The Four Pillars of the Catechism (CCC 13–17)
On This Page
Part of a series working through the Catechism of the Catholic Church one section at a time. Previous: The Aim and Readership of the Catechism (CCC 11–12). Next: Proof-Texting and the Catechism (CCC 18–22)
Five short paragraphs near the front of the Catechism of the Catholic Church explain how the whole book is built. CCC 13–17 name four “pillars”—the Creed, the sacraments, the Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer—and assign one part of the Catechism to each. It is easy to read past them as a table of contents. They are more than that.
When I first wrote about this section in 2020, what struck me was how little of it an evangelical Protestant would find objectionable. Given the anti-Catholic sentiment of my evangelical youth, I was surprised to find that three of the four pillars are common ground. I still think that is largely right. But the section repays a slower reading. The pillars are older than the Catechism, and the Reformers built their own catechisms from the same four materials. The order in which the Catechism arranges them says something about how the Christian life is meant to work. And all four revolve around Christ.
The Text
Here is the section in full:1
IV. Structure of this Catechism
13 The plan of this catechism is inspired by the great tradition of catechisms which build catechesis on four pillars: the baptismal profession of faith (the Creed), the sacraments of faith, the life of faith (the Commandments), and the prayer of the believer (the Lord’s Prayer).
Part One: the Profession of Faith
14 Those who belong to Christ through faith and Baptism must confess their baptismal faith before men. First therefore the Catechism expounds revelation, by which God addresses and gives himself to man, and the faith by which man responds to God (Section One). The profession of faith summarizes the gifts that God gives man: as the Author of all that is good; as Redeemer; and as Sanctifier. It develops these in the three chapters on our baptismal faith in the one God: the almighty Father, the Creator; his Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour; and the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier, in the Holy Church (Section Two).
Part Two: the Sacraments of Faith
15 The second part of the Catechism explains how God’s salvation, accomplished once for all through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit, is made present in the sacred actions of the Church’s liturgy (Section One), especially in the seven sacraments (Section Two).
Part Three: the Life of Faith
16 The third part of the Catechism deals with the final end of man created in the image of God: beatitude, and the ways of reaching it—through right conduct freely chosen, with the help of God’s law and grace (Section One), and through conduct that fulfils the twofold commandment of charity, specified in God’s Ten Commandments (Section Two).
Part Four: Prayer in the Life of Faith
17 The last part of the Catechism deals with the meaning and importance of prayer in the life of believers (Section One). It concludes with a brief commentary on the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer (Section Two), for indeed we find in these the sum of all the good things which we must hope for, and which our heavenly Father wants to grant us.
An Old Plan
CCC 13 does not claim to have invented anything. It says the Catechism’s plan is “inspired by the great tradition of catechisms,” and the claim is easy to check.
The most direct ancestor is the Roman Catechism, the catechism the Council of Trent commissioned and Pius V published in 1566. Its preface explains why the faith is taught under four heads, and it explains it as an inheritance rather than an innovation:
But as the truths revealed by Almighty God, are so many, and so various, as to render it no easy task to comprehend them, or having comprehended them, to retain so distinct a recollection of them as to be able to explain them with ease and promptitude when occasion may require; our predecessors in the faith have very wisely reduced them to these four heads—The Apostle’s Creed—The Sacraments—The ten Commandments—and the Lord’s Prayer.2
The same preface then summarizes each part in a sentence. The Creed contains what is to be believed; the doctrine of the sacraments comprehends “the signs, and, as it were, the instruments of grace”; the Decalogue covers “whatever has reference to the law, ‘the end whereof is charity’”; and the Lord’s Prayer “contains whatever can be the object of the Christian’s desires, or hopes, or prayers.”3 The last line of CCC 17 echoes that sentence.
