What we believe

     A Creed gives testimony and voice to what we believe, what we hold sacred.  In the Council of Nicea a creed was put forth that proclaimed what was essential to the Faith of the Church.  We pray that Creed at Sunday Eucharist and at major celebrations of the Church.  Today, the Feast of the Annunciation, was one of those days.

     One aspect of the creed focuses on today's feast - the visit by the angel to the young girl Mary to announce that she was chosen by God to be the mother of Jesus.  Her YES opened the way for the Spirit of God to fill her with divine love and she conceived.  It was at that moment, the moment of the incarnation, that God became man - the two natures joined in a life giving and redeeming moment in history.  Our recent revised translation from the New Roman Missal saw this point made clearer.  In the previous translation it stated that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.  The new translation makes our faith clearer when it says that Jesus "came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man."  He became man at the moment he was conceived (not at the moment of his birth).  Jesus was Jesus, the God/man, incarnate in the womb of Mary, at the moment that God's divine love filled Mary and she conceived.  We celebrate Christmas, the day he was born ... but this is "the" important feast, when God became man in the incarnation.

      A growing portion of society scoffs at us because of our primitive beliefs, our scientific naivete, our backwardness.  Abortion is all about the rights of the woman involved.  Nothing else matters.

     The belief that we declare every Sunday states otherwise ... it it also about the unique living person whom God has breathed his life into and given a soul at that moment of conception, however it came about.  That is when the person comes to be ... and is my personhood more important than anothers?  Can I disregard one to satisfy the other?  There is the dilemma!  Reason would suggest that the answer is NO ... Faith would tell us that the answer is NO.  And yet so many enlightened say yes.  How disturbing.