought, love, and procreation.
    • Capacity for Change: Unlike angels, human persons have the capacity for growth, development, and change through their embodied lives.
    • Dignity: Every living human individual, regardless of developmental stage or capability, is a person with intrinsic worth and rights, reflecting God’s image. 

    Person

    According to the generally accepted definition of Boethius, a person is an individual substance of a rational or intellectual nature.  The notion of person is subject to analogical differences depending on whether the term is referring to human, angelic, or divine persons.

    PERSON

    “An individual substance of a rational nature” (Boethius). Therefore every individual intellectual substance which is complete in itself, uncommunicated and existing for itself, is a person. Essential to person in theological terms are intelligence and substantiality, wholeness in oneself and especially individuality. From individuality flow such features of personhood as distinctiveness, incommunicability, and uniqueness. Among human persons there are also the elements of responsibility and possession of distinctive rights. (Etym. Latin persona, actor’s mask; character; supposition of a rational nature.)

    https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=35539&randomterm=false#:~:text=

    Person

    https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11726a.htm

    The Latin word persona was originally used to denote the mask worn by an actor. From this it was applied to the role he assumed, and, finally, to any character on the stage of life, to any individual. This article discusses (1) the definition of “person”, especially with reference to the doctrine of the Incarnation; and (2) the use of the word persona and its Greek equivalents in connection with the Trinitarian disputes. For the psychological treatment see PERSONALITY.

    Definition

    The classic definition is that given by Boethius in “De persona et duabus naturis”, c. ii: Naturæ rationalis individua substantia (an individual substance of a rational nature).

    Substantia — “Substance” is used to exclude accidents: “We see that accidents cannot constitute person” (Boethius, op. cit.). Substantia is used in two senses: of the concrete substance as existing in the individual, called substantia prima, corresponding to Aristotle’s ousia prote; and of abstractions, substance as existing in genus and species, called substantia secunda, Aristotle’s ousia deutera. It is disputed which of the two the word taken by itself here signifies. It seems probable that of itself it prescinds from substantia prima and substantia secunda, and is restricted to the former signification only by the word individua.

    Individua — Individua, i.e., indivisum in se, is that which, unlike the higher branches in the tree of Porphyry, genus and species, cannot be further subdivided. Boethius in giving his definition does not seem to attach any further signification to the word. It is merely synonymous with singularis.

    Rationalis naturae — Person is predicated only of intellectual beings. The generic word which includes all individual existing substances is suppositum. Thus person is a subdivision of suppositum which is applied equally to rational and irrational, living and non-living individuals. A person is therefore sometimes defined as suppositum naturae rationalis.

    The definition of Boethius as it stands can hardly be considered a satisfactory one. The words taken literally can be applied to the rational soul of man, and also the human nature of Christ. That St. Thomas accepts it is presumably due to the fact that he found it in possession, and recognized as the traditional definition. He explains it in terms that practically constitute a new definition. Individua substantia signifies, he says, substantia, completa, per se subsistens, separata ab aliia, i.e., a substance, complete, subsisting per se, existing apart from others (III, Q. xvi, a. 12, ad 2um).

    If to this be added rationalis naturae, we have a definition comprising the five notes that go to make up a person: (a) substantia– this excludes accident; (b) completa– it must form a complete nature; that which is a part, either actually or “aptitudinally” does not satisfy the definition; (c) per se subsistens–the person exists in himself and for himself; he is sui juris, the ultimate possessor of his nature and all its acts, the ultimate subject of predication of all his attributes; that which exists in another is not a person; (d) separata ab aliis–this excludes the universal, substantia secunda, which has no existence apart from the individual; (e) rationalis naturae–excludes all non-intellectual supposita.

    To a person therefore belongs a threefold incommunicability, expressed in notes (b), (c), and (d). The human soul belongs to the nature as a part of it, and is therefore not a person, even when existing separately. The human nature of Christ does not exist per se seorsum, but in alio, in the Divine Personality of the Word. It is therefore communicated by assumption and so is not a person. Lastly the Divine Essence, though subsisting per se, is so communicated to the Three Persons that it does not exist apart from them; it is therefore not a person.

    Theologians agree that in the Hypostatic Union the immediate reason why the Sacred Humanity, though complete and individual, is not a person is that it is not a subsistence, not per se seorsum subsistens. They have, however, disputed for centuries as to what may be the ultimate determination of the nature which if present would make it a subsistence and so a person, what in other words is the ultimate foundation of personality. According to Scotus, as he is usually understood, the ultimate foundation is a mere negation. That individual intellectual nature is a person which is neither of its nature destined to be communicated–as is the human soul–nor is actually communicated–as is the Sacred Humanity. If the Hypostatic Union ceased, the latter would ipso facto, without any further determination, become a person. To this it is objected that the person possesses the nature and all its attributes. It is difficult to believe that this possessor, as distinct from the objects possessed, is constituted only by a negative. Consequently, the traditional Thomists, following Cajetan, hold that there is a positive determination which they call the “mode” of subsistence. It is the function of this mode to make the nature incommunicable, terminated in itself, and capable of receiving its own esse, or existence. Without this mode the human nature of Christ exists only by the uncreated esse of the Word.

    CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

    I. “IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT”

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/paragraph_2_the_father.html#:~:text=

    232 Christians are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”53 Before receiving the sacrament, they respond to a three-part question when asked to confess the Father, the Son and the Spirit: “I do.” “The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity.”54

    233 Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: not in their names,55 for there is only one God, the almighty Father, his only Son and the Holy Spirit: the Most Holy Trinity.

    234 The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the “hierarchy of the truths of faith”.56 The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men “and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin”.57

    235 This paragraph expounds briefly (I) how the mystery of the Blessed Trinity was revealed, (II) how the Church has articulated the doctrine of the faith regarding this mystery, and (III) how, by the divine missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit, God the Father fulfils the “plan of his loving goodness” of creation, redemption and sanctification.

    236 The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions.

    237 The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the “mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God”.58 To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

    II. THE REVELATION OF GOD AS TRINITY

    The Father revealed by the Son

    238 Many religions invoke God as “Father”. the deity is often considered the “father of gods and of men”. In Israel, God is called “Father” inasmuch as he is Creator of the world.59 Even more, God is Father because of the covenant and the gift of the law to Israel, “his first-born son”.60 God is also called the Father of the king of Israel. Most especially he is “the Father of the poor”, of the orphaned and the widowed, who are under his loving protection.61

    239 By calling God “Father”, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,62 which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. the language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard:63 no one is father as God is Father.

    240 Jesus revealed that God is Father in an unheard-of sense: he is Father not only in being Creator; he is eternally Father by his relationship to his only Son who, reciprocally, is Son only in relation to his Father: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”64

    241 For this reason the apostles confess Jesus to be the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; as “the image of the invisible God”; as the “radiance of the glory of God and the very stamp of his nature”.65

    242 Following this apostolic tradition, the Church confessed at the first ecumenical council at Nicaea (325) that the Son is &uot;consubstantial” with the Father, that is, one only God with him.66 The second ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, kept this expression in its formulation of the Nicene Creed and confessed “the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father”.67

    The Father and the son revealed by the spirit

    243 Before his Passover, Jesus announced the sending of “another Paraclete” (Advocate), the Holy Spirit. At work since creation, having previously “spoken through the prophets”, the Spirit will now be with and in the disciples, to teach them and guide them “into all the truth”.68 The Holy Spirit is thus revealed as another divine person with Jesus and the Father.

    244 The eternal origin of the Holy Spirit is revealed in his mission in time. the Spirit is sent to the apostles and to the Church both by the Father in the name of the Son, and by the Son in person, once he had returned to the Father.69 The sending of the person of the Spirit after Jesus’ glorification70 reveals in its fullness the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

    245 The apostolic faith concerning the Spirit was confessed by the second ecumenical council at Constantinople (381): “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.”71 By this confession, the Church recognizes the Father as “the source and origin of the whole divinity”.72 But the eternal origin of the Spirit is not unconnected with the Son’s origin: “The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is God, one and equal with the Father and the Son, of the same substance and also of the same nature. . . Yet he is not called the Spirit of the Father alone,. . . but the Spirit of both the Father and the Son.”73 The Creed of the Church from the Council of Constantinople confesses: “With the Father and the Son, he is worshipped and glorified.”74

    246 The Latin tradition of the Creed confesses that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque)”. the Council of Florence in 1438 explains: “The Holy Spirit is eternally from Father and Son; He has his nature and subsistence at once (simul) from the Father and the Son. He proceeds eternally from both as from one principle and through one spiration… And, since the Father has through generation given to the only-begotten Son everything that belongs to the Father, except being Father, the Son has also eternally from the Father, from whom he is eternally born, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son.”75

    247 The affirmation of the filioque does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople. But Pope St. Leo I, following an ancient Latin and Alexandrian tradition, had already confessed it dogmatically in 447,76 even before Rome, in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, came to recognize and receive the Symbol of 381. the use of this formula in the Creed was gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries). the introduction of the filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Latin liturgy constitutes moreover, even today, a point of disagreement with the Orthodox Churches.

    248 At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father’s character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he “who proceeds from the Father”, it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son.77 The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, “legitimately and with good reason”,78 for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as “the principle without principle”,79 is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.80 This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed.

