From Pentecost through the Blessed Trinity to Corpus Christi

The Life of the Church is the Life of God, the Holy Trinity, and the life of God is given to us as food and drink in the Holy Eucharist for the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist and thus the Eucharistic Community makes us fit for Heaven for the Eucharist is the seed of the Resurrection!

The dogma of faith which forms the object of the Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity is this: There is one God and there are three Divine Persons; the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. Yet there are not three Gods, but one, eternal, incomprehensible God! The Father is not more God than the Son, neither is the Son more God than the Holy Spirit. The Father is the first Divine Person; the Son is the second Divine Person, begotten from the nature of the Father from all eternity; the Holy Spirit is the third Divine Person, proceeding from the Father and the Son from all eternity. No mortal can fully fathom this sublime truth. But I submit humbly and say: Lord, I believe, help my weak faith.

Although we cannot fully fathom this sublime truth, we can discover how this sublime truth of the Blessed Trinity makes sense of Life, Man and Woman, the World and human culture.

If we are made in the image of God and God is a trinity of persons then we are made to live in relationship. Many today seem to think that human beings are either to live in splendid isolation like an island or must live in a splendid collectivisation like a hive.  But to be a person means to be a relation. Indeed, the language of persons is that of ‘I - You - We’! A person is made to live in relationship understood as being-for-the-Other [God] and being-for-others [our fellow human beings]. But it must be a being for others in the truth.

So many Catholics who see themselves as pious lock themselves in a world of individual piety which does not need to be in relation to others. They decide that their relationship to God does not need to be in relation to other human beings but rather God is for me, myself and I – the selfish trinity! They refuse to live or work in a Communion with others which from apostolic times was called the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. By so doing they worship God in their own image which is the image of the individual self and deny the Trinity of divine persons. They say ‘God is God and the Trinity is not relevant to my religion or my relationship to God and so my religion does not need me to be for others, with others or work in a fellowship with others.’ For such a person, the words of the atheist existential philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, is true: ‘Hell is other people!’

Catholics, however, are actually called by the Eucharist into a divine-human communion that is cross-shaped: the vertical communion with God and the horizontal communion with the Church [the family of God]. A Communion which means Holy Communion with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and holy Communion with our brothers and sisters in Christ. In other words, we are defined by our relationality to God who is a trinity of relations. A trinity of relations that means we are adopted sons and daughters of the Father, brothers and sisters of the Son in which each of us is made a temple of the Holy Spirit who live in a communion with one another called the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

It is for this reason that last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost Sunday as the birthday of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and this Sunday we celebrated the Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity. As this article of the creed on the Church I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church follows the articles on the three divine persons: I believe in God the Father...God the Son...and God the Holy Spirit.

But the Church is not some abstraction out there beyond me, myself and I. No, it is embodied and enfleshed within the parish as a Eucharistic Community. Hence, following Pentecost and Holy Trinity, we find that we celebrate the Solemnity of Corpus Christi. It is as the Eucharistic community of the parish that we exist as sons and daughters of the Father who gather round and have communion with the Body and Blood of Jesus, the Son, and as such we are brothers and sisters not just of Christ but of one another too.

“If we receive the Eucharist worthily, we become what we receive.” And in receiving Christ, we become one body in him, and through him, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit [St Augustine, sermon 227].

The New Covenant made visible in the Eucharist makes us all a family who are called to know one another, love one another, serve one another and reach out to others in the mission of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit so as to make disciples of all the nations [Matt 28:19-20]. And it is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord that we receive in the Eucharist that feeds us and strengthens us for this work of mission and it also transfigures each of us to grow up to Heaven, in and through doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.

The Eucharist is the divine nourishment that makes sinners into saints for it is the seed of the resurrection whereby the glorified Body of Christ transfigures us in heart, mind, body and soul till we are real enough for heaven; namely, it alone can makes us saints!

