(Following is a pastoral letter by Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan and Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin on the “Year of Faith” called for by Pope Paul VI).

“Do you believe in the Son of Man?…Lord, I believe!”—John 9, 35, 38.

During Sunday Mass, the People of God stand for their profession of faith. Priest and laity assembled, they speak out with confidence and humility: “I believe in God…”

Toward the end, they tell why their faith is firm: “He spoke through the prophets…”

When they have been dismissed, they go their way—to cars, homes, recreation and work. Now on Monday, Tuesday, week after week, do their hearts enkindled at Mass, continue to burn within them? During the Creed, both the ordinary man and the intellectual understood what they professed at least obscurely. But many fail to follow through with their prayer, thought and meditation. Our instinct to believe is not sharpened. Our faith is openly professed, but quietly betrayed.

Our Lord knew this. Like the seed planted in the field, our faith is liable to misfortunes. Sometimes, the Word is snatched away by the usual forces of evil (in the Gospel, it is the birds). Trials and persecutions stifle it (it has no roots). Again, it may be diminished by worries or the pressures for wealth (it is choked by thorns).

What is the “rich soil’ that generously produces a fine crop, the fourth possibility noted by Christ? Such soil is the open mind and will, heart and body and emotions, the social views of the man who hears the Word, understands and keeps it. This is the Christian man or woman of faith. In the Creed or in daily life, they answer Christ, “I believe!”

It is no secret that the Catholic world today is tense with anxiety. Modern man (and we are that man) reaches out in conquest, proud of his own self-awareness. Out of this has come a collective turmoil. We are impatient that man who can do so much can solve so little.

In a sense, the bottom has fallen out of our world. In more papal language, Pope Paul VI on the anniversary of Peter and Paul, the apostles of faith, has made this comment:

“Where God has no place, there is no longer a final explanation for reality, no inspiration for thought, no compelling moral sense that our human order needs.”

A new generation of Catholic thinkers was unleashed by Vatican II’s “Open Church.” Study has opened up the riches of scriptures; liturgy has opened new doors to God. Ecumenism has built a new bridge to other religions. The Church’s social teaching has cut new paths through the inner city, suburbia, the minorities and emerging nations, and especially through the areas of God’s poor wherever they are.

The Holy Spirit moving over the assembled bishops has reawakened the whole body of Christians to a fresh, adult way of life. Faith—its meaning, application and loss—is being reexamined. This should not surprise us. The present pope is encouraging new “energies of Catholic though in the search for fresh and adequate expression.” But his chief role is pastor and father, and he has not abandoned John XXIII’s formula for renewal.

“The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way it is presented is another.”

But what a Layman C, Father Y, Bishop Z? Faith, contained in the Church, is personalized in each of us. Am I waking to a fuller awareness of the faith, enlivened, purified and strengthened? Unless on this anniversary of the apostles of faith, we can answer Yes, then the Council and its aftermath remain only events of history.

A LIFE NOT A LIST

A Church, closely following the Bible, identifies faith as the acceptance of a person, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. When you read St. Paul’s letters to the Romans, Corinthians and Galatians, you notice that the old catechism simply will not do. Faith is no single act, or series of steps or list of things to believe. Paul, speaking to unbelievers, describes the living faith. James, speaking to Christians, takes a more practical view and insists that behavior must harmonize with this living faith. There is no contradiction: faith to both apostles is not a one-time thing, static and fixed. It is an experience.

It is the Apostle John, closest of all to Christ, who describes faith as a lived experience:

“We proclaim what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have embraced with our own hands.

“I refer to the Word who imparts life. To you, we proclaim that we have seen and heard, that you many share our treasure with us…union with the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.”

Contemporary man is more concerned with the fact that things exist than why they exist. He reads more newspapers than books of philosophies. To such existentialist mood, the ancient but fresh Christian faith speaks with far more meaning than it did a generation ago. Man is not asked just to accept a list of truths which surpass human knowledge. He is summoned to an encounter with Christ who speaks to us all that God wants to say to men. We are not just pupils of faith. We are participants and witnesses of it.

A recent “Pastoral Catechectics” (Hofinger and Stone) comments: “God comes to believers through the biblical, liturgical witness and doctrinal signs, unveiling His personality under the impulse of intense love.” De Chardin address God in his hymn to the universe: “It is not your gifts that I discern; It is you yourself that I encounter.’

The theologian, Karl Rahner, links the Church to Christ: “This reality (the people of God) means a presence, as it were, an incarnation” of Christ’s truth, will and grace.