    III. THE HOLY TRINITY IN THE TEACHING OF THE FAITH

    The formation of the Trinitarian dogma

    249 From the beginning, the revealed truth of the Holy Trinity has been at the very root of the Church’s living faith, principally by means of Baptism. It finds its expression in the rule of baptismal faith, formulated in the preaching, catechesis and prayer of the Church. Such formulations are already found in the apostolic writings, such as this salutation taken up in the Eucharistic liturgy: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”81

    250 During the first centuries the Church sought to clarify her Trinitarian faith, both to deepen her own understanding of the faith and to defend it against the errors that were deforming it. This clarification was the work of the early councils, aided by the theological work of the Church Fathers and sustained by the Christian people’s sense of the faith.

    251 In order to articulate the dogma of the Trinity, the Church had to develop her own terminology with the help of certain notions of philosophical origin: “substance”, “person” or “hypostasis”, “relation” and so on. In doing this, she did not submit the faith to human wisdom, but gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, “infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand”.82

    252 The Church uses (I) the term “substance” (rendered also at times by “essence” or “nature”) to designate the divine being in its unity, (II) the term “person” or “hypostasis” to designate the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the real distinction among them, and (III) the term “relation” to designate the fact that their distinction lies in the relationship of each to the others.

    The dogma of the Holy Trinity

    253 The Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the “consubstantial Trinity”.83 The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire: “The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e. by nature one God.”84 In the words of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), “Each of the persons is that supreme reality, viz., the divine substance, essence or nature.”85

    254 The divine persons are really distinct from one another. “God is one but not solitary.”86 “Father”, “Son”, “Holy Spirit” are not simply names designating modalities of the divine being, for they are really distinct from one another: “He is not the Father who is the Son, nor is the Son he who is the Father, nor is the Holy Spirit he who is the Father or the Son.”87 They are distinct from one another in their relations of origin: “It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds.”88 The divine Unity is Triune.

    255 The divine persons are relative to one another. Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another: “In the relational names of the persons the Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. While they are called three persons in view of their relations, we believe in one nature or substance.”89 Indeed “everything (in them) is one where there is no opposition of relationship.”90 “Because of that unity the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Son is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Son.”91

    256 St. Gregory of Nazianzus, also called “the Theologian”, entrusts this summary of Trinitarian faith to the catechumens of Constantinople: Above all guard for me this great deposit of faith for which I live and fight, which I want to take with me as a companion, and which makes me bear all evils and despise all pleasures: I mean the profession of faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I entrust it to you today. By it I am soon going to plunge you into water and raise you up from it. I give it to you as the companion and patron of your whole life. I give you but one divinity and power, existing one in three, and containing the three in a distinct way. Divinity without disparity of substance or nature, without superior degree that raises up or inferior degree that casts down. . . the infinite co-naturality of three infinites. Each person considered in himself is entirely God. . . the three considered together. . . I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendour. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me. .92

    IV. THE DIVINE WORKS AND THE TRINITARIAN MISSIONS

    257 “O blessed light, O Trinity and first Unity!”93 God is eternal blessedness, undying life, unfading light. God is love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God freely wills to communicate the glory of his blessed life. Such is the “plan of his loving kindness”, conceived by the Father before the foundation of the world, in his beloved Son: “He destined us in love to be his sons” and “to be conformed to the image of his Son”, through “the spirit of sonship”.94 This plan is a “grace [which] was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began”, stemming immediately from Trinitarian love.95 It unfolds in the work of creation, the whole history of salvation after the fall, and the missions of the Son and the Spirit, which are continued in the mission of the Church.96

    258 The whole divine economy is the common work of the three divine persons. For as the Trinity has only one and the same natures so too does it have only one and the same operation: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle.”97 However, each divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal property. Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, “one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are”.98 It is above all the divine missions of the Son’s Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit that show forth the properties of the divine persons.

    259 Being a work at once common and personal, the whole divine economy makes known both what is proper to the divine persons, and their one divine nature. Hence the whole Christian life is a communion with each of the divine persons, without in any way separating them. Everyone who glorifies the Father does so through the Son in the Holy Spirit; everyone who follows Christ does so because the Father draws him and the Spirit moves him.99

    260 The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity.100 But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity: “If a man loves me”, says the Lord, “he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him”:101

    O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.102

    IN BRIEF

    261 The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and of Christian life. God alone can make it known to us by revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

    262 The Incarnation of God’s Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God.

    263 The mission of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father in the name of the Son ( Jn 14:26) and by the Son “from the Father” ( Jn 15:26), reveals that, with them, the Spirit is one and the same God. “With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified” (Nicene Creed).

    264 “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son” (St. Augustine, De Trin. 15, 26, 47: PL 42, 1095).

    265 By the grace of Baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, we are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here on earth in the obscurity of faith, and after death in eternal light (cf. Paul VI, CPG # 9).

    266 “Now this is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person of the Father is one, the Son’s is another, the Holy Spirit’s another; but the Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty coeternal” (Athanasian Creed: DS 75; ND 16).

    267 Inseparable in what they are, the divine persons are also inseparable in what they do. But within the single divine operation each shows forth what is proper to him in the Trinity, especially in the divine missions of the Son’s Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

  • God is Love so He is a Triune God, One God in Three Persons, and We have a whole Divine Family waiting for us in Heaven in which we can be grafted in and united to already, even right here on Earth



    Rediscovering the nature, the essence, the very definition of what and who God is, is absolutely amazing!!! Understanding that God is a Holy Trinity, Three Persons in one God, one and only God, one only Divinity, one Essence in Three Persons: God The Father, God The Son and God The Holy Spirit.

    To define God, we have to go back to 1st John chapter 4 verse 8:
    “God is love”.

    But how do you define love when God is infinte and we humans as so limited to grasp the deep things of God?

    Well, how would you define a table to an extraterrestrial being from another system? A text with a definition might do. A picture even better…
    How about cooking? We would need to show a person with some food doing some action of cutting, mixing, pouring, heating, stiring… We do agree that showing a picture of a person with a tomato in the hand would not do. We would also need to show the action of actually cutting or peeling or manipulating the tomato to convey the concept of cooking. It therefore must have 3 components: a person, some food, and the action of cooking…

    Well love is also an action, love is a action verb. Not just a feeling as movies would have us believe. It is a verb. To define love, we first need a lover, a person who loves, who generates love, who gives love, and that person is God the Father.

    We also need a recipient, a beloved, another person who receives love, that person is God The Son.

    And because love is an action, it is an action verb, we need something to be done between them two, an action, a verb, love is embracing, giving, forgiving, gifting, protecting, caring, kissing, taking care of, feeding, providing, sacrificing, listening to, watching over, looking after, waiting, stroking, hugging, cuddling, covering, sheltering… it’s a verb and this verb is so powerful that it takes on its own identity with a will and an intellect, and as a rational individuality this person is God the Holy Spirit who is Charity, who is Love in action Itself.
    SEE SECTION ON “THE HOLY TRINITY”.

    In the account of the Creation in Genesis 1:27 The Holy Trinity appears for the first time as God speaks in the first personal subject pronoun of the plural form, “Let us make man in Our Image”. Who was God speaking to in such a plural form? The Three Persons cooperated as One Concert of Love in This Divine Work of Creation.

    This Triad, this Trio, those Three Persons, from the very same and unique Divine nature and essence, live as One God.
    They are co-eternal, they always existed, not one came before another as God lives outside of time, He created time for humans but He Himself is not subjected to time.
    They are co-equal and consubstantial of the same substance, the same Essence, the same God, one Divinity in three persons.
    They share the same Divine Nature or Essence. They are distinct persons, yet possess one inseparable, undivided Divine Substance. 

    To exemplify what God is in our little human minds and brains that are too limited to understand what the Holy Trinity is, God has tried to explain to us who He is using concepts that the human mind can grasp yet The Most Holy Trinity still remains a Mystery as God is infinite and cannot be contained nor understood by a limited mind.

    The Holy Spirit has given us to understand that in the Holy Baptism we received the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity. Each one gifted by a Person of the Holy Trinity.
    Faith from The Father.
    Hope from the Son.
    Charity from the Holy Spirit.

    In the Confiteor prayer, when we confess our sins we pray the following: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do”, the thoughts being related to The Father,  the words because God The Son is the Verb, The Word, The Logos,  and in works relating to God The Holy Spirit in action in our lives that we offend by our wrongdoings or by our omissions of good actions or lack of action when we fail to act upon His promptings.

    Also, The Holy Trinity acts in our lives through the three sacraments of Christian Initiation.
    The first Sacrament of Baptism makes us Sons of God of God the Father by adoption within the Son.
    Through the Sacrament of the Holy Communion we receive God The Son in the Holy Eucharist.
    In the Sacrament of the Confirmation we receive a personal downpour of God’s Holy Spirit. 

    The Triune God is LOVE; God The Father is the Source of Love, God The Son is the Incarnate Love and God The Holy Spirit is the Love being Poured out upon us.

    God the Father is connected directly to our will and therefore we need to conform our will to the Will of God. As the Holy Mother of God The Son, the Will of God must become our own will, “Fiat Mihi Segundun Verbum Tuum” said the Virgin Mary to the Arcangel Gabriel relating to Her the Message of God. “Fiat Voluntas Tua”
    said Jesus Himself to His Father when He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.
    Our will must come to be what God The Father wills, our intellect relates to God The Son and all memory to God The Holy Spirit. These are the 3 highest faculties of our Human Soul, perfectly compatible and formatted to be configured according to God in His Three Persons.

    The Holy Trinity therefore consists of a Divine Family to which we are all called and predestined to belong to. God called all of us, every single human being, to become part of his Divine Family. Not all humans will respond to the call as every human has free will but all of us were called to be Sons and Daughters of God to enter into the Divine Family and to be adopted as Sons and Daughters of God.