The “predecessors in the faith” reach back much further. Around 421, St. Augustine wrote a short handbook of the faith for a man named Laurentius and built it around faith, hope, and love. For the first two, he pointed to two short texts: “For you have the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. What can be briefer to hear or to read? What easier to commit to memory?”4 The Creed teaches what to believe; the Lord’s Prayer teaches what to hope for and to ask.
What may surprise some Protestant readers is that the Reformation catechisms used the same building blocks. In the preface to his Small Catechism of 1529, Martin Luther urged preachers to avoid using many different texts and forms of “the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Sacraments, etc.”5 His catechism takes up the Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, then Baptism, Confession, and the Sacrament of the Altar. The Reformed Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 is organized differently, into three parts on our misery, our deliverance, and our gratitude,6 but inside that frame it expounds the Apostles’ Creed, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer, in that order. It introduces the Creed as “the articles of our universal and undisputed Christian faith.”7
So the Reformers did not start from scratch. They argued, often bitterly, about what the old materials meant. That is worth keeping in mind before assuming that Catholics and Protestants have nothing in common.
The order is a different matter. Luther begins with the Commandments, for reasons of his own; the Catholic tradition begins with faith. The Roman Catechism gave its reason: “Walking in the footsteps of the Fathers, who to initiate men in Christ the Lord and instruct them in his discipline begin with the doctrine of faith, we have deemed it useful to explain first in order what appertains to faith.”8 The Catechism of 1992 keeps that order.
Christ at the Center
The four pillars are not four unrelated subjects that happen to share a binding. The Catechism says so itself, at the start of Part Four:
“Great is the mystery of the faith!” The Church professes this mystery in the Apostles’ Creed (Part One) and celebrates it in the sacramental liturgy (Part Two), so that the life of the faithful may be conformed to Christ in the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father (Part Three). This mystery, then, requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it, and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God. This relationship is prayer.9
Each pillar leans on the others. “What faith confesses, the sacraments communicate.”10 And the moral life depends on prayer: “Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.”11
The structure, as I read it, shows the points around which the whole faith revolves, and all of them revolve around Christ. The Creed confesses him as “our Lord and Saviour.”12 In the sacraments, “Christ himself is at work: it is he who baptizes.”13 In the moral life, his person “becomes, through the Spirit, the living and interior rule of our activity.”14 And in prayer, “There is no other way of Christian prayer than Christ.”15 Take Christ out and the four pillars stop holding anything up.
The First Pillar: The Profession of Faith
Part One opens with an obligation: “Those who belong to Christ through faith and Baptism must confess their baptismal faith before men.” The Catechism points to two texts. Jesus says, “So every one who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven,” and Paul writes, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”16
It is an interesting place to begin. The confession described here belongs to people who already “belong to Christ through faith and Baptism.” The order matters. Baptism is not merely a public pledge that the believer makes; it is God’s act, and the Catechism can say that “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism.”17 Nor does Baptism wait on a finished faith. “The faith required for Baptism is not a perfect and mature faith, but a beginning that is called to develop.”18 What CCC 14 adds is that the baptized do not keep their faith to themselves. Having been given it, they say it out loud.
The Creed is the form that confession takes. The Catechism calls the creed “first and foremost the baptismal creed,” because “the first ‘profession of faith’ is made during Baptism,” and it notes that its articles are arranged around the three persons in whose name Baptism is given.19 The Apostles’ Creed in particular is “the ancient baptismal symbol of the Church of Rome,” which the Catechism calls, “as it were, ‘the oldest Roman catechism,’” and Part One follows it article by article.20
Revelation before response
Before it explains the Creed, though, Part One explains revelation, “by which God addresses and gives himself to man,” and the faith by which we respond. That order is right. We cannot come to know God’s inner life on our own. The Trinity in particular is “a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.”21 God speaks first. Faith answers.
How God brings a person to faith, and how that response should be understood, are hard questions, and much of Christian history has been spent arguing about them. The Catechism’s own answer is that faith is a total response to a God who has spoken: “By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God,” and Scripture calls this response “the obedience of faith.”22 I will come back to that phrase.