Christianity has more than a message; it has a mission. It communicates to us not just an idea, but reality itself. Faith is a lived response. Robert Louis Stevenson, a man of deep religious sensitivity, put it in a way most men can grasp.

THE BEGINNING OF FAITH

Every experience unveils something new. When the Council of Trent called faith “the origin, foundation and root” of our salvation, it meant that God was unveiling of us all the truths He wanted us to know.

St. Paul’s classic definition of faith stressed the unveilings.

“Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for: the evidence of things that are not seen.”

But faith does more. God speaks to us. Ours is not the fate of remaining silent observers of the silent God. “He has spoken to us through His Son.” And we respond to this forthright language. The dialogue is obscure, of course. God uses our faulty languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Hellenic Greek. We listen to the translated readings at Mass. We mediate on the texts in private.

Our reason plays its part, although the call to faith is God’s gift. The French theologian, Jean Moroux, assures us that the Church “has always refused to admit a break between faith and reason.” God would hardly have given this man the superb tool of the intellect if he had not expected man to use it in the noblest task of all. Despite those who rest their religion on a pillow of emotion, men of letters bear a long witness to reason’s role. Robert Frost, our New England poet, asks:

“Grant me intention, purpose and design-That’s near enough for me to the Divine.”

Other writers like G.K. Chesterton insist on more than that, in his essays and short stories, the jolly Englishman demonstrated both the work of reason and the free gift of faith.

When the baby is brought to the parish Church for baptism, the first question put to him is: “What do you ask of the Church of God?” the godparents answer: “Faith”. In one word, his intention. In the words and rite of baptism, its fulfillment. The tiny creature of God becomes a child of God, a brother of Christ. Belief is on-going. It is our daily response carrying that simple answer. Faith, through the sacraments of penance, anointing and Eucharist received as death approaches.

In practically every document of Vatican II faith is noted. Parents are its “first preachers”. Educators give it “clarity and vigor”. Priests strike its spark and then nourish it. Bishops confirm their people in it. In the liturgy, men grasp by deed what they hold by faith.

We are blessed in this gift of faith, and we must not hold it lightly. Our reason played its part. So did preaching. So did the whole impact of Catholic life—God’s goodness, our readiness, the example of those around us, the heritage of our parents. Faith started us on our rugged pilgrimage to God whom we will one day see face to face. What shall each of us do about it now?

MAN THE PILGRIM

A time of tensions is a time of choice. We do not always grasp this. Many Catholics fight the renewal because it is their nature to fight change. Others see it as a time to tear down the old, destroy old ways and experiment with new uncharted paths. The truth is, renewal is a time of choice. Karl Rahner states that today’s Christian has discovered the sharply painful nature of choice:

“Each individual has to achieve (his faith) afresh for himself; it is no longer a heritage from our fathers.”

This painful struggle may be at the root of what this generation calls an “identity crisis.” It is difficult to tell who we are unless we are more sure of what we are—flawed children of God, flawed by Adam’s sin, restored by Christ, illumined by faith, enlivened by grace. Because faith will not be static, its alternating current in us can drive us wild. Christian men and women must ask:

1. How is faith strengthened?
2. How is it weakened and lost?
3. How can it be restored?
4. “INCREASE OUR FAITH” (Luke 17.5)

Father John Powell has observed that although the virtues sound sweet, “their practice is costly.’ Difficulties abound everywhere, but as John Henry Newman pointed out in his Apologia, there is a radical difference between a doubt and a difficulty:

“Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt….I have never been able to see a connection between apprehending, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and—on the other hand, doubting the doctrines to which they are attached.”

First then we must meet our difficulties head on. They are no more than symptoms of a malady that is subject to cure. But faith lives best in the whole man, not in a bland and superficial state of mind. Newman, again:

“The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, direct impression, the testimony of facts and events, by history and descriptions.”

Faith must permeate the whole man, each of us giving to its enrichment the best that he is. The ordinary layman strengthens his faith by repeated prayer, gratitude, hard work and perseverance. The Christian intellectual adds to these his own reflection, his reading, his skill of intellect. Surely the believer who leaves his Bible shut and his liturgy unlived is not strengthening his faith. Newman’s prayer for faith works for us all:

“Oh Lord, here I am—I will be whatever you will ask me—I will bear whatever you put upon me...Never will you bring me into any trial which you will not bring me through.”

(B) “YOU OF LITTLE FAITH” (Matt.8, 26)

Faith can be weakened, and it can be lost. Our present society does little help. Materialism, relativism and secularism are poor soil if we expect a good harvest from our faith.