    ILLUSTRATION: The same as the human hand has five fingers, when we are created we are called to be part of a family with persons who take care of us whatever the circumstances that we may have on Earth.

    – As the middle finger God The Father is the Central Person,

    – God Our Father, as the middle finger of our hand has God the Son “at his right hand”, the index represents God The Son who points out to The Father: he came to the Earth to teach us about The Father. to show us The Father, to take us back to The Father and to bring us back to The Father. Jesus Christ is the index,

    – God the Holy Spirit could be symbolized by what we interestingly call in English “the ring finger”; it is the finger where we put the ring of a married person. It is appropriate as God the Holy Spirit is the very person who literally married or espoused the Holy Virgin Mary to put the seed of God into her womb so that God the Son would be born as God Incarnate, as a human being and we, humans, are also called to receive God the Holy Spirit into our souls as it cleanses our entire being at our Baptism. We also receive Him contained in the Holy Communion and we receive Him personally too in the Holy Sacrament of the Confirmation.

    – Therefore right next to the ring finger is the little finger: it is shorter than the others but it is still the closest to the Holy Trinity and that is Our Mother the Holy Virgin Mary, who is the closest being next to the Holy Trinity, above all angels, being Herself Queen of Angels. The little finger is actually right next to the ring finger because God the Holy Spirit is Her Spouse: The Holy Virgin Mary was literally impregnated by the Holy Spirit who put the seed of God into Mary’s womb to beget the Son of God Incarnate, God The Son in flesh, The Incarnate Word of God Jesus Christ and so Mother, The Holy Mother of God the Virgin Mary, is that fourth finger that is shorter than the other three, but the closest to them.

    – And finally we have a fifth finger which is the thumb. The thumb seems to be separate from the others, it doesn’t even reach the height of the others, it is very mobile and that finger represents our Guardian Angel: it is of the Heavenly Realm. It is not human, it’s part of the hand because it does work and acts in presence of God the Holy Trinity but it is very mobile because it actually accompanies us here below on Earth since our conception all the way throughout our lives until our personal judgment. He is with us every single day of our lives. The thumb shows us the way. murmurs into our ears what we should or should not do, constantly reminds us of the right path and guides us. And therefore we pray: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom God’s love commits me here, Ever this day (or night) be at my side, To light, to guard, to rule, and guide. From sinful stain O keep me free, And at death’s hour, my helper be. Amen”. He will try to put us on the right path to bring us back to the Holy Trinity, to show us the way to go home: that is our Guardian Angel.

    Therefore every single one of us, every single human being, we actually live right in the palm of God’s hand, in the palm of a Divine Family watching over us, in the middle of a Heavenly cradle. This is when God closes His Hand and we are safe under the protection of God the Father, God The Son, God the Holy Spirit, with also The Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady Terror of Demons, Virgen Potens, Most Powerful Virgin and with the constant care of our Guardian Angel, whoever we are, whatever our circumstances here on Earth, social background, with a human family or without a human family. We are never alone, we have a family!!!!

    We have God The Father God The Son God The Holy Spirit and Mother Mary and our Guardian Angel. every single one of us!!! We have a family and we are all taken care of!!!!

  • BAPTISM

    STUDY OF OFFICIAL CATECHISM REFERENCE BOOK OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

    CCC 1213-1280

    https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

    https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P3G.HTM

    Article 1 The Sacrament Of Baptism

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_one/article_1.html#:~:text=

    THE SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM

    1213 Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit (vitae spiritualis ianua),4 and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: “Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word.”5

    I. What is This Sacrament Called?

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/i_what_is_this_sacrament_called.html

    1214 This sacrament is called Baptism, after the central rite by which it is carried out: to baptize (Greek baptizein) means to “plunge” or “immerse”; the “plunge” into the water symbolizes the catechumen’s burial into Christ’s death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him, as “a new creature.”6

    1215 This sacrament is also called “the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit,” for it signifies and actually brings about the birth of water and the Spirit without which no one “can enter the kingdom of God.”7

    1216 “This bath is called enlightenment, because those who receive this [catechetical] instruction are enlightened in their understanding . . . .”8 Having received in Baptism the Word, “the true light that enlightens every man,” the person baptized has been “enlightened,” he becomes a “son of light,” indeed, he becomes “light” himself:9

    Baptism is God’s most beautiful and magnificent gift….We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth, seal, and most precious gift. It is called gift because it is conferred on those who bring nothing of their own; grace since it is given even to the guilty; Baptism because sin is buried in the water; anointing for it is priestly and royal as are those who are anointed; enlightenment because it radiates light; clothing since it veils our shame; bath because it washes; and seal as it is our guard and the sign of God’s Lordship.10

    II. Baptism in the Economy of Salvation

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/ii_baptism_in_the_economy_of_salvation.html#:~:text=

    Prefigurations of Baptism in the Old Covenant

    1217 In the liturgy of the Easter Vigil, during the blessing of the baptismal water, the Church solemnly commemorates the great events in salvation history that already prefigured the mystery of Baptism:

    Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power.

    In Baptism we use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament.11

    1218 Since the beginning of the world, water, so humble and wonderful a creature, has been the source of life and fruitfulness. Sacred Scripture sees it as “oveshadowed” by the Spirit of God:12

    At the very dawn of creation

    your Spirit breathed on the waters,

    making them the wellspring of all holiness.13

    1219 The Church has seen in Noah’s ark a prefiguring of salvation by Baptism, for by it “a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water”:14

    The waters of the great flood

    you made a sign of the waters of Baptism,

    that make an end of sin and a new beginning of goodness.15

    1220 If water springing up from the earth symbolizes life, the water of the sea is a symbol of death and so can represent the mystery of the cross. By this symbolism Baptism signifies communion with Christ’s death.

    1221 But above all, the crossing of the Red Sea, literally the liberation of Israel from the slavery of Egypt, announces the liberation wrought by Baptism:

    You freed the children of Abraham from the slavery of Pharaoh,

    bringing them dry-shod through the waters of the Red Sea,

    to be an image of the people set free in Baptism.16

    1222 Finally, Baptism is prefigured in the crossing of the Jordan River by which the People of God received the gift of the land promised to Abraham’s descendants, an image of eternal life. the promise of this blessed inheritance is fulfilled in the New Covenant.

    Christ’s Baptism

    1223 All the Old Covenant prefigurations find their fulfillment in Christ Jesus. He begins his public life after having himself baptized by St. John the Baptist in the Jordan.17 After his resurrection Christ gives this mission to his apostles: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”18

    1224 Our Lord voluntarily submitted himself to the baptism of St. John, intended for sinners, in order to “fulfill all righteousness.”19 Jesus’ gesture is a manifestation of his self-emptying.20 The Spirit who had hovered over the waters of the first creation descended then on the Christ as a prelude of the new creation, and the Father revealed Jesus as his “beloved Son.”21

    1225 In his Passover Christ opened to all men the fountain of Baptism. He had already spoken of his Passion, which he was about to suffer in Jerusalem, as a “Baptism” with which he had to be baptized.22 The blood and water that flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus are types of Baptism and the Eucharist, the sacraments of new life.23 From then on, it is possible “to be born of water and the Spirit”24 in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

    See where you are baptized, see where Baptism comes from, if not from the cross of Christ, from his death. There is the whole mystery: he died for you. In him you are redeemed, in him you are saved.25

    Baptism in the Church

    1226 From the very day of Pentecost the Church has celebrated and administered holy Baptism. Indeed St. Peter declares to the crowd astounded by his preaching: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”26 The apostles and their collaborators offer Baptism to anyone who believed in Jesus: Jews, the God-fearing, pagans.27 Always, Baptism is seen as connected with faith: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household,” St. Paul declared to his jailer in Philippi. and the narrative continues, the jailer “was baptized at once, with all his family.”28

    1227 According to the Apostle Paul, the believer enters through Baptism into communion with Christ’s death, is buried with him, and rises with him:

    Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.29

    The baptized have “put on Christ.”30 Through the Holy Spirit, Baptism is a bath that purifies, justifies, and sanctifies.31

    1228 Hence Baptism is a bath of water in which the “imperishable seed” of the Word of God produces its life-giving effect.32 St. Augustine says of Baptism: “The word is brought to the material element, and it becomes a sacrament.”33

    III. How is the Sacrament of Baptism Celebrated?

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/iii_how_is_the_sacrament_of_baptism_celebrated.html

    Christian Initiation

    1229 From the time of the apostles, becoming a Christian has been accomplished by a journey and initiation in several stages. This journey can be covered rapidly or slowly, but certain essential elements will always have to be present: proclamation of the Word, acceptance of the Gospel entailing conversion, profession of faith, Baptism itself, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and admission to Eucharistic communion.

    1230 This initiation has varied greatly through the centuries according to circumstances. In the first centuries of the Church, Christian initiation saw considerable development. A long period of catechumenate included a series of preparatory rites, which were liturgical landmarks along the path of catechumenal preparation and culminated in the celebration of the sacraments of Christian initiation.

    1231 Where infant Baptism has become the form in which this sacrament is usually celebrated, it has become a single act encapsulating the preparatory stages of Christian initiation in a very abridged way. By its very nature infant Baptism requires a post-baptismal catechumenate. Not only is there a need for instruction after Baptism, but also for the necessary flowering of baptismal grace in personal growth. the catechism has its proper place here.