Common ground
When I wrote about this section in 2020, I observed that there is little in the Apostles’ Creed an evangelical Protestant would object to. It confesses God as Creator, the virgin birth, the death and burial and resurrection of Christ, his return in judgment, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body. Those are fundamentals of any orthodox Christian faith.
The clause that troubles some evangelicals is Christ’s descent into hell. The evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem, for example, argued in 1991 that the clause should be dropped from the Creed.23 Yet the Heidelberg Catechism keeps it in its text of the Creed: “he descended to hell.” It reads the clause differently than Catholics do, as Christ’s “unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul” rather than a descent to the dead,24 but it does not drop it. On the text of the first pillar, at least, the classical Reformation and the Catholic Church stand closer to each other than either stands to some of the Reformation’s modern heirs.
Whom Do We Address When We Pray?
CCC 14 says the Creed is built around “our baptismal faith in the one God: the almighty Father, the Creator; his Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour; and the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier.” The Trinity is still difficult for me to grasp, and I suspect I am not alone in that. One practical form the difficulty takes is this: when I pray, to whom am I praying?
I had generally assumed that I was praying to the Father unless I addressed a prayer specifically to Jesus or to the Holy Spirit. The Catechism largely confirms that instinct, and then complicates it in a helpful way.
The Church’s prayer “is addressed above all to the Father,” but “it includes in all the liturgical traditions forms of prayer addressed to Christ.”25 It is also addressed to the Spirit: “Since he teaches us to pray by recalling Christ, how could we not pray to the Spirit too?” In any case, the Spirit is involved in every prayer, because “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit,” and “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”26
The way the Catechism holds these together is that praying to one person is never a way of leaving the other two behind. “When we pray to the Father, we adore and glorify him together with the Son and the Holy Spirit.”27 And the pattern runs in one direction: “Everyone who glorifies the Father does so through the Son in the Holy Spirit.”28
The lines blur at the edges, and that is understandable, since the divine nature is beyond human comprehension. The Kyrie at Mass is a good example. When I say “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy,” I have tended to think of it as addressing each person in turn. That reading has a pedigree. Adrian Fortescue, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia, thought it obvious that in the old ninefold Kyrie “the first group is addressed to God the Father, the second to God the Son, the third to God the Holy Ghost.”29 The current Roman Missal is more modest. It calls the Kyrie simply a chant “by which the faithful acclaim the Lord and implore his mercy,”30 and where its third form of the Penitential Act supplies invocations, they are addressed to Christ: “You were sent to heal the contrite of heart.”31 Both readings can stand. The God we acclaim is one.
Seeing the triune God
The same question has an eschatological form. If, by God’s grace and mercy, we come to the beatific vision, what will we see? Will we see the Father, with Jesus Christ distinct at his right hand? Three persons, or one God?
The Church has given more of an answer here than I expected. The Council of Florence taught that the souls of the blessed “clearly behold the triune God as he is.”32 Benedict XII had already defined that they “see the divine essence with an intuitive vision, and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature,” which the Catechism quotes alongside John’s promise that “we shall see him as he is.”33 The vision is of one God in three persons, not of one person to the exclusion of the others.
What that seeing will be like is another matter. “God cannot be seen as he is, unless he himself opens up his mystery to man’s immediate contemplation and gives him the capacity for it.”34 And since the Son took on flesh and rose in it, I take it that the blessed will see him in his glorified humanity as well. Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit,” was given a glimpse of it while still alive: he saw “Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”35 Beyond that, I think it is wise to stop and wait.
The Second Pillar: The Sacraments of Faith
CCC 15 says that Part Two explains “how God’s salvation, accomplished once for all through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit, is made present in the sacred actions of the Church’s liturgy,” especially in the seven sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, the Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony.36
“Once for all” is the language of Hebrews: “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”37 The sacraments do not add to that offering, and the Mass does not repeat it. The Catechism is careful on the point. Christ’s Paschal mystery “cannot remain only in the past, because by his death he destroyed death,” so it “transcends all times while being made present in them all.”38 Or, more briefly: “the Paschal mystery of Christ is celebrated, not repeated.”39
What did the Spirit do “once for all”?
