KNOWLEDGE IS NEEDED TO LIVE FAITH
Faith is above all an experience of meeting with God through Jesus Christ. It is not mere sentiment that changes according to one´s own state of mind. This meeting is based on what God himself wanted to reveal when he came to meet us. The knowledge of this revelation of the Scripture and the Tradition of the Church is unavoidable for the faith to be solid to enter into dialogue with the cultures. Many pastoral problems of today are born from a great ignorance of having reduced faith to a mere subjective experience, to a comment, “I believe” breaking all the links with the community of believers with whom “we believe”. We cannot make present what we don´t know.
In 1992 The Catechism of the Catholic Church was officially promulgated as an updated compendium of the faith; but for many reasons, it didn´t have the expected result. When the foundation is not solid, all that is constructed on it will collapse. Claret witnessed a lack of formation in many Christians. He checked what Jesus himself says in the parable of the sower. If the one who hears the Word lacks roots, he will be lost and withdraw into himself (cf. Mk 4, 16).
Claret was a great promoter of only one catechism for all the dioceses of Spain: he tried not only to assure basic Christian formation for Christians but also with the aim of helping them to live deeply the faith, he edited “The Straight Path”, a sort of manual for Christian life that had numerous editions. Today we need to follow a similar line. It is not enough to say, for example, “The important thing in faith is love of neighbour”. Today we have to build on the basis of the Revelation received on what we believe. Otherwise, our personal ideas are placed in the centre and the living aspect of a common faith as the church is made difficult. Truth of Jesus alone makes us truly free.