    1232 The second Vatican Council restored for the Latin Church “the catechumenate for adults, comprising several distinct steps.”34 The rites for these stages are to be found in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA).35 The Council also gives permission that: “In mission countries, in addition to what is furnished by the Christian tradition, those elements of initiation rites may be admitted which are already in use among some peoples insofar as they can be adapted to the Christian ritual.”36

    1233 Today in all the rites, Latin and Eastern, the Christian initiation of adults begins with their entry into the catechumenate and reaches its culmination in a single celebration of the three sacraments of initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist.37 In the Eastern rites the Christian initiation of infants also begins with Baptism followed immediately by Confirmation and the Eucharist, while in the Roman rite it is followed by years of catechesis before being completed later by Confirmation and the Eucharist, the summit of their Christian initiation.38

    The mystagogy of the celebration

    1234 The meaning and grace of the sacrament of Baptism are clearly seen in the rites of its celebration. By following the gestures and words of this celebration with attentive participation, the faithful are initiated into the riches this sacrament signifies and actually brings about in each newly baptized person.

    1235 The sign of the cross, on the threshold of the celebration, marks with the imprint of Christ the one who is going to belong to him and signifies the grace of the redemption Christ won for us by his cross.

    1236 The proclamation of the Word of God enlightens the candidates and the assembly with the revealed truth and elicits the response of faith, which is inseparable from Baptism. Indeed Baptism is “the sacrament of faith” in a particular way, since it is the sacramental entry into the life of faith.

    1237 Since Baptism signifies liberation from sin and from its instigator the devil, one or more exorcisms are pronounced over the candidate. the celebrant then anoints him with the oil of catechumens, or lays his hands on him, and he explicitly renounces Satan. Thus prepared, he is able to confess the faith of the Church, to which he will be “entrusted” by Baptism.39

    1238 The baptismal water is consecrated by a prayer of epiclesis (either at this moment or at the Easter Vigil). the Church asks God that through his Son the power of the Holy Spirit may be sent upon the water, so that those who will be baptized in it may be “born of water and the Spirit.”40

    1239 The essential rite of the sacrament follows: Baptism properly speaking. It signifies and actually brings about death to sin and entry into the life of the Most Holy Trinity through configuration to the Paschal mystery of Christ. Baptism is performed in the most expressive way by triple immersion in the baptismal water. However, from ancient times it has also been able to be conferred by pouring the water three times over the candidate’s head.

    1240 In the Latin Church this triple infusion is accompanied by the minister’s words: “N., I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” In the Eastern liturgies the catechumen turns toward the East and the priest says: “The servant of God, N., is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” At the invocation of each person of the Most Holy Trinity, the priest immerses the candidate in the water and raises him up again.

    1241 The anointing with sacred chrism, perfumed oil consecrated by the bishop, signifies the gift of the Holy Spirit to the newly baptized, who has become a Christian, that is, one “anointed” by the Holy Spirit, incorporated into Christ who is anointed priest, prophet, and king.41

    1242 In the liturgy of the Eastern Churches, the post-baptismal anointing is the sacrament of Chrismation (Confirmation). In the Roman liturgy the post-baptismal anointing announces a second anointing with sacred chrism to be conferred later by the bishop Confirmation, which will as it were “confirm” and complete the baptismal anointing.

    1243 The white garment symbolizes that the person baptized has “put on Christ,”42 has risen with Christ. the candle, lit from the Easter candle, signifies that Christ has enlightened the neophyte. In him the baptized are “the light of the world.”43 The newly baptized is now, in the only Son, a child of God entitled to say the prayer of the children of God: “Our Father.”

    1244 First Holy Communion. Having become a child of God clothed with the wedding garment, the neophyte is admitted “to the marriage supper of the Lamb”44 and receives the food of the new life, the body and blood of Christ. the Eastern Churches maintain a lively awareness of the unity of Christian initiation by giving Holy Communion to all the newly baptized and confirmed, even little children, recalling the Lord’s words: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them.”45 The Latin Church, which reserves admission to Holy Communion to those who have attained the age of reason, expresses the orientation of Baptism to the Eucharist by having the newly baptized child brought to the altar for the praying of the Our Father.

    1245 The solemn blessing concludes the celebration of Baptism. At the Baptism of newborns the blessing of the mother occupies a special place.

    IV. Who can Receive Baptism?

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/iv_who_can_receive_baptism.html

    1246 “Every person not yet baptized and only such a person is able to be baptized.”46

    The Baptism of adults

    1247 Since the beginning of the Church, adult Baptism is the common practice where the proclamation of the Gospel is still new. the catechumenate (preparation for Baptism) therefore occupies an important place. This initiation into Christian faith and life should dispose the catechumen to receive the gift of God in Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist.

    1248 The catechumenate, or formation of catechumens, aims at bringing their conversion and faith to maturity, in response to the divine initiative and in union with an ecclesial community. the catechumenate is to be “a formation in the whole Christian life . . . during which the disciples will be joined to Christ their teacher. the catechumens should be properly initiated into the mystery of salvation and the practice of the evangelical virtues, and they should be introduced into the life of faith, liturgy, and charity of the People of God by successive sacred rites.”47

    1249 Catechumens “are already joined to the Church, they are already of the household of Christ, and are quite frequently already living a life of faith, hope, and charity.”48 “With love and solicitude mother Church already embraces them as her own.”49

    The Baptism of infants

    1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called.50 The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. the Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.51

    1251 Christian parents will recognize that this practice also accords with their role as nurturers of the life that God has entrusted to them.52

    1252 The practice of infant Baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church. There is explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on, and it is quite possible that, from the beginning of the apostolic preaching, when whole “households” received baptism, infants may also have been baptized.53

    Faith and Baptism

    1253 Baptism is the sacrament of faith.54 But faith needs the community of believers. It is only within the faith of the Church that each of the faithful can believe. the faith required for Baptism is not a perfect and mature faith, but a beginning that is called to develop. the catechumen or the godparent is asked: “What do you ask of God’s Church?” the response is: “Faith!”

    1254 For all the baptized, children or adults, faith must grow after Baptism. For this reason the Church celebrates each year at the Easter Vigil the renewal of baptismal promises. Preparation for Baptism leads only to the threshold of new life. Baptism is the source of that new life in Christ from which the entire Christian life springs forth.

    1255 For the grace of Baptism to unfold, the parents’ help is important. So too is the role of the godfather and godmother, who must be firm believers, able and ready to help the newly baptized – child or adult on the road of Christian life.55 Their task is a truly ecclesial function (officium).56 The whole ecclesial community bears some responsibility for the development and safeguarding of the grace given at Baptism.

    VI. The Necessity of Baptism

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/vi_the_necessity_of_baptism.html

    1257 The Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation.59 He also commands his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and to baptize them.60 Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament.61 The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude; this is why she takes care not to neglect the mission she has received from the Lord to see that all who can be baptized are “reborn of water and the Spirit.” God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.

    1258 The Church has always held the firm conviction that those who suffer death for the sake of the faith without having received Baptism are baptized by their death for and with Christ. This Baptism of blood, like the desire for Baptism, brings about the fruits of Baptism without being a sacrament.

    1259 For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.

    1260 “Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.”62 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.

    1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,”63 allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church’s call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.

    Baptism Arrangement – CHECK: Jehovah’s witnesses versus Bible

    https://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/baptism.php

    Jesus commanded to baptise in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Over time, Watchtower has changed the question asked prior to immersion, replacing “holy spirit” with “spirit-directed organization,” and then removing reference to the “holy spirit” altogether. Scriptural precedence is ignored in order to elevate the Watchtower organization.

    BibleWatchtower

    Matthew 28:19

    “Go therefore and make disciples of people of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the holy spirit”.
    (1) “Have you repented of your sins, dedicated yourself to Jehovah, and accepted his way of salvation through Jesus Christ?”

    (2) “Do you understand that your baptism identifies you as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses in association with Jehovah’s organization?”

    At Matthew 28:19, Jesus outlined a simple yet powerful baptismal process. It was to be “in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the holy spirit”. He made no mention of affiliation with any earthly organization. Whilst the Watchtower baptism arrangement originally followed the requirements set by Jesus, it has gradually deviated from his guidelines.

    From a sermon by Saint Caesarius of Arles, bishop (d. AD 542)

    (Sermo 229, 1-3: CCL 104, 905-908)

    We have all been made temples of God through baptism

    My fellow Christians, today is the birthday of this church, an occasion for celebration and rejoicing. We, however, ought to be the true and living temple of God.

    Nevertheless, Christians rightly commemorate this feast of the church, their mother, for they know that through her they were reborn in the spirit. At our first birth, we were vessels of God’s wrath; reborn, we became vessels of his mercy. Our first birth brought death to us, but our second restored us to life.

    Indeed, before our baptism we were sanctuaries of the devil; but after our baptism we merited the privilege of being temples of Christ. And if we think more carefully about the meaning of our salvation, we shall realize that we are indeed living and true temples of God. God does not dwell only in structures fashioned by human hands, in homes of wood and stone, but rather he dwells principally in the soul made according to his own image and fashioned by his own hand. Therefore, the apostle Paul says: The temple of God is holy, and you are that temple.

    When Christ came, he banished the devil from our hearts, in order to build in them a temple for himself. Let us therefore do what we can with his help, so that our evil deeds will not deface that temple. For whoever does evil, does injury to Christ. As I said earlier, before Christ redeemed us, we were the house of the devil, but afterward, we merited the privilege of being the house of God. God himself in his loving mercy saw fit to make of us his own home.