The phrase that stopped me is the one that follows: salvation accomplished once for all “through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit.” I had never considered that. I could see the Holy Spirit as a means of salvation in an ongoing sense. Christ’s sacrifice won our justification and opened the door; the Spirit works in us to conform us to the image of the Son, and he is with us as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling. But that is a process, not something done once for all. So what does CCC 15 have in mind?
The Catechism answers the question in Part One. “Christ’s whole work is in fact a joint mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit.”40 The Son was conceived by the Spirit, anointed by the Spirit, and, in the words of Hebrews, “through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God.”41 The Spirit was not absent from the Cross.
My guess was that the phrase might refer to Pentecost, and the Catechism points the same way: “On the day of Pentecost when the seven weeks of Easter had come to an end, Christ’s Passover is fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.” On that day, it adds, “the Holy Trinity is fully revealed.”42 It also links Pentecost directly to the subject of Part Two: “The gift of the Spirit ushers in a new era in the ‘dispensation of the mystery’—the age of the Church, during which Christ manifests, makes present, and communicates his work of salvation through the liturgy of his Church.”43
So is Pentecost as much a part of salvation history as the crucifixion and resurrection? In one sense, yes: it belongs to the same saving work, as its fulfillment. It is not a second sacrifice. The Catechism describes the Paschal mystery as Christ’s Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension,44 and Pentecost is where that Passover reaches us. The once-for-all work is Christ’s and the Spirit’s together; the ongoing work of sanctification is the Spirit applying it.
It is not surprising that the Spirit is so easily forgotten. The Catechism even explains why: the Spirit “makes us hear the Father’s Word, but we do not hear the Spirit himself. We know him only in the movement by which he reveals the Word to us.”45 He is, in that sense, the person of the Trinity whose work is to point away from himself.
Not mere good works
The sacraments are not good works that we perform to earn God’s favor. They are actions of Christ. They are “efficacious because in them Christ himself is at work.”46 This is what the Church means when she says the sacraments act ex opere operato, “by the very fact of the action’s being performed”—that is, “by virtue of the saving work of Christ, accomplished once for all.” Their power does not depend on the holiness of the minister, though “the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them.”47
I find it most helpful to think of them as places God has promised to meet us. The Catechism calls them “the masterworks of God” in the new covenant and defines them as “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.”48 They may look foolish to some. I am grateful for them, and I believe they have changed me.
The Christian circles in which I grew up typically denied that the sacraments confer grace. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were called ordinances: commanded acts of obedience, testimony, and remembrance, visible signs that strengthen faith but not means by which God gives grace. On that view the signs point to a grace received elsewhere, by faith; they do not carry it. Its defenders appeal to texts like John 6:63, “the flesh is of no avail.”49 Still, in my opinion that view reflects something of an old Gnostic instinct, a suspicion that God would not really work through water, bread, wine, and oil. The Catechism’s reply is simple. Man is “a being at once body and spirit,” who “expresses and perceives spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols,” and “the same holds true for his relationship with God.”50 God made us this way, and in the Incarnation he took the same kind of body.
None of this means God is confined to the sacraments. In a single sentence the Catechism says both things that need saying: “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.”51 He can give his grace to whomever and however he likes. But he has bound salvation, for us, to these signs and promised to act in them, and that is a remarkable accommodation to creatures who need to see, touch, and taste. To rely on the sacraments, then, is really to rely on God, who provided them as the means to receive his grace.
