Learning to be Quick to Listen

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity invites the faithful to contemplate the central mystery of Christian faith and life: the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity itself ( CCC 234 ). The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that this mystery is the source of all the other mysteries of faith , serving as the very light that enlightens them (CCC 234). It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the "hierarchy of the truths of faith" (CCC 234). Yet, because it is a mystery of faith in the strictest sense—one of those "mysteries hidden in God"—it could never be known unless it were divinely revealed to us (CCC 237). God has left traces of His trinitarian being in creation and in the history of Israel, but the intimacy of His inner Being as Holy Trinity remained an inaccessible mystery before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit (CCC 237). In expressing this profound truth, the Church relies on a carefully articulated theology...