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” [John 6:53]

The Holy Trinity also underpins the truth of Gender, namely, that man and woman are made to image God in their bodies as well as in their minds, hearts and souls. Since God has assumed a human nature in Jesus Christ God’s relationship to creation is now made visible in Christ’s relationship to the Church. Thus, the Body reveals both a logic and a language that is theological for as the Man is to image Christ the bridegroom so the woman is to image the Bride of Christ, the Church. But this logic and language of the Body is also found in the sacrament of Holy Orders. For the priest is to be the icon of Christ as head and bridegroom of the Church who is his body and bride! So, marriage is constituted a sacrament only by the valid matter of man and woman and priesthood is constituted a sacrament only by only by the valid matter of a man.

The language and logic of the body includes, but is not limited to, the biology and morphology of the body for it also includes the neurology, chemistry, psychology of Man and Woman. Here is revealed that the body has also meaning, symbolic meaning, as it answers the question not just what is a human body and not just how the human body functions but also why is it so made and so functions - i.e. what the human body means in its form and matter? For Science gives us the how but Faith gives us the why; as God made human beings male and female and as such they are made in God’s image! To seek to destroy this profound truth of being made male and female is to destroy the image of God and this ultimately means to seek to cast out God from human life which is precisely what the secular ideology of transgenderism is seeking to do!

However, although we are made for relationship this does not mean that any relationship is ipso facto good and true. There is in fact a hierarchy of relationships, a sacred order of relationships, which helps us to discern and also helps us to protect ourselves from disordered relationships, unjust relationships and toxic relationships.

The hierarchical [hieros=sacred; arche=order] nature of relationships begins with our relationship to God as trinity for we are made in the image of God and so we are never more truly human when we are in a proper relationship to God. Hence the 1st Great Commandment ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength.’ But then comes the 2nd Great Commandment ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ because your neighbour too is made in the image of God.

From these two Great Commandments that summarise the whole Moral Law there comes an order, a sacred order of relationships revealed in and through the 10 Commandments.

Thus, our primary relationship is to God and the Decalogue has three commandments dedicated to this relationship:

we are called to love God with all our mind, heart, body and soul and this means that we can have no other gods or idols but the one true God and he alone must we worship [1st Commandment - so, no pachamamas!]; we are also called to hold the name of God as sacred and to a holding of all our oaths to God as ones that are also sacred [2nd Commandment] for we are called to hallow his name not to use it as a swear word; we are also called to set aside a day that must be given to the Lord and thus held to be sacred and on this day we are to come together to publically worship him and that day is the Day of the Resurrection so that every Sunday is the Lord’s Day and so it is a day for the Lord and not for car-washing, playing Football or human work…etc [3rd commandment].

Then comes an order of relationship towards our fellow human beings defined by the next 7 commandments.

First comes our relationship to our parents who we are called to honour - Honor your father and your mother; next comes our relationship to all human life from the womb to the tomb which we are called to respect - You shall not kill the innocent; then comes our spousal relationship to whom we are called to be faithful and our relationship to other people’s spouses to whom we should be honourable - You shall not commit adultery; then comes our relationship to other people’s property which we are called to respect - You shall not steal; then comes our relationship to the truth where we do not gossip, speak badly of others or lie - You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour; and finally comes our relationship to our hearts wherein we must have a pure intent which is not envious or jealous of others - You shall not covet your neighbour's spouse; You shall not covet your neighbour's goods.

Now all these relationships are to be rooted in the life of the Church wherein they are healed, made right and properly ordered by grace.

In short we are to love one another as Our Lord loves us and that is lived out in a concrete way by being members of the Church who live in a relationship of service to one another in which, as the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, we are regenerated, reformed and remodelled as the family of God...so as to be fit for the Kingdom of Heaven!

Thus the parish is the place where we learn how to let Christ live in us, work in us and work through us for the salvation of the world.

The Parish is not just a space but the place where a Catholic Culture can arise that is counter-cultural. It is called to be counter cultural to the culture of modernity that seeks to live life without God, and called to be counter cultural to a culture of post-Modernity that seeks to live life without Truth, without an Ordered, just and right relationship to God and to Man, Woman and Child! A post-modern world that has freed itself from Natural Law, Objective Truth and Right Order as we saw the last three years.

If ever the Church needed to be counter-cultural and prophetic right down to parish level, it is now!

Examples of the last point - watch why 7 doctors were hanged in 1947: https://youtu.be/l7OIyN1i-P8