Where Protestants stand
It is on this pillar that Catholics and most Protestants divide most visibly. The Council of Trent condemned anyone who says that the sacraments of the New Law “are more, or less, than seven.”52 Most Protestant traditions that use the word at all count two, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Even here the picture is more varied than the evangelicalism of my youth suggested. Lutherans kept a robust sacramental theology; the Apology of the Augsburg Confession states that “Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and Absolution, which is the Sacrament of Repentance, are truly Sacraments.”53 The Heidelberg Catechism, which insists that we share in Christ “through faith alone,” still says that the Holy Spirit produces that faith “by the preaching of the holy gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.”54 The memorial view I grew up with sits toward one end of the Protestant spectrum, not at its center.
The Third Pillar: The Life of Faith
CCC 16 describes Part Three as dealing with “the final end of man created in the image of God: beatitude.” Human dignity, the Catechism says, “is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God” and “fulfilled in his vocation to divine beatitude.”55 Augustine described the goal in a sentence the Catechism quotes: “There we shall rest and see, we shall see and love, we shall love and praise.”56 The moral life is the road to that end. Sin tarnishes the image; grace restores it, and conforms us to the image of the Son so that we are prepared to come into God’s presence.
The way, CCC 16 says, runs “through right conduct freely chosen, with the help of God’s law and grace.” Each element matters. The conduct is freely chosen: freedom is “the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act,” and it “attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.”57 I really do choose to repent, to love, and to obey; the choice is mine. But even the choosing is moved by grace, for “the preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace.”58 I cannot do any of it without help, and the help comes in two forms: “Divine help comes to him in Christ through the law that guides him and the grace that sustains him.”59
The twofold commandment
Section Two of Part Three takes up “the twofold commandment of charity, specified in God’s Ten Commandments.” I assumed the phrase meant love of God and love of neighbor, since the Ten Commandments seem to concern one or the other. The Catechism confirms it. When Jesus is asked which commandment is greatest, he answers with two: love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets.” The Decalogue, the Catechism says, “must be interpreted in light of this twofold yet single commandment of love.”60 The tablets themselves reflect it: “the first three concern love of God, and the other seven love of neighbor.”61
Perhaps it is simpler still. We must love God fully, and in loving him we love our neighbors. The two tables, the Catechism says, “shed light on one another; they form an organic unity.” “One cannot honor another person without blessing God his Creator. One cannot adore God without loving all men, his creatures.”62 The First Letter of John is blunter: “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.” And Jesus identifies himself with the neighbor: “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”63
That has a practical consequence. A piety that has no time for the neighbor in front of us has misunderstood the commandment it claims to keep.
Faith that obeys
Is this salvation by works? When I wrote about this section in 2020, I noted that a reader who comes to CCC 16 already convinced that the Catholic Church teaches a works-based salvation will find that conviction confirmed. One could read it as saying that man reaches his final end through his own conduct, and from there conclude that man can earn heaven by his own effort.
That misses the point. The paragraph itself says the conduct is undertaken “with the help of God’s law and grace,” and the Catechism is explicit about where grace comes in: “Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion.”64 Whatever we do afterward, “we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us.”65 Even the merit of good works “is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful.”66 The Catechism goes on to say that, “moved by the Holy Spirit and by charity,” the justified can then merit “the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life,”67 but even that merit is grace crowning its own work. God does not drag anyone kicking and screaming to heaven. He guides us by his grace, and he asks us to cooperate. He forces himself on no one.
The Catholic emphasis is better described as the inseparability of living faith and obedience. Paul speaks of “the obedience of faith,” and the Catechism says that because faith commits the whole person to God, “the believer seeks to know and do God’s will.”68 If I truly trusted God, I would obey him. James puts it in terms Luther famously found hard to accept: faith “if it has no works, is dead”; “Even the demons believe—and shudder”; “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”69 A mere affirmation that something is true, held at a distance, is not living faith, and it does not save. (I have written more about James, and about how Catholics and Protestants read him, in my post on the Epistle of James and in the commentary on CCC 4–10.)