    My fellow Christians, do we wish to celebrate joyfully the birth of this temple? Then let us not destroy the living temples of God in ourselves by works of evil. I shall speak clearly, so that all can understand. Whenever we come to church, we must prepare our hearts to be as beautiful as we expect this church to be. Do you wish to find this basilica immaculately clean? Then do not soil your soul with the filth of sins. Do you wish this basilica to be full of light? God too wishes that your soul be not in darkness, but that the light of good works shine in us, so that he who dwells in the heavens will be glorified.

    Just as you enter this church building, so God wishes to enter into your soul, for he promised: I shall live in them, and I shall walk the corridors of their hearts.

    Office of Readings Wed. of 31 st week Ordinary Time

    What is required for a baptism to be valid – Minute 1h38′

    Why babies are baptized? – Minute 1h41′

    Not a child of God until you are baptized

    IN BAPTISM THE HOLY SPIRIT DWELLS IN US

    MINUTE 1H02′

    THE THREE BAPTISMS : WATER, BLOOD, DESIRE

    PART OF THE CHURCH BY BAPTISM, BLOOD OR DESIRE

    Minute 20:25

    WHAT IS THE CHURCH? BAPTISM BY WATER, DESIRE OR BLOOD

    ANY BAPTISM DONE NOT IN THE NAME OF THE PERSONS OF THE HOLY TRINITY IS INVALID

    ANY BAPTISM DONE NOT IN THE NAME OF THE PERSONS OF THE HOLY TRINITY IS INVALID

    OUR BAPTISM GIVES US WHAT WE NEED TO BE SAINTS

    Arian, Jehovah’s Witnesses Baptisms Invalid

    https://www.catholic.com/qa/arian-jehovahs-witnesses-baptisms-invalid

    ANY BAPTISM DONE NOT IN THE NAME OF THE PERSONS OF THE HOLY TRINITY IS INVALID

    WHAT ARE THE 3 BAPTISMS

    Baptism and Confirmation (Aquinas 101)

    Why Can’t You Be Baptized More Than Once? Baptism and Sacramental Character (Aquinas 101)

    Where is Baptism in the Bible? The Origins of Baptism (Aquinas 101)

    What is the Sacrament of Baptism? (Aquinas 101)

    How Baptism Changes You: The Effects of Baptism (Aquinas 101)

    Why Baptize With Water? Explaining the Rite of Baptism (Aquinas 101)

    The Trinity and Baptism: Why it Matters What You Say (Aquinas 101)

    Do You Need to Be Baptized to Be Saved? (Aquinas 101)

    THE 3 INFUSED VIRTUES AT BAPTISM

    Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi: How the Holy Trinity Operated in Adam and Eve before Original Sin and how He operates in us at baptism

  • THE HOLY TRINITY

    TRINITY: The Triune God (Aquinas 101)

    The Persons of the Trinity (Aquinas 101)

    The Missions of the Trinity (Aquinas 101)

    WATCH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjph8GJRbjc

    The Theology of the Trinity – Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon

    CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

    I. “IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT”

    https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_one/article_1/paragraph_2_the_father.html#:~:text=

    232 Christians are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”53 Before receiving the sacrament, they respond to a three-part question when asked to confess the Father, the Son and the Spirit: “I do.” “The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity.”54

    233 Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: not in their names,55 for there is only one God, the almighty Father, his only Son and the Holy Spirit: the Most Holy Trinity.

    234 The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the “hierarchy of the truths of faith”.56 The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men “and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin”.57

    235 This paragraph expounds briefly (I) how the mystery of the Blessed Trinity was revealed, (II) how the Church has articulated the doctrine of the faith regarding this mystery, and (III) how, by the divine missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit, God the Father fulfils the “plan of his loving goodness” of creation, redemption and sanctification.

    236 The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions.

    237 The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the “mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God”.58 To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

    II. THE REVELATION OF GOD AS TRINITY

    The Father revealed by the Son

    238 Many religions invoke God as “Father”. the deity is often considered the “father of gods and of men”. In Israel, God is called “Father” inasmuch as he is Creator of the world.59 Even more, God is Father because of the covenant and the gift of the law to Israel, “his first-born son”.60 God is also called the Father of the king of Israel. Most especially he is “the Father of the poor”, of the orphaned and the widowed, who are under his loving protection.61

    239 By calling God “Father”, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,62 which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. the language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard:63 no one is father as God is Father.

    240 Jesus revealed that God is Father in an unheard-of sense: he is Father not only in being Creator; he is eternally Father by his relationship to his only Son who, reciprocally, is Son only in relation to his Father: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”64

    241 For this reason the apostles confess Jesus to be the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; as “the image of the invisible God”; as the “radiance of the glory of God and the very stamp of his nature”.65

    242 Following this apostolic tradition, the Church confessed at the first ecumenical council at Nicaea (325) that the Son is &uot;consubstantial” with the Father, that is, one only God with him.66 The second ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, kept this expression in its formulation of the Nicene Creed and confessed “the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father”.67

    The Father and the son revealed by the spirit

    243 Before his Passover, Jesus announced the sending of “another Paraclete” (Advocate), the Holy Spirit. At work since creation, having previously “spoken through the prophets”, the Spirit will now be with and in the disciples, to teach them and guide them “into all the truth”.68 The Holy Spirit is thus revealed as another divine person with Jesus and the Father.

    244 The eternal origin of the Holy Spirit is revealed in his mission in time. the Spirit is sent to the apostles and to the Church both by the Father in the name of the Son, and by the Son in person, once he had returned to the Father.69 The sending of the person of the Spirit after Jesus’ glorification70 reveals in its fullness the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

    245 The apostolic faith concerning the Spirit was confessed by the second ecumenical council at Constantinople (381): “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.”71 By this confession, the Church recognizes the Father as “the source and origin of the whole divinity”.72 But the eternal origin of the Spirit is not unconnected with the Son’s origin: “The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is God, one and equal with the Father and the Son, of the same substance and also of the same nature. . . Yet he is not called the Spirit of the Father alone,. . . but the Spirit of both the Father and the Son.”73 The Creed of the Church from the Council of Constantinople confesses: “With the Father and the Son, he is worshipped and glorified.”74

    246 The Latin tradition of the Creed confesses that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque)”. the Council of Florence in 1438 explains: “The Holy Spirit is eternally from Father and Son; He has his nature and subsistence at once (simul) from the Father and the Son. He proceeds eternally from both as from one principle and through one spiration… And, since the Father has through generation given to the only-begotten Son everything that belongs to the Father, except being Father, the Son has also eternally from the Father, from whom he is eternally born, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son.”75

    247 The affirmation of the filioque does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople. But Pope St. Leo I, following an ancient Latin and Alexandrian tradition, had already confessed it dogmatically in 447,76 even before Rome, in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, came to recognize and receive the Symbol of 381. the use of this formula in the Creed was gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries). the introduction of the filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Latin liturgy constitutes moreover, even today, a point of disagreement with the Orthodox Churches.

    248 At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father’s character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he “who proceeds from the Father”, it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son.77 The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, “legitimately and with good reason”,78 for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as “the principle without principle”,79 is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.80 This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed.

    III. THE HOLY TRINITY IN THE TEACHING OF THE FAITH

    The formation of the Trinitarian dogma

    249 From the beginning, the revealed truth of the Holy Trinity has been at the very root of the Church’s living faith, principally by means of Baptism. It finds its expression in the rule of baptismal faith, formulated in the preaching, catechesis and prayer of the Church. Such formulations are already found in the apostolic writings, such as this salutation taken up in the Eucharistic liturgy: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”81

    250 During the first centuries the Church sought to clarify her Trinitarian faith, both to deepen her own understanding of the faith and to defend it against the errors that were deforming it. This clarification was the work of the early councils, aided by the theological work of the Church Fathers and sustained by the Christian people’s sense of the faith.

    251 In order to articulate the dogma of the Trinity, the Church had to develop her own terminology with the help of certain notions of philosophical origin: “substance”, “person” or “hypostasis”, “relation” and so on. In doing this, she did not submit the faith to human wisdom, but gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, “infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand”.82

    252 The Church uses (I) the term “substance” (rendered also at times by “essence” or “nature”) to designate the divine being in its unity, (II) the term “person” or “hypostasis” to designate the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the real distinction among them, and (III) the term “relation” to designate the fact that their distinction lies in the relationship of each to the others.

    The dogma of the Holy Trinity

    253 The Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the “consubstantial Trinity”.83 The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire: “The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e. by nature one God.”84 In the words of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), “Each of the persons is that supreme reality, viz., the divine substance, essence or nature.”85

    254 The divine persons are really distinct from one another. “God is one but not solitary.”86 “Father”, “Son”, “Holy Spirit” are not simply names designating modalities of the divine being, for they are really distinct from one another: “He is not the Father who is the Son, nor is the Son he who is the Father, nor is the Holy Spirit he who is the Father or the Son.”87 They are distinct from one another in their relations of origin: “It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds.”88 The divine Unity is Triune.

