Katholisch Leben!

Dreifaltigkeitssonntag

“One in essence, distinction of persons, such is the mystery of the Trinity, such is the inner life of God. The three angles of a triangle do not make three triangles but one; as the heat, power, and light of the sun do not make three suns but one; as water, air, and steam are all manifestations of the one substance; as the form, color, and perfume of the rose do not make three roses, but one; as our soul, our intellect, and our will do not make three substances, but one; as one times one times one times one does not equal three, but one, so too in some much more mysterious way, there are three Persons in God and yet only one God.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Divine Romance)

Trinity Sunday – Is it Relevant?

Marcellino D'Ambrosio (Dr. Italy)

Trinity Sunday celebrates the Church’s faith in the triune God, one God in three persons. This doctrine has baffled people for 2,000 years. Given that it is so hard to accept, why bother with it? What difference does the trinitarian dogma really make to how we live our Christian lives?

Many are ready to give a polite nod of some sort to Jesus of Nazareth. Most honor him as a great moral teacher. Many even confess him as Savior. But the Incarnation of the Eternal God? Second person of the Holy Trinity? God can’t be one and three at the same time. Such a notion is at worst illogical, at best meaningless. “This Trinity business was invented by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine in 313 AD,” scoff a motley crew ranging from the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the Da Vinci Code.

Did Constantine invent the Trinity?

Of course this charge has no historical leg to stand on. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven brief letters around 110 AD in which he called Jesus “God” 16 times, beating Constantine by over two centuries.

True, the word “trinity” is not in the bible. But everywhere the New Testament refers to three distinct persons who seem to be equally divine, yet one (e.g. 2 Cor 13:13). So over 100 years before Constantine, a Christian writer named Tertullian coined the term “Trinity” as a handy way to refer to this reality of three distinct, equal persons in one God. It stuck.

Why the Doctrine Matters

But if the doctrine of the Trinity is authentically biblical, is it relevant? Does it really matter?

If Christianity were simply a religion of keeping the law, the inner life of the lawgiver would not matter. But if Christianity is about personal relationship with God, then who God really is matters totally. Common sense tells us that some supreme being made the universe and that we owe Him homage. But that the creator is a trinity of persons who invites us to intimate friendship with Himself — this we never could have guessed! We only know it because God has revealed it.

God is Love – a community of Three Persons

God is love, says 1 John 4:8 (see too John 3:16). If God were solitary, how could he have been love before he created the world? Who would there have been to love? Jesus reveals a God who is eternally a community of three persons pouring themselves out in love for one another. The Father does not create the Son and then, with the Son, create the Spirit. No, the Father eternally generates the Son. And with and through the Son, this Father eternally “breathes” the Spirit as a sort of personalized sigh of love. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” That’s what the conclusion of the Glory Be really means, that the self-giving of the three divine persons did not begin at a moment in time, but was, is, and is to come.

Persons made in God’s Image & Likeness

If we are truly to “know” our God, we must know this. But if we are ever to understand ourselves, we must also know this. For we were made in the image and likeness of God, and God is a community of self-donating love. That means that we can never be happy isolated from others, protecting ourselves from others, holding ourselves back selfishly from others. Unless we give ourselves in love, we can never be fully human. And unless we participate in the life of God’s people, we can never be truly Christian either. Because Christianity is about building up the community of divine love which is called the Church. If God is Trinity, then there really is no place for free-lance, lone-ranger Christians.

Family, an icon of the Trinity

The family, the domestic Church, is a reflection of trinitarian love – the love of husband and wife, distinct and very different persons, generates the child who is from them but is nonetheless distinct from them, indeed absolutely unique.

And that is the final point. One of the greatest treasures of Western culture is the concept of the uniqueness and dignity of the individual person. You really don’t find this idea in the ancient societies of Greece and Rome or in other great world religions, such as Islam.

Personhood – Dignity, individuality, freedom

The concept of the irreplaceable uniqueness of each person came into Western culture straight from the doctrine of the Trinity, three who possess the exact same divine nature but who are yet irreplaceably unique in their personhood.

The irony? As it progressively abandons the triune God, the Western world is undermining the very foundation of personal dignity, individuality, and freedom.

So yes, the Trinity does matter.

This essay on the Church’s trinitarian faith in the triune God, one God yet three persons, is offered as a reflection on the scripture readings for Trinity Sunday (Exodus 34:4b-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18). Trinity Sunday is observed annually the Sunday following Pentecost.

