Catholics do not believe in dogmas. Dogmas are instead an expression of the set of beliefs that Catholics hold as true. What are these basic beliefs? Catholicism is a form of Christianity and Christian beliefs are summarised in the formal statements of the Christian faith: the creeds. But these five fundamental beliefs are not all covered by or developed in those statements:
(1) the Holy Trinity;
(2) the creator God;
(3) the Fall;
(4) the Incarnation;
(5) the redemption.
God as defined in Christianity is a Trinitarian God. In God there are three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God transcends gender, even though most of the times God is erroneously referred as male — some people refer to the Holy Spirit as feminine as well, for example. Three persons do not equal three gods: in God there are three persons. God is one and is also a community. This is a concept difficult to grasp for us humans. This difficulty can be taken as evidence that such concept was not invented but revealed.
God is the creator of all we see and do not see. God therefore continually sustains the creation in being and answers the question that the world raises from its very existence as something. This does not mean that God constantly interferes in every event or action in the world. God is always present, but creation gave rise to a complex and intricate causal process. St. Thomas Aquinas has put it clearly: God, the primary cause, does not act directly in the world, but indirectly through secondary causes, that is, through a chain of natural elements and occurrences that are imperfect.
The Fall of Man,[1] or simply the Fall, is therefore the Fall of Humankind, the lapse of human beings into a state of sin. Some Christians read the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 literally, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that this narrative uses “figurative language”.[2] This means that the disobedience of Adam and Eve, when they share a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, reveals a greater, deeper truth. We are told that they become ashamed of their nakedness. Shame in the context of the tree of morality means that the key is not the event (the eating of the fruit) but its consequences. We feel shame when we do something wrong, something that we know is wrong, and become conscious of it. That is sin. Sin is not an offence to God, but a separation from God. God does not punish, sin contains its own punishment: the consciousness of the disconnection from God. Original sin, as it is called, is the moment when men and women consciously, freely turned away from God. What is this sin of the world? The collective failure of humankind to be truly moral, that is, holy or wholly human given that we were created in God’s image — our spiritual intuition attests to this connection.
Incarnation means made man. It is a mystery, just like the Trinity. The second person of the Trinity, the Son, became man, born of Mary. His name was Jesus. The apostles saw God when they looked at Jesus and they also saw a sinless human being — these two natures are united via a hypostatic union, a union of substances or natures, the divine and the human. The powerful persuasion of God is embodied in Jesus, but his humanity is not less important and it is often forgotten. He was human, more human than we are (because of our sinful tendencies, or more precisely, because of our reluctance to be fully human to ourselves and especially to others).
The Son became man to free us from sin, to overcome the alienation of humankind from God. Jesus was incarnated to bring human beings back to God through his teachings, death, and resurrection. This is what is called redemption. Jesus Christ, Jesus the anointed, showed the way to salvation, another name for liberation. He consented to his crucifixion because he wanted to “live out the full implications of being loving in a loveless world; he wished to accept the consequence of accepting sinners”.[3]
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[1] Traditionally, the word “man” has been used to refer not only to adult males but also to human beings in general regardless of sex. In old English, the principal sense of “man” was a human being, and the words “wer” and “wif” were used to refer specifically to a male person and a female person, respectively. Subsequently, “man” replaced “wer” as the normal term for a male person, but the older sense of a human being remained in use.
[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 390.
[3] Herbert McCabe, The Teaching of the Catholic Church: A New Catechism of Christian Doctrine (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000), p. 14.