    255 The divine persons are relative to one another. Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another: “In the relational names of the persons the Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. While they are called three persons in view of their relations, we believe in one nature or substance.”89 Indeed “everything (in them) is one where there is no opposition of relationship.”90 “Because of that unity the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Son is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Son.”91

    256 St. Gregory of Nazianzus, also called “the Theologian”, entrusts this summary of Trinitarian faith to the catechumens of Constantinople: Above all guard for me this great deposit of faith for which I live and fight, which I want to take with me as a companion, and which makes me bear all evils and despise all pleasures: I mean the profession of faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I entrust it to you today. By it I am soon going to plunge you into water and raise you up from it. I give it to you as the companion and patron of your whole life. I give you but one divinity and power, existing one in three, and containing the three in a distinct way. Divinity without disparity of substance or nature, without superior degree that raises up or inferior degree that casts down. . . the infinite co-naturality of three infinites. Each person considered in himself is entirely God. . . the three considered together. . . I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendour. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me. .92

    IV. THE DIVINE WORKS AND THE TRINITARIAN MISSIONS

    257 “O blessed light, O Trinity and first Unity!”93 God is eternal blessedness, undying life, unfading light. God is love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God freely wills to communicate the glory of his blessed life. Such is the “plan of his loving kindness”, conceived by the Father before the foundation of the world, in his beloved Son: “He destined us in love to be his sons” and “to be conformed to the image of his Son”, through “the spirit of sonship”.94 This plan is a “grace [which] was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began”, stemming immediately from Trinitarian love.95 It unfolds in the work of creation, the whole history of salvation after the fall, and the missions of the Son and the Spirit, which are continued in the mission of the Church.96

    258 The whole divine economy is the common work of the three divine persons. For as the Trinity has only one and the same natures so too does it have only one and the same operation: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle.”97 However, each divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal property. Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, “one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are”.98 It is above all the divine missions of the Son’s Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit that show forth the properties of the divine persons.

    259 Being a work at once common and personal, the whole divine economy makes known both what is proper to the divine persons, and their one divine nature. Hence the whole Christian life is a communion with each of the divine persons, without in any way separating them. Everyone who glorifies the Father does so through the Son in the Holy Spirit; everyone who follows Christ does so because the Father draws him and the Spirit moves him.99

    260 The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity.100 But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity: “If a man loves me”, says the Lord, “he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him”:101

    O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.102

    IN BRIEF

    261 The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and of Christian life. God alone can make it known to us by revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

    262 The Incarnation of God’s Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God.

    263 The mission of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father in the name of the Son ( Jn 14:26) and by the Son “from the Father” ( Jn 15:26), reveals that, with them, the Spirit is one and the same God. “With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified” (Nicene Creed).

    264 “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son” (St. Augustine, De Trin. 15, 26, 47: PL 42, 1095).

    265 By the grace of Baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, we are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here on earth in the obscurity of faith, and after death in eternal light (cf. Paul VI, CPG # 9).

    266 “Now this is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person of the Father is one, the Son’s is another, the Holy Spirit’s another; but the Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty coeternal” (Athanasian Creed: DS 75; ND 16).

    267 Inseparable in what they are, the divine persons are also inseparable in what they do. But within the single divine operation each shows forth what is proper to him in the Trinity, especially in the divine missions of the Son’s Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

    Understanding the Holy Spirit – BISHOP BARRON

    In Defense of the Trinity: A dialogue on the errors of Jehovah’s Witnesses regarding this historic Christian teaching

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/in-defense-of-the-trinity

    Explaining the Trinity | Catholic Answers Magazine


    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/explaining-the-trinity

    El Misterio de la TRINIDAD ¿TRES DIOSES? | Lo que muchos no se atreven a decir. TEOLOGÍA PARA LAICOS

    A Divine Act of the Trinity at play with each other, recreating with each other.

    IN MARY THE HOLY TRINITY WERE OPERATING FULLY AND MARY WAS COOPERATING

    MINUTE 1H03′

    PROPER TRANSLATION OF PHILIPPIANS 2

    EXPLANATION OF PHILIPPIANS 2

    TRIPARTITION UNION

    FATHER IN THE WILL

    SON IN THE INTELLECT

    SPIRIT IN THE MEMORY

    DEFINITION OF A “PERSON”

    In Catholic theology, a person is fundamentally an individual substance of a rational nature, defined by intelligence, will, distinctiveness, and self-subsistence (incommunicability), meaning they are complete in themselves but called to communion with others. This definition applies analogously to God (the Trinity), angels, and humans, but for humans, personhood also involves being a body-soul composite, uniquely reflecting God’s image through intellect and love in relationship, and possessing inherent dignity from conception. 

    Core Characteristics

    • Individual Substance: A complete, self-existing entity, not a part of something else.
    • Rational Nature: Possesses intellect and will, enabling knowledge and love, distinguishing persons from animals or inanimate objects.
    • Incommunicability: Each person is unique and distinct, unable to be completely merged into another.
    • Openness to Others: While distinct, persons are made for communion, not isolation, finding fulfillment in relationships, especially with God. 

    Types of Persons in Theology

    • God: The Holy Trinity is three distinct Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) in one divine nature.
    • Angels: Purely spiritual, intellectual beings, existing as individual persons.
    • Humans: A unique composite of a rational soul and a body, made in God’s image, with inherent dignity from the first moment of existence. 

    Key Distinctions for Humans

    • Body-Soul Union: Humans are not just spirits but are embodied, allowing for unique forms of thought, love, and procreation.
    • Capacity for Change: Unlike angels, human persons have the capacity for growth, development, and change through their embodied lives.
    • Dignity: Every living human individual, regardless of developmental stage or capability, is a person with intrinsic worth and rights, reflecting God’s image. 

    Person

    According to the generally accepted definition of Boethius, a person is an individual substance of a rational or intellectual nature.  The notion of person is subject to analogical differences depending on whether the term is referring to human, angelic, or divine persons.

    PERSON

    “An individual substance of a rational nature” (Boethius). Therefore every individual intellectual substance which is complete in itself, uncommunicated and existing for itself, is a person. Essential to person in theological terms are intelligence and substantiality, wholeness in oneself and especially individuality. From individuality flow such features of personhood as distinctiveness, incommunicability, and uniqueness. Among human persons there are also the elements of responsibility and possession of distinctive rights. (Etym. Latin persona, actor’s mask; character; supposition of a rational nature.)

    https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=35539&randomterm=false#:~:text=

    Person

    https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11726a.htm

    The Latin word persona was originally used to denote the mask worn by an actor. From this it was applied to the role he assumed, and, finally, to any character on the stage of life, to any individual. This article discusses (1) the definition of “person”, especially with reference to the doctrine of the Incarnation; and (2) the use of the word persona and its Greek equivalents in connection with the Trinitarian disputes. For the psychological treatment see PERSONALITY.

    Definition

    The classic definition is that given by Boethius in “De persona et duabus naturis”, c. ii: Naturæ rationalis individua substantia (an individual substance of a rational nature).

    Substantia — “Substance” is used to exclude accidents: “We see that accidents cannot constitute person” (Boethius, op. cit.). Substantia is used in two senses: of the concrete substance as existing in the individual, called substantia prima, corresponding to Aristotle’s ousia prote; and of abstractions, substance as existing in genus and species, called substantia secunda, Aristotle’s ousia deutera. It is disputed which of the two the word taken by itself here signifies. It seems probable that of itself it prescinds from substantia prima and substantia secunda, and is restricted to the former signification only by the word individua.

    Individua — Individua, i.e., indivisum in se, is that which, unlike the higher branches in the tree of Porphyry, genus and species, cannot be further subdivided. Boethius in giving his definition does not seem to attach any further signification to the word. It is merely synonymous with singularis.

    Rationalis naturae — Person is predicated only of intellectual beings. The generic word which includes all individual existing substances is suppositum. Thus person is a subdivision of suppositum which is applied equally to rational and irrational, living and non-living individuals. A person is therefore sometimes defined as suppositum naturae rationalis.

    The definition of Boethius as it stands can hardly be considered a satisfactory one. The words taken literally can be applied to the rational soul of man, and also the human nature of Christ. That St. Thomas accepts it is presumably due to the fact that he found it in possession, and recognized as the traditional definition. He explains it in terms that practically constitute a new definition. Individua substantia signifies, he says, substantia, completa, per se subsistens, separata ab aliia, i.e., a substance, complete, subsisting per se, existing apart from others (III, Q. xvi, a. 12, ad 2um).

    If to this be added rationalis naturae, we have a definition comprising the five notes that go to make up a person: (a) substantia– this excludes accident; (b) completa– it must form a complete nature; that which is a part, either actually or “aptitudinally” does not satisfy the definition; (c) per se subsistens–the person exists in himself and for himself; he is sui juris, the ultimate possessor of his nature and all its acts, the ultimate subject of predication of all his attributes; that which exists in another is not a person; (d) separata ab aliis–this excludes the universal, substantia secunda, which has no existence apart from the individual; (e) rationalis naturae–excludes all non-intellectual supposita.

    To a person therefore belongs a threefold incommunicability, expressed in notes (b), (c), and (d). The human soul belongs to the nature as a part of it, and is therefore not a person, even when existing separately. The human nature of Christ does not exist per se seorsum, but in alio, in the Divine Personality of the Word. It is therefore communicated by assumption and so is not a person. Lastly the Divine Essence, though subsisting per se, is so communicated to the Three Persons that it does not exist apart from them; it is therefore not a person.

    Theologians agree that in the Hypostatic Union the immediate reason why the Sacred Humanity, though complete and individual, is not a person is that it is not a subsistence, not per se seorsum subsistens. They have, however, disputed for centuries as to what may be the ultimate determination of the nature which if present would make it a subsistence and so a person, what in other words is the ultimate foundation of personality. According to Scotus, as he is usually understood, the ultimate foundation is a mere negation. That individual intellectual nature is a person which is neither of its nature destined to be communicated–as is the human soul–nor is actually communicated–as is the Sacred Humanity. If the Hypostatic Union ceased, the latter would ipso facto, without any further determination, become a person. To this it is objected that the person possesses the nature and all its attributes. It is difficult to believe that this possessor, as distinct from the objects possessed, is constituted only by a negative. Consequently, the traditional Thomists, following Cajetan, hold that there is a positive determination which they call the “mode” of subsistence. It is the function of this mode to make the nature incommunicable, terminated in itself, and capable of receiving its own esse, or existence. Without this mode the human nature of Christ exists only by the uncreated esse of the Word.