One qualification is important, because it is easy to overstate the point. It would be wrong to say that there is no faith at all where there is no obedience. The Council of Trent taught that “by every mortal sin, grace is lost, but not faith,”70 and it condemned anyone who says “that, grace being lost through sin, faith also is always lost with it; or, that the faith which remains, though it be not a lively faith, is not a true faith.”71 The Catechism puts it this way: “The gift of faith remains in one who has not sinned against it. But ‘faith apart from works is dead’: when it is deprived of hope and love, faith does not fully unite the believer to Christ and does not make him a living member of his Body.”72 So the precise claim is this: there is no living faith, no faith that saves, without love and the obedience love produces.
A careful Protestant would agree with more of that than the polemics suggest. The Heidelberg Catechism, having said that we are delivered “by grace through Christ without any merit of our own,” asks why we should then do good works, and answers that Christ “is also restoring us by his Spirit into his image.”73 The real disagreements lie elsewhere: over what justification is, and over what God makes of the works the justified do. Those are serious disagreements, and I have tried to treat them fairly in my post on what the Council of Trent actually said about justification. But they are not the caricature of Catholics trying to buy their way into heaven.
Keeping the Commandments is part of the life of faith, not a substitute for it. As the Catechism summarizes the Council of Trent, “the Ten Commandments are obligatory for Christians and … the justified man is still bound to keep them.”74 There is no keeping enough of them to earn our way, and no fixed allowance of failures. It is instead an act of faith to submit ourselves to God over and over again, though we repeatedly fail.
The Fourth Pillar: Prayer in the Life of Faith
And finally, prayer. It is the aspect of Catholic life most often overlooked when I have these debates with Protestants. Yet prayer gets its own pillar.
CCC 17 says Part Four treats “the meaning and importance of prayer in the life of believers” and ends with the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, “for indeed we find in these the sum of all the good things which we must hope for.” The tradition behind that sentence is old. Tertullian called the Lord’s Prayer “truly the summary of the whole gospel,” and Thomas Aquinas called it “the most perfect of prayers,” because in it “we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired.”75
Here, too, the Reformation tradition is not far away. The Heidelberg Catechism asks why Christians need to pray and answers: “Because prayer is the most important part of the thankfulness God requires of us.”76
Prayer is foundational
Scripture is essential, but prayer is foundational. There is no thriving faith without frequent prayer. What kind of faith can I have in God if I do not talk with him and do not make time for him? The Catechism describes the life of prayer as “the habit of being in the presence of the thrice-holy God and in communion with him,” and it adds that “this communion of life is always possible because, through Baptism, we have already been united with Christ.”77
It is easy not to pray. For a Christian who reads the Bible seriously—and I count myself among them—it is especially easy to let reading Scripture stand in for prayer. Reading Scripture is good and valuable and something that should be done. But it is not a replacement for prayer, and the Catechism quotes the Second Vatican Council to say that the two belong together: “prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. For ‘we speak to him when we pray; we listen to him when we read the divine oracles.’”78
The difficulties
How do I keep my mind from wandering? How do I know what to say? What does it mean to listen, and would I recognize God’s voice if he spoke? I have struggled with all of them. Some prayers are easy to understand: I ask for something, and if I receive it, I see an answer and am grateful. But when I pray simply to grow closer to God, what is he doing? Does he speak while I am too deaf to hear? Or is prayer the means by which he lets me focus on him and grow closer to him, even when the conversation feels one-sided?
The Catechism takes each of these seriously.