Links

katholisch.de: Gott sind drei: http://www.katholisch.de/de/katholisch/glaube/unser_kirchenjahr/zeit_im_jahreskreis/dreifaltigkeitssonntag.php

Kathpedia: Dreifaltigkeitssonntag: http://www.kathpedia.com/index.php?title=Dreifaltigkeitssonntag

New Advent: Trinity Sunday: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15058a.htm

Reflections by St Josemaria on The Blessed Trinity http://ow.ly/2bt9q8
Posted by Opus Dei Communications Office on Sonntag, 31. Mai 2015

With the feast of the Holy Trinity yesterday, this article by Fr. Brendan seemed appropriate. What do you think?
Posted by Orthodox Christian Network on Montag, 1. Juni 2015

Some reflections on the readings from Sacred Scripture for this Sunday's Solemnity of the Holy Trinity...
Posted by Scott Hahn on Freitag, 29. Mai 2015

Trinity Sunday | Doctrine Dogma of the Holy Trinity | Three Persons in One God -Welcome to The... http://t.co/1u8FX13Rft
— Robert Gollwitzer (@gollwitzer) May 31, 2015

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"Es gibt nicht mehr als 100 Menschen auf der Welt, die die Katholische Kirche wirklich hassen, aber es gibt Millionen, die das hassen, was sie für die Katholische Kirche halten…Wenn wir Katholiken all die Unwahrheiten und Lügen, die gegen die Kirche gesagt wurden, glauben würden, würden wir die Kirche wahrscheinlich Tausend Mal mehr hassen als sie es tun."

Erzbischof Fulton Sheen

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Father Joseph Ratzinger 1969 Prediction of the Future of the Church

In a 1969 German radio broadcast, Father Joseph Ratzinger offered this prediction of the future of the Church:

“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves.

To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered.

If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!

How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.

Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.

The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.

But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”

https://www.romancatholicman.com/father-joseph-ratzinger-1969-prediction-future-church/

Beitrag von Evangelical Catholics.

Michael Card: "Why?"

Why did it have to be a friend who chose to betray the Lord?

and why did he use a kiss to show them, that's not what a kiss is for?

Only a friend can betray a friend, a stranger has nothing to gain.

and only a friend comes close enough to ever cause so much pain.

Why did it have to be a thorny crown place upon his head?

It should have been a royal one, made of jewels and gold instead.

It had to be a crown of thorns, because in this world that we live,

all that would seek to love a thorn is all the world has to give.

Why did it have to be a heavy cross he was made to bear?

and why did they nail His feet and hands; His love would have held him there.

It was a cross for on a cross, a thief was supposed to pay.

and Jesus had come into the world to steal every heart away.

Yes, Jesus had come into the world to steal every heart away.

Posted by Julie Bilodeau on Freitag, 22. Januar 2016

Posted by Wolfgang Pastötter on Donnerstag, 7. April 2016

Posted by Machine Gun Preacher on Donnerstag, 7. April 2016

"Interesting that they call it "gay pride" because pride is the worst of sins and the root of all other sins - in essence a stubborn rebellion against God and his commandments. This parade in Tel Aviv is awful and shameful not only because Israel promotes sexual perversion and the distortion of God's purpose for the human person, but it's even worse because they celebrate it with "pride". Remember that God will extend His protection upon you, Israel, only to the extent that you keep his commandments. In other words, you are inviting disaster upon your nation. Repent!"

Andre Villeneuve on the Gay Pride in Israel

If the Church becomes more and more like the world, why would we need the Church then anymore? The world does what the world does - and it can do that way better than Church people will ever be able to. If we don't have more than this, if we are no different than anybody else, what's the point of being a follower of Jesus Christ?

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Wisdom of the ancients:
"Should we look to kings and princes to put right the inequalities between rich and poor? Should we require soldiers to come and seize the rich person's gold and distribute it among his destitute neighbors? Should we beg the emporer to impose a tax on the rich so great that it reduces them to the level of the poor and then to share the proceeds of that tax among everyone? Equality imposed by force would achieve nothing, and do much harm. Those who combined both cruel hearts and sharp minds would soon find ways of making themselves rich again. Worse still, the rich whose gold was taken away would feel bitter and resentful; while the poor who received the gold from the hands of soldiers would feel no gratitude, because no generosity would have prompted the gift. Far from bringing moral benefit to society, it would actually do moral harm. Material justice cannot be accomplished by compulsion, a change of heart will not follow. The only way to achieve true justice is to change people's hearts first - and then they will joyfully share their wealth."
-- St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople (died in 407 A.D.)

My goal in life? I want to cross the finish line with nothing else left to give for my Lord, hearing those words: "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter in!"

Private Website:

www.robert-gollwitzer.com

Wetter München

"But do you and I realize what we are doing at this point? We are molding Jesus into our image. He is beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is whom we are most comfortable with. And the danger now is that when we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead we may be worshiping ourselves"

David Platt

Robert Gollwitzer

Katholisch Leben!

Den katholischen Glauben kennen, leben, lieben & verteidigen!

Dreifaltigkeitssonntag

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Moralistic Therapeutic Deism