    The Trinity and Baptism: Why it Matters What You Say (Aquinas 101)

    Understanding The Trinity? – Explaining the Faith

    God the Father: The Old Testament – Explaining the Faith

    Understanding Jesus In a New Way – Explaining the Faith

    MUST SEE: Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi: How the Holy Trinity Operated in Adam and Eve before Original Sin?

    God is Love so He is a Triune God, One God in Three Persons, and We have a whole Divine Family waiting for us in Heaven in which we can be grafted in and united to already, even right here on Earth!!!



    Rediscovering the nature, the essence, the very definition of what and who God is, is absolutely amazing!!! Understanding that God is a Holy Trinity, Three Persons in one God, one and only God, one only Divinity, one Essence in Three Persons: God The Father, God The Son and God The Holy Spirit.

    To define God, we have to go back to 1st John chapter 4 verse 8:
    “God is love”.

    But how do you define love when God is infinte and we humans as so limited to grasp the deep things of God?

    Well, how would you define a table to an extraterrestrial being from another system? A text with a definition might do. A picture even better…
    How about cooking? We would need to show a person with some food doing some action of cutting, mixing, pouring, heating, stiring… We do agree that showing a picture of a person with a tomato in the hand would not do. We would also need to show the action of actually cutting or peeling or manipulating the tomato to convey the concept of cooking. It therefore must have 3 components: a person, some food, and the action of cooking…

    Well love is also an action, love is a action verb. Not just a feeling as movies would have us believe. It is a verb. To define love, we first need a lover, a person who loves, who generates love, who gives love, and that person is God the Father.

    We also need a recipient, a beloved, another person who receives love, that person is God The Son.

    And because love is an action, it is an action verb, we need something to be done between them two, an action, a verb, love is embracing, giving, forgiving, gifting, protecting, caring, kissing, taking care of, feeding, providing, sacrificing, listening to, watching over, looking after, waiting, stroking, hugging, cuddling, covering, sheltering… it’s a verb and this verb is so powerful that it takes on its own identity with a will and an intellect, and as a rational individuality this person is God the Holy Spirit who is Charity, who is Love in action Itself.
    SEE SECTION ON “THE HOLY TRINITY”.

    In the account of the Creation in Genesis 1:27 The Holy Trinity appears for the first time as God speaks in the first personal subject pronoun of the plural form, “Let us make man in Our Image”. Who was God speaking to in such a plural form? The Three Persons cooperated as One Concert of Love in This Divine Work of Creation.

    This Triad, this Trio, those Three Persons, from the very same and unique Divine nature and essence, live as One God.
    They are co-eternal, they always existed, not one came before another as God lives outside of time, He created time for humans but He Himself is not subjected to time.
    They are co-equal and consubstantial of the same substance, the same Essence, the same God, one Divinity in three persons.
    They share the same Divine Nature or Essence. They are distinct persons, yet possess one inseparable, undivided Divine Substance. 

    To exemplify what God is in our little human minds and brains that are too limited to understand what the Holy Trinity is, God has tried to explain to us who He is using concepts that the human mind can grasp yet The Most Holy Trinity still remains a Mystery as God is infinite and cannot be contained nor understood by a limited mind.

    The Holy Spirit has given us to understand that in the Holy Baptism we received the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity. Each one gifted by a Person of the Holy Trinity.
    Faith from The Father.
    Hope from the Son.
    Charity from the Holy Spirit.

    In the Confiteor prayer, when we confess our sins we pray the following: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do”, the thoughts being related to The Father,  the words because God The Son is the Verb, The Word, The Logos,  and in works relating to God The Holy Spirit in action in our lives that we offend by our wrongdoings or by our omissions of good actions or lack of action when we fail to act upon His promptings.

    Also, The Holy Trinity acts in our lives through the three sacraments of Christian Initiation.
    The first Sacrament of Baptism makes us Sons of God of God the Father by adoption within the Son.
    Through the Sacrament of the Holy Communion we receive God The Son in the Holy Eucharist.
    In the Sacrament of the Confirmation we receive a personal downpour of God’s Holy Spirit. 

    The Triune God is LOVE; God The Father is the Source of Love, God The Son is the Incarnate Love and God The Holy Spirit is the Love being Poured out upon us.

    God the Father is connected directly to our will and therefore we need to conform our will to the Will of God. As the Holy Mother of God The Son, the Will of God must become our own will, “Fiat Mihi Segundun Verbum Tuum” said the Virgin Mary to the Arcangel Gabriel relating to Her the Message of God. “Fiat Voluntas Tua”
    said Jesus Himself to His Father when He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.
    Our will must come to be what God The Father wills, our intellect relates to God The Son and all memory to God The Holy Spirit. These are the 3 highest faculties of our Human Soul, perfectly compatible and formatted to be configured according to God in His Three Persons.

    NOTE: Father Iannuzzi explains that “God the Father was operating in Adam and Eve’s wills and He was also sustaining their heart beats, the center of the human being’s body. God The Son was operating in the intellect of Adam and Eve continuously through infused knowledge and He was also sustaining and maintaining their life blood, the same life blood that He would shed in atonement for their sin. The Holy Spirit was operating in the memory of Adam and Eve as well as in their breath, their exhalation and inhalation. The “Ruach”, the wind, the “breath of God”, “Ruach Yahve”, entered the nostril of Adam to give him divine life. The Spirit was breathing in and out of Adam’s lung with divine breath and divine life force and in the memory too. WATCH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw28h1CQwkA&t=



    The Holy Trinity therefore consists of a Divine Family to which we are all called and predestined to belong to. God called all of us, every single human being, to become part of his Divine Family. Not all humans will respond to the call as every human has free will but all of us were called to be Sons and Daughters of God to enter into the Divine Family and to be adopted as Sons and Daughters of God.

    ILLUSTRATION: The same as the human hand has five fingers, when we are created we are called to be part of a family with persons who take care of us whatever the circumstances that we may have on Earth.

    – As the middle finger God The Father is the Central Person,

    – God Our Father, as the middle finger of our hand has God the Son “at his right hand”, the index represents God The Son who points out to The Father: he came to the Earth to teach us about The Father. to show us The Father, to take us back to The Father and to bring us back to The Father. Jesus Christ is the index,

    – God the Holy Spirit could be symbolized by what we interestingly call in English “the ring finger”; it is the finger where we put the ring of a married person. It is appropriate as God the Holy Spirit is the very person who literally married or espoused the Holy Virgin Mary to put the seed of God into her womb so that God the Son would be born as God Incarnate, as a human being and we, humans, are also called to receive God the Holy Spirit into our souls as it cleanses our entire being at our Baptism. We also receive Him contained in the Holy Communion and we receive Him personally too in the Holy Sacrament of the Confirmation.

    – Therefore right next to the ring finger is the little finger: it is shorter than the others but it is still the closest to the Holy Trinity and that is Our Mother the Holy Virgin Mary, who is the closest being next to the Holy Trinity, above all angels, being Herself Queen of Angels. The little finger is actually right next to the ring finger because God the Holy Spirit is Her Spouse: The Holy Virgin Mary was literally impregnated by the Holy Spirit who put the seed of God into Mary’s womb to beget the Son of God Incarnate, God The Son in flesh, The Incarnate Word of God Jesus Christ and so Mother, The Holy Mother of God the Virgin Mary, is that fourth finger that is shorter than the other three, but the closest to them.

    – And finally we have a fifth finger which is the thumb. The thumb seems to be separate from the others, it doesn’t even reach the height of the others, it is very mobile and that finger represents our Guardian Angel: it is of the Heavenly Realm. It is not human, it’s part of the hand because it does work and acts in presence of God the Holy Trinity but it is very mobile because it actually accompanies us here below on Earth since our conception all the way throughout our lives until our personal judgment. He is with us every single day of our lives. The thumb shows us the way. murmurs into our ears what we should or should not do, constantly reminds us of the right path and guides us. And therefore we pray: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom God’s love commits me here, Ever this day (or night) be at my side, To light, to guard, to rule, and guide. From sinful stain O keep me free, And at death’s hour, my helper be. Amen”. He will try to put us on the right path to bring us back to the Holy Trinity, to show us the way to go home: that is our Guardian Angel.

    Therefore every single one of us, every single human being, we actually live right in the palm of God’s hand, in the palm of a Divine Family watching over us, in the middle of a Heavenly cradle. This is when God closes His Hand and we are safe under the protection of God the Father, God The Son, God the Holy Spirit, with also The Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady Terror of Demons, Virgen Potens, Most Powerful Virgin and with the constant care of our Guardian Angel, whoever we are, whatever our circumstances here on Earth, social background, with a human family or without a human family. We are never alone, we have a family!!!!

    We have God The Father God The Son God The Holy Spirit and Mother Mary and our Guardian Angel. every single one of us!!! We have a family and we are all taken care of!!!!

    The Athanasian Creed (Quicunque vult) is a statement of Christian doctrine traditionally ascribed to Saint Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria, who lived in the 4th century. It was designed to overcome Arianism.

