With all the Signs of War before us has our faith also become lost? Look into your faith!

With all the Signs of War before us has our faith also become lost?

How easy it can become to blame God when our life-style presents us with signs of evil that seem to occur when there is no apparent solution for correcting them.

So the question regarding our faith in God and finding reasons to place our faith into a bottle of despair becomes the desire to throw this container filled with doubt into the ocean.  

Believing in Jesus Christ and in the One who sent him for our salvation is necessary for obtaining that salvation.  “Since our faith is impossible to please God and to attain to the fellowship of his sons, therefore without faith no one has ever attained justification, nor will anyone obtain eternal life; but he who endures to the end.”    (CCC 161).  

Throughout the many centuries where evil deployments of God’s enemies have become adversaries and through almost all of them, God’s chosen people have struggled to hold onto their faith.

Faith is an entirely free gift that God makes to man.  We can lose this priceless gift, as St. Paul indicated to St. Timothy: “Wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience.  By rejecting conscience, certain persons have made shipwreck of their faith.”  To live, grow, and persevere in the faith until the end we must nourish it with the word of God; we must beg the Lord to increase our faith; it must be working through charity,” abounding in hope, and rooted in the faith of the Church.  (CCC 162).

Each day, as we watch the news of unstable nations preparing themselves for possible attacks, the premise of world peace appears further away from the day before.  If we, who are among the faithful and trusting in God, keep our faith in a solid manner, the weak among us may just acknowledge the trust needed to hold onto their faith as well.      

As the Passion of Christ becomes closer each day we pray for our own salvation, the need to believe in the salvation of our souls is why our Lord chose to suffer and die on the cross at Calvary.  It is this salvation that we must have faith and hold onto its eternal promise daily. 

“Outside the Church there is no salvation.”  How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?  Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:  (CCC 846).

Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church.  He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door.  Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or remain in it.

In spite of all the evil that man has produced for a lack of faith themselves, we have the mandate to hold true the very obligation of keeping faith with the Catholic Church, which is the Body of Christ and profess to the way for Salvation lies in our faith in Christ, first.

Ralph B. Hathaway