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One God, Entire and Whole: Gazing Into the Heart of the Trinity

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 to confess one God in three divine Persons (CCC 249, 253). The Church does not confess three gods, but one God in three Persons, the "consubstantial Trinity" (CCC 253). The divine Persons do not share the one divinity among themselves, but each of them is God whole and entire: "The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e., by nature one God" (CCC 253). While the Persons are entirely inseparable in what they are, they are genuinely distinct from one another in their relations of origin: it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds (CCC 254). By sending His Son and the Spirit of love in the fullness of time, God has revealed His ultimate secret: He Himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that endless communion (CCC 221, 257).

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