343. In the Church we hear the living Word of God.

YOUCAT Catechism + Catechism of the Catholic Church Lesson 343

Ave Maria series

The Church

How does the Church help us to lead a good, responsible life?

In the Church we are baptized.  In the Church we receive the faith that the Church has preserved intact down through the centuries.  In the Church we hear the living Word of God and learn how we must live if we want to please God.  Through the sacraments that Jesus entrusted to his disciples, the Church builds us up, strengthens, and consoles us.  In the Church there is the blazing fire of the saints, by which our hearts are kindled. In the Church the Holy Eucharist is celebrated, in which Christ’s sacrifice and strength are renewed for us in such a way that, united with him, we become his Body and live by his strength. Despite all her human weaknesses, apart from the Church no one can be a Christian.  [2030-2031, 2047]

A statue of Mary with 12 stars. 

“I am the Queen of Heaven…Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation…Teach them their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments. That is what I wish you to do.  Go and fear nothing, I will help you.” --Request of the Blessed Virgin Mary at a site now known as Champion, Wisconsin in an apparition to Adele Brise, a Belgium immigrant, returning home from Sunday Mass in 1859.…..343

“To love Christ is the same thing as to love the Church.”  Brother Roger Schutz (1915-2005)

“Even today the Church gives me Jesus.  That says it all.  What would I know about him, what connection would there be between him and me without the Church?”  Henry Cardinal De Lubac, S.J. (1896-1961, French theologian)

[2030-2031, 2047]

THE CHURCH, MOTHER AND TEACHER

2030 It is in the Church, in communion with all the baptized, that the Christian fulfills his vocation. From the Church he receives the Word of God containing the teachings of "the law of Christ."(Galatians 6:2.)⁷² From the Church he receives the grace of the sacraments that sustains him on the "way." From the Church he learns the example of holiness and recognizes its model and source in the all-holy Virgin Mary; he discerns it in the authentic witness of those who live it; he discovers it in the spiritual tradition and long history of the saints who have gone before him and whom the liturgy celebrates in the rhythms of the sanctoral cycle. –Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition

2031 The moral life is spiritual worship. We "present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God,"(Romans 12:1.)⁷³ within the Body of Christ that we form and in communion with the offering of his Eucharist. In the liturgy and the celebration of the sacraments, prayer and teaching are conjoined with the grace of Christ to enlighten and nourish Christian activity. As does the whole of the Christian life, the moral life finds its source and summit in the Eucharistic sacrifice. --CCC

IN BRIEF

2047 The moral life is a spiritual worship. Christian activity finds its nourishment in the liturgy and the celebration of the sacraments. –CCC

Mary  Assumption a statue of Mary with 12 stars