St. Thomas More Chicago

Fr. Robert Behnke

Trinity Sunday is, for me and I suspect for many who preach, a particularly challenging Sunday.  How can one say anything helpful, nourishing, spiritually significant let alone spiritually challenging, about the Mystery of God the Blessed Trinity, when in the first place man could never have figured out that God is a Trinity?  God had to reveal supernaturally the mystery of what theology calls His “Godhead.”  Though man can reason to the existence of God and following that, some truths about God, it would be utterly impossible for man on his own to have come to the conclusion that God is Three Divine Persons in one; God had to reveal this truth to man, because our reason cannot adequately wrap our minds even around the idea, let alone the reality.  And the great blessing we celebrate, surely every day, especially at every Sacrifice of the Mass, but particularly on Trinity Sunday, is that we don’t have to figure God out on our own.  Surely He has not, and will never, reveal to us all there could be to know about Himself; we would need to be God to know God in His fullness.  But the blessing is that we who have met and believed in the Son of God Our Lord Jesus Christ have been told by Him all that we need to know about God.  Anything that is true—any truth—can be either external or internal in relation to our own lives.  We may know and be able to rattle off the names of the capitals of the fifty states, but that information remains really external – peripheral – to our lives until, perhaps, a person may become first a little curious, then mildly interested, and then passionate, about the history of America and her fifty states: how they came to be, how the boundaries were determined, how they were named, when they entered the union.  Then that same knowledge that was once external – peripheral – incidental – now has become internal – important – significant – crucial – to the man who has come genuinely to breathe the study of American history.  For one man, knowing the fifty capitals is merely incidental to his life; for another, it becomes like the marrow in his bones.
               Sadly, I suspect, the truth of the Trinity remains incidental in the lives of so many many Catholics.  Catholics may know the doctrine, they may be able to recite it, and give even a basic explanation of what it means (more often, what it does not mean), but were God not a Trinity, many Catholics might not be bothered or disturbed at all; those Catholic should consider that well, because not embracing the mystery of the Trinity can make one very close to being Jewish or Moslem.  So many Catholics, after all (I read it and/or hear it from Catholics at least once a week) say …well, we all believe in the same God – Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists… (not knowing that ‘orthodox Buddhists’ don’t believe in God at all), overlooking that only Christians acknowledge the Trinity and, at least for Catholics, the Trinity is the foundation of everything else we believe – everything else the Church teaches.  The ancient symbols of the faith – the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed – are extended professions of faith in the Trinity; here I will use the words of the new translation we will begin using at Mass this coming Advent: I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth….I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God….I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son….  How tragic for any Christian, especially for any Catholic, to go through life equating the truth of the Blessed Trinity with their knowing the multiplication tables, or their knowing the names of the planets revolving around our sun, or their knowing the names of all the kings and queen of England.  Surely Our Lord came to give us knowledge—divine facts about the Mystery of God–but much more importantly, He came for a specific supernatural purpose: to make it possible for every man actually to enter into the life of the Blessed Trinity: to participate in the eternal life of the Godhead.  The Catholic who is a genuine disciple of Our Lord may know–and should learn from childhood–facts that we know about God.  But it is not knowledge of the facts about God that brings us into supernatural Trinitarian life.  An atheist can learn the facts that others believe about God; an atheist can even teach those facts to others without his believing any facts of belief he teaches.  But every time we witness the baptism of a baby, we witness a supernatural event: the Divine Life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enveloping that baby who has no human knowledge about the God Who at the moment of baptism is adopting him as His very own child.  That life of God is the most precious gift that baby has—a human first created in the image and likeness of the one God—and now, because of his baptism, that baby becomes a actual child of God; from the moment that child reaches what we call the age of the use of reason, that child of God’s vocation is preserving God’s supernatural life, increasing that life, by knowing not just things about God, but by knowing God Himself: His will for us, His divine plan – to know God is to love God and so, as Our Lord tells us, …if you love Me, keep My commandments….

