A basic understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity is that Jesus is God, equal to the Father in every way, but not the same as the Father.  The Spirit who comes from the Father and the Son is equal to each of them, and yet not the same as the Father and the Son.  The fundamental elements of Catholic belief in the Trinity come from the teaching of the apostles, the gospels and the letters of St Paul.  However, use of the word “Trinity” to refer to God did not come about until the year 200 AD.  It took another 125 years for this doctrine to be formulated in the Nicene Creed that was drawn up at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.  This creed is the profession of faith which we proclaim each week.

From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have tried to understand the great power that created the world and all that is in it.  Nations conceptualized this powerful force in ways they could understand.  They pictured gods somewhat like themselves or like animals with divine powers, and they pictured many different gods.  Hindu tradition, for example, holds that there are about 330 million gods.  That would be a job to keep all of them happy.  The Christian God has made life easy for us by telling us there is only one God we must honor.  But this God could never be conceived of if it had not been revealed to us.  A God bursting with so much personality, that there are three persons in God, so closely united in being and power and love that there is only one God.  And that’s the mystery about this God.

Being a mystery, we cannot therefore reduce ideas about God to the questions of science for verifiable answers.  A few ideas to keep in mind about the idea of God as Trinity include:

1. God is in love with us.  God wants us to know him as much as we are capable, and that’s why God came to us in human form in the person of Jesus.  In Jesus, we get to know God better, so we are better able to follow God and spend eternity enjoying God’s presence and God’s love.
2. God is not a lonely monarch, but a family who is full of love and fully fulfilled within God’s own self.  We are loved, not because God is lonely, but because God is so overflowing with love it just pours out to us and we are fulfilled by that love.
3. Through the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, we are able to know Jesus better and have the wonderful honor of sharing his life and being one with him through works of charity, prayer and the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

As a core sign of our identity as Catholic Christians, therefore, it is required that we ALWAYS begin and end all our prayers and gatherings with the Sign of the Cross, expressing our belief in the Trinity: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.