On distraction, it is surprisingly gentle: “To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to.”79
On not knowing what to say, it treats the problem as the starting point rather than an obstacle: “Only when we humbly acknowledge that ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought,’ are we ready to receive freely the gift of prayer. ‘Man is a beggar before God.’”80
On the feeling that prayer is one-sided, it insists that it is not. Christian prayer “is the action of God and of man, springing forth from both the Holy Spirit and ourselves.”81 St. Teresa of Ávila, whom the Catechism quotes, called contemplative prayer “a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.”82 When even that seems empty, the Catechism names the experience as dryness and treats it as a moment of “sheer faith clinging faithfully to Jesus in his agony and in his tomb.”83
That last line suggests an answer to my own question. Perhaps the one-sidedness is simply another aspect of faith: believing and trusting that God hears, that he loves us, and that he will work everything out eventually for our good. And the desire to pray is already his work. “Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.”84
Specific times
Prayer also takes discipline. “We pray as we live, because we live as we pray,” the Catechism says, which ties the fourth pillar back to the third.85 And it is realistic about the need for structure: “we cannot pray ‘at all times’ if we do not pray at specific times.” The Church proposes rhythms for that purpose: morning and evening prayer, grace at meals, the Liturgy of the Hours, Sunday Mass, and the liturgical year.86 “One does not undertake contemplative prayer only when one has the time: one makes time for the Lord.”87
For those who find words hard to come by, the tradition offers short prayers that can be repeated anywhere. One of the best known is the Jesus Prayer, which the Catechism quotes in the form “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners.”88 (I have written about its history in a post on the Jesus Prayer and hesychasm.)
What This Means for Catholics and Protestants
Looking back on the four pillars together, I still think much of what I wrote in 2020 holds. The Creed, the Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer are largely shared ground. Even the differences on those three are smaller than the polemics suggest. The Catechism itself notes that its numbering of the Commandments follows Augustine’s division, “which has become traditional in the Catholic Church. It is also that of the Lutheran confessions,” while the Reformed communities follow the division of the Greek Fathers.89
The sacraments are where the division is most visible. They are not the only place, and it would be a mistake to pretend that Catholics and Protestants differ only about rituals. The disagreement over justification is real. But the second pillar is where an evangelical visitor to a Catholic parish is likely to notice the difference first, and it is the pillar that most needs explaining. Many of the sacramental differences, in fact, follow from the deeper disagreement over justification.
I suspect that many of the problems that have plagued Catholic–Protestant relations come from one side seeing in the other something that is not there and then interpreting everything the other side says accordingly. I am sure this happens on the Catholic side as well. I am most familiar with the Protestant version of the mistake and can speak most freely about it. A reader who expects to find salvation by works in CCC 16 will find it there, but only by skipping the words “with the help of God’s law and grace.”
The cure is the one the Catechism invites: read the whole thing, in its own order, and let each pillar interpret the others. The Creed tells us who God is. The sacraments give him to us. The Commandments show us how to live in him. And prayer is where we actually speak with him. Take any one of them away and the house leans.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the four pillars of the Catechism?
CCC 13 names them: the baptismal profession of faith (the Creed), the sacraments of faith, the life of faith (the Commandments), and the prayer of the believer (the Lord’s Prayer). Each one corresponds to one of the Catechism’s four parts.
Where does the four-part structure come from?
The Catechism says its plan is inspired by “the great tradition of catechisms.” Its closest model is the Roman Catechism of 1566, which taught the faith under the same four heads and described them as an inheritance from earlier generations. St. Augustine had already built his handbook of the faith around the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.
Do Protestant catechisms use the same four pillars?
Largely, yes. Luther’s Small Catechism (1529) covers the Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments, and the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism (1563) expounds the Creed, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer within its three-part structure. The order and the teaching on the sacraments differ.
Does CCC 16 teach salvation by works?
No. CCC 16 says the moral life is lived “with the help of God’s law and grace,” and the Catechism teaches that “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification” (CCC 2010). Whatever merit follows is itself the fruit of grace (CCC 2008–2011). The Catechism also teaches that faith without hope and love “does not fully unite the believer to Christ” (CCC 1815).
What does CCC 15 mean by salvation “accomplished once for all through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit”?
The Catechism teaches that Christ’s whole work is “a joint mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit” (CCC 727) and that at Pentecost “Christ’s Passover is fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 731). The sacraments make that once-for-all work present without repeating it.