But it is more likely that the torpor starts within us. If a man fails to relate his faith to the everyday facts of life, the bond intended by God becomes weakened. If he is harsh and critical to other persons and institutions, without love and compassion for them, his vision of the Church grows bitter. There is evidence of this in the well-publicized critiques of the Church by men whose faith has diminished, or even disappeared.

Our vigilance must be constant. We must meet difficulties with wisdom. Even doubts can have two effects: Although they can enervate and weaken faith, they can also try and test it. Catholics must not rest comfortably on their belief. They are called to suffer many a struggle of doubt. Under pain of decline, the habit of faith must keep struggle of doubt. Under pain of decline, the habit of faith must keep stretching toward a perpetual renewal and growth. It is not an insurance policy or a guarantee of a serene mind. Its exercise, amid difficulties and even with the resolution of doubts, is a necessary part of God’s discipline.

The young people of today are both pioneers of an uncertain future and relics of a mixed-up past. Are they more apt to lose their faith? Our college and universities, neighborhood groups, the protests and demands seen to underline the crisis of belief. The Fathers of Vatican II honestly faced up to this young impatience and rebellion: “Aware of their own influence in the life of society, they want to take their role in it at once.” As we think of it, this strong desire to assert oneself, and to protest authority, is not exclusively for the young. Women, minorities, the deprived and the disadvantaged are all asserting a new independence. Church, state, schools may not find this comfortable. But we must remember that these are tests of authority, a discipline, not a belief, a faith.

We must not forget either that history is on the side of the young. So is their zeal and innovation and hard work. So is their optimism about the future, and pessimism about the past. To the extent, and only that far, that the adults of society share these young virtues have we earned the luxury of criticizing them.

Our Christian hope in these youths, and in special minorities is a more attractive virtue than gloom. And it is far more effective.

Faith is not lost in one sharp act of disengagement. It dies slowly and painfully. Whether the cause is within or without, man can wake to a dreary life without faith, a series of fragmented days centered not upon God, but upon self.

The non-believer is an alienated person. He is also among the world’s most lonely men.

(C) “I HAVE KEPT THE FAITH” (Paul to Timothy, II, 4, 7)

There is much in today’s Church that reminds us of the trials of Corinth in St. Paul’s time. The Christians there let their faith be diminished by jealousy, shallowness and over-personalization of their preachers. Paul dealt with them sharply. But near the end of his first letter to them, the Apostle opened his heart:

“Be awake to all dangers. Stay firm in the faith. Be brave and be strong. Let everything you do be done in love.”

For the man whose faith has lapsed, this is sound advice. When he is unduly, drawn by fame or pleasure or popularity; when he resents the humility that must go with faith; when he is distracted or preoccupied with personal—let him read Paul’s advice, and do whatever he does in love. For the Christian, Paul never separates faith and charity. In the same Corinthian letter, he gives the chart and dimension of authentic love, “The greatest of the virtues,” the sure and steady bridge to God.

The doubting man, even the unbeliever, can still walk this bridge of love. The humanist and the socialist does not have the faith, but he still loves his fellowman. The poor man too, all how are in need, can join him on this crossing; “Those who are poor according to the World, God has chosen to be rich in faith.” Charity is a generous avenue. And crossing it, every man can link the burden of his good works to the fight of belief. As Paul adds, “In Christ Jesus, faith works through charity.”

God calls whom He will. But His love is for all, even the redeeming love of the Son of God, and His will that all men be saved.

Religions of men, whether they acclaim mankind or some “unknown god,’ will not do. But they can provide the soil in which the Word of faith can sprout, take root, and bear the harvest of a full faith.

ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM

Vatican II has make the Catholic world more aware of its mission, to those within it, other Christians and those of other or no faith. Never as much as today is the Church a city set upon a mountain. The world is watching.

What of Catholics so complacent that they do not even walk the road of good works, much less the higher plane of faith? What of Catholic thinkers more concerned with self prestige than the humble spirit of Christ, more anxious for the flatter of their peers than for the hard work of truth, more prone to novelty and revolt than to the meekness and humility of heart?

What of our own index of faith? Have fear and prejudice and hatred and impurity corroded our spiritual life?

The human condition is our own, fashioned by us, lived out in the context of our home, our work, our leisure. God has spoken to us through his prophets. Faith is our personal encounter with him, an on-going experience, a lived response.

Blessed is the man whose human condition has been permeated by this faith. Blessed is the society in which it can flourish.

Yours in Christ,

ARCHBISHOP PAUL J. HALLINAN

BISHOP JOSEPH L. BERNARDIN