Archbishop Francis Chullikatt

This past week, at the United Nations General Assembly, the permanent observer of the Holy See to the U.N., Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, was roundly booed as he made a speech.  But that diplomatic representative of the Holy See was not booed and hissed by Moslems or Hindus or Buddhists, but by representatives of some Western nations, of Europe and the Americas.  The General Assembly was debating a statement it titled Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS.  Here is a sampling of what the Church’s representative said that caused such a rude reaction from so many Western diplomats:

…In providing more than one fourth of all care for those who are suffering from HIV and AIDS, Catholic healthcare institutions know well the importance of access to treatment, care and support for the millions of people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS….The Holy See understands that, when referring to "young people," the definition of which enjoying no international consensus, States must always respect the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents to provide appropriate direction and guidance to their children, which includes having primary responsibility for the upbringing, development, and education of their children….States must acknowledge that the family, based on marriage being the equal partnership between one man and one woman and the natural and fundamental group unit of society, is indispensable in the fight against HIV and AIDS, for the family is where children learn moral values to help them live in a responsible manner and where the greater part of care and support is provided….The Holy See rejects references to terms such as "populations at high risk" because they treat persons as objects and can give the false impression that certain types of irresponsible behavior are somehow morally acceptable. The Holy See does not endorse the use of condoms/commodities including as part of HIV and AIDS prevention programs or classes/programs of education in sex/sexuality. Prevention programs or classes/programs of education in human sexuality should focus not on trying to convince the world that risky and dangerous behavior forms part of an acceptable lifestyle, but rather should focus on risk avoidance, which is ethically and empirically sound. The only safe and completely reliable method of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV is abstinence before marriage and respect and mutual fidelity within marriage, which is and must always be the foundation of any discussion of prevention and support. The Holy See does not accept so-called "harm reduction" efforts related to drug use. Such efforts do not respect the dignity of those who are suffering from drug addiction as they do not treat or cure the sick person, but instead falsely suggest that they cannot break free from the cycle of addiction. Such persons must be provided the necessary spiritual, psychological and familial support to break free from the addictive behavior in order to restore their dignity and encourage social inclusion.  The Holy See rejects the characterization of persons who engage in prostitution as "sex workers" as this can give the false impression that prostitution could somehow be a legitimate form of work. Prostitution cannot be separated from the issue of the status and dignity of persons; governments and society must not accept such a dehumanization and objectification of persons.  What is needed is a value-based approach to counter the disease of HIV and AIDS, an approach which provides the necessary care and moral support for those infected and which promotes living in conformity with the norms of the natural moral order, an approach which respects fully the inherent dignity of the human person….

It may be true that, on first examination, many Christians think that the Blessed Trinity doesn't connect with anything much in either their life or worship.  But our belief in the dignity of every human clearly follows from our belief in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, and in particular from what we believe about how the Blessed Trinity interacts in the life of the world.  Our Lord spells it out clearly and succinctly in speaking to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel: …God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.  For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him….
The action of the Blessed Trinity for us—our creation in God’s image, our salvation by God’s death, our adoption as children of God in the sacrament of baptism—these are the reasons why the Church has always fought—and still fights today—for respect for the dignity of every human person—why the Church fought in the past and still fights today against any power, any culture, any nation, any people, any opinion that diminishes the intrinsic worth of even a single human being.  This is why the Church strenuously opposes abortion and opposes anyone who in any way supports abortion or even facilitates abortion; this is why the bishops of the USA just this past week formally reiterated the Church’s opposition to assisted suicide, something now legally allowable in three states, and something that I wouldn’t be surprised to debut soon in the Illinois legislature.  This is why the Church has Catholic Charities, hospitals, nursing homes, grade and high schools, senior citizen centers; this is why the Church invented the idea of universities in the Middle Ages; this is why no single institution cares for more HIV/AIDS patients than the Catholic Church—because the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, Which is a mystery of unending, self-sacrificing, eternal, other-centered love—is at the heart of the Church, at the heart of the Catholic Faith.  The nations of the West and their UN ambassadors believe that HIV/AIDS can be successfully treated by acting as if narcissistic sexual activity is good but must carry a caution in the form of a condom.  The Church knows that HIV/AIDS—as well as every other evil on the planet—can only be fought and defeated with self-sacrificing love—a love that entails both self-respect and respect for the other rather, than by a utilitarian treatment of persons as objects, by passing out free condoms and giving instructions even to children on how to use them.  The Church teaches that people have more dignity than the UN or the US government realizes; all people have a dignity that comes directly from their creation by God the Three-in-One—Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
In today’s Second Reading, St. Paul links belief in the Blessed Trinity with the daily practice of Christian living.  Being in right relationship with God is the whole point of life as a Catholic:…Mend your ways…writes St. Paul….encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you….  In other words, act and live like what you are, as what God created you to be, a human being created in the image and likeness of the God Who is eternal, unending, everlasting love.  If we can decide always to try to live as what we have been created to be, we will, on this Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, today have delved very deeply into the mystery of that Blessed Trinity, and in that mystery we will see God ever more clearly.