Do Catholics pray to the Father, to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit?
All three. The Church’s prayer “is addressed above all to the Father” but includes prayer to Christ (CCC 2665), and the Church invites us to call upon the Holy Spirit as well (CCC 2670). Praying to one divine person never excludes the others: “When we pray to the Father, we adore and glorify him together with the Son and the Holy Spirit” (CCC 2789).
Footnotes
1. CCC 13–17. The Catechism’s note to CCC 14 cites Matt 10:32 and Rom 10:9. Quotations of the Catechism in this post are from the English translation on the Vatican website, which follows the 1997 Latin editio typica.
2. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. J. Donovan (Baltimore: James Myres, 1833), Preface, available at archive.org. The Roman Catechism was first published in 1566.
3. Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. Donovan, Preface.
4. Augustine, Enchiridion 7, trans. J. F. Shaw, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1887), available at New Advent. Augustine wrote the work around 421 for a correspondent named Laurentius, and organized it around faith, hope, and love.
5. Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529), Preface, in the translation published at bookofconcord.org. The body of the catechism treats, in order, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Confession, and the Sacrament of the Altar.
6. Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 2. The three parts are headed “Misery,” “Deliverance,” and “Gratitude.”
7. Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Q&A 22–23, in the translation of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, crcna.org. The Creed is expounded in Lord’s Days 7–22, the sacraments in Lord’s Days 25–30, the Ten Commandments in Lord’s Days 34–44, and the Lord’s Prayer in Lord’s Days 45–52.
8. Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. Donovan, Preface.
16. Matt 10:32; Rom 10:9. Scripture quotations are from the RSV-CE.
23. Wayne Grudem, “He Did Not Descend into Hell: A Plea for Following Scripture Instead of the Apostles’ Creed,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34, no. 1 (1991).
24. Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 23 and 44.
29. Adrian Fortescue, “Kyrie Eleison,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910). Fortescue is describing the older ninefold form of the chant.
30. General Instruction of the Roman Missal 52, USCCB translation.
31. Roman Missal, Order of Mass, Penitential Act, form C (third form). See “Exploring the Biblical Allusions in the Order of Mass: Penitential Act,” Adoremus (September 2011).
32. Council of Florence, Session 6, Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439), in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), online at papalencyclicals.net.
33. CCC 1023, quoting Benedict XII, Benedictus Deus (1336); 1 John 3:2.
34. CCC 1028, which goes on to quote St. Cyprian, Ep. 58.10.
47. CCC 1128. The Council of Trent condemned the view “that by the said sacraments of the New Law grace is not conferred through the act performed, but that faith alone in the divine promise suffices for the obtaining of grace”: Session 7, Canons on the Sacraments in General, can. 8, trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), papalencyclicals.net.
52. Council of Trent, Session 7, Canons on the Sacraments in General, can. 1, trans. Waterworth, papalencyclicals.net.
53. Apology of the Augsburg Confession, art. 13.4, in the translation published at bookofconcord.org.
54. Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 65.
60. CCC 2055, quoting Matt 22:37–40 and Rom 13:9–10; the RSV-CE reads “depend” where the Catechism has “hang.”
61. CCC 2067, which goes on to quote Augustine, Sermo 33.2.2.
70. Council of Trent, Session 6, Decree on Justification, ch. 15 (chapter heading), trans. Waterworth, papalencyclicals.net.
71. Council of Trent, Session 6, Canons on Justification, can. 28, trans. Waterworth.
73. Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 86.
75. CCC 2761, quoting Tertullian, De oratione 1; CCC 2763, quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 83, a. 9.
76. Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 116.
78. CCC 2653, quoting Vatican II, Dei Verbum 25, which in turn quotes St. Ambrose, De officiis ministrorum 1.20.88.
82. CCC 2709, quoting St. Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life 8.5.
Garrett Ham
Garrett Ham is an attorney, military veteran, and holds a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on theology, law, and service.
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