    “Whoever wishes to be saved must, above all, keep the Catholic faith. For unless a person keeps this faith whole and entire, he will undoubtedly be lost forever. And the Catholic faith is this: we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Spirit.
    But the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have one divinity, equal glory, and coeternal majesty. What the Father is, the Son is, and the Holy Spirit is. 
    The Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, and the Holy Spirit is uncreated. The Father is boundless, the Son is boundless, and the Holy Spirit is boundless. The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, and the Holy Spirit is eternal. 
    Nevertheless, there are not three eternal beings, but one eternal being. So there are not three uncreated beings, nor three boundless beings, but one uncreated being and one boundless being. Likewise, the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent. 
    Yet there are not three omnipotent beings, but one omnipotent being. Thus the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. 
    However, there are not three gods, but one God. The Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, and the Holy Spirit is Lord. However, there are not three lords, but one Lord. For as we are obliged by Christian truth to acknowledge every Person singly to be God and Lord, so too are we forbidden by the Catholic religion to say that there are three Gods or Lords. 
    The Father was not made, nor created, nor generated by anyone. The Son is not made, nor created, but begotten by the Father alone. The Holy Spirit is not made, nor created, nor generated, but proceeds from the Father and the Son. There is, then, one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three sons; one Holy Spirit, not three holy spirits. In this Trinity, there is nothing before or after, nothing greater or less. The entire three Persons are coeternal and coequal with one another. So that in all things, as is has been said above, the Unity is to be worshiped in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity.
    He, therefore, who wishes to be saved, must believe thus about the Trinity. It is also necessary for eternal salvation that he believes steadfastly in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is both God and man. As God, He was begotten of the substance of the Father before time; as man, He was born in time of the substance of His Mother. He is perfect God; and He is perfect man, with a rational soul and human flesh. He is equal to the Father in His divinity, but inferior to the Father in His humanity. Although He is God and man, He is not two, but one Christ. And He is one, not because His divinity was changed into flesh, but because His humanity was assumed unto God. He is one, not by a mingling of substances, but by unity of person. As a rational soul and flesh are one man: so God and man are one Christ. He died for our salvation, descended into Hell, and rose from the dead on the third day. He ascended into Heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty. From there He shall come to judge the living and the dead. At His coming, all men are to arise with their own bodies; and they are to give an account of their own deeds. Those who have done good deeds will go into eternal life; those who have done evil will go into the everlasting fire. 
    This is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved. Amen. “

    THE DEVIL PUNISHED WITH A SPLIT PERSONALITY OPPOSING THE HOLY TRINITY:

    Satan, Beelzebub and Lucifer: same demon with a split personality – Watch Minute 3h02mn

    Satan the Father of lie – The inversion of the Father

    Lucifer – The inversion of Christ

    Beelzebub – The inversion of the Holy Spirit

  • “JESUS, THE FIRST BORN OF ALL CREATION”

    Firstborn of All Creation

    https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/the-firstborn-of-all-creation

    Jesus as “Firstborn”

    https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/jesus-as-firstborn

    EXPLANATION OF: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15)

    27 Things Exorcists Want You To Know – VIDEO – WATCH STARTING Minute 37:00

    The Firstborn of All Creation 

    https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/the-firstborn-of-all-creation

    ARIANISM AND HERESIES ABOUT THE PERSON OF CHRIST

    Scotus on Why Christ’s Assumed Human Nature Is Not a Person | Prof. Michael Gorman

    MUST SEE: JESUS FIRST BORN OF ALL CREATION

    HOW JESUS CHRIST WAS GENERATED

    The Firstborn of All Creation

    How the Jehovah’s Witness Bible added a word to the original Greek Translation

    https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/the-firstborn-of-all-creation

    JESUS PRIMOGENITO DE TODA CREACION

    SAINT LOUIS MARIS GRIGNON DE MONFORT

    SAINT MARÍA GRIGNON DE MONTFORT

    Siendo Dios Espíritu Santo estéril en la divinidad, es decir no produciendo ninguna otra persona divina, se volvió fecundo por María con quien se desposó. Es, efectivamente, con Ella y en Ella y de Ella, que Él ha producido su obra maestra, que es un Dios hecho hombre; y es también por medio de Ella, que Él produce todos los días hasta el fin del mundo a los predestinados y miembros del cuerpo de esa Cabeza adorable. He aquí el por qué cuanto más Él ve a María, su querida e indisoluble Esposa viviendo en un alma, más operante y poderoso se vuelve, para producir a Jesucristo en esta alma y a esta alma en Jesucristo. No es propiamente que se quiera decir que la Santísima Virgen da al Espíritu Santo la fecundidad, como si Él no la tuviera, ya que siendo Dios, tiene la fecundidad o la capacidad de producir como el Padre y el Hijo, a pesar de no reducirla al acto y en consecuencia no produciendo ninguna otra Persona divina. Con esto quiero decir que el Espíritu Santo, por intermedio de la Santísima Virgen de quien Él quiere servirse, aunque de ello no tendría absolutamente ninguna necesidad, puso en acto su fecundidad, produciendo a Jesucristo y a todos sus miembros en Ella y por Ella: misterio de gracia desconocido incluso a los más sabios y espirituales de entre los cristianos.

    DIO A LUZ A SU PRIMOGENITO

    GOD’S PLAN A WAS ALWAYS TO COME DOWN TO RAISE MANKIND TO HIS DIVINITY

  • JESUS, ANGEL OR GOD? THE TRUE NATURE OF JESUS

    Jesus Christ: True God and True Man (Aquinas 101)

    HERESY OF ARIANISM

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism

    Is the Angel of the Lord the Pre-Incarnate Christ? – Taylor Marshal

    The Angel Heresy

    ABSOLUTE MUST SEE: THE NICEAN CREED RESPONDS TO THE ARIANISM HERESY

    Explaining What the Creed Means Line by Line: Explaining the Faith with Fr. Chris Alar

    Merely ‘a’ God? Answering Jehovah’s Witnesses on Jesus

    The Jehovah’s Witnesses have to jump through some pretty tight hoops to say that Jesus wasn’t God.

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/merely-a-god-answering-jehovahs-witnesses-on-jesus

    Christ’s Divinity Proved by the JW Bible

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/christs-divinity-proved-by-the-jw-bible

    Jesus and Jehovah’s Witnesses

    Jehovah’s Witnesses mistakenly believe Jesus is a created Son who is also Michael the Archangel

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/jesus-and-jehovahs-witnesses

    Christ’s Divinity Proved by the JW Bible

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/christs-divinity-proved-by-the-jw-bible

    What does “This Day I Have Begotten Thee” Mean?

    They Told Me Jesus Isn’t God…

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/they-told-me-jesus-isnt-god

    Are Michael the archangel and Jesus the same person?

    https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-it-true-jehovahs-witnesses-believe-that-michael-the-archangel-and-jesus-are-the-same-person

    John 1: 1 – The God or a God?

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-god-or-a-god

    Merely ‘a’ God? Answering Jehovah’s Witnesses on Jesus

    The Jehovah’s Witnesses have to jump through some pretty tight hoops to say that Jesus wasn’t God.

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/merely-a-god-answering-jehovahs-witnesses-on-jesus

    Merely ‘a’ God? Answering Jehovah’s Witnesses on Jesus | Catholic Answers Magazine


    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/merely-a-god-answering-jehovahs-witnesses-on-jesus

    Jesus and Jehovah’s Witnesses

    Jehovah’s Witnesses mistakenly believe Jesus is a created Son who is also Michael the Archangel

    https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/jesus-and-jehovahs-witnesses

    ABSOLUTE MUST SEE: JESUS BILOCATED TO BECOME INCARNATE IN MARY’S WOMB – Minute 5’44

    MUST SEE: HUMAN, DIVINE AND ETERNAL STATES

    En la Iglesia ha vuelto el espíritu de Arrio

    El Concilio de Nicea de 325 condenó el arrianismo, que consideraba que Jesús era una criatura y, por tanto, no tenía la misma naturaleza que el Padre. La Iglesia, en cambio, enseña que la única Persona divina asumió una naturaleza humana además de la divina. En la década de 1990, el cardenal Joseph Ratzinger identificó una especie de retorno al arrianismo, hasta el punto de describirlo como un verdadero desafío para el cristianismo actual.

    https://www.infocatolica.com/?t=noticia&cod=51221

    THE HERETIC ARIUS

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arius#:~:text=

    Jesus Christ: True God and True Man (Aquinas 101)

    Why Jesus had to be a man?

    Jesus always had knowledge of His Divinity even before His baptism

    JESUS WAS NOT AN ANGEL / JESUS NO ERA UN ANGEL

    Heb 1, 1-6.
    EN muchas ocasiones y de muchas maneras habló Dios antiguamente a los padres por los profetas.
    En esta etapa final, nos ha hablado por el Hijo, al que ha nombrado heredero de todo, y por medio del cual ha realizado los siglos.
    Él es reflejo de su gloria, impronta de su ser. Él sostiene el universo con su palabra poderosa. Y, habiendo realizado la purificación de los pecados, está sentado a la derecha de la Majestad en las alturas; tanto más encumbrado sobre los ángeles cuanto más sublime es el nombre que ha heredado. Pues ¿a qué ángel dijo jamás:
    «Hijo mío eres tú, yo te he engendrado hoy»;
    y en otro lugar:
    «Yo seré para él un padre,
    y él será para mí un hijo?».
    Asimismo, cuando introduce en el mundo al primogénito, dice:
    «Adórenlo todos los ángeles de Dios».

    JESUS VERSUS SUPER HEROES