Saints Peter & Paul  

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Faith is a key component of a healthy spiritual life. What is a “spiritual life?” It is a life that takes seriously the reality of a non-physical dimension of a person’s existence. It’s where a conviction of the reality of God and spiritual beings is part of our mentality and our vision of what responds to our desire for the fullness of life.

Faith is what we call a “theological virtue.” The word “virtue” comes from the Latin word for “strength.” We use the word “theological” to indicate something which relates directly to God. So, the virtue of Faith is our ability to firmly believe in God and what God reveals to us.

Non-believers often describe faith as blindly accepting something which you can’t prove. They use the expression “blind faith” to make it seem that faith is opposed to reality. Behind their accusation seems to be the ideology of scientist, which assumes that nothing can be true unless it can be scientifically proven. But this is a shallow understanding of knowledge. We take for granted the reality of many things that cannot be scientifically proven: things like love, freedom, justice, etc.

The virtue of Faith is grounded in our conviction that our minds can discover truth. Without this conviction it’s hard to see how we could live without being nervous wrecks, for everything would be up for grabs. Without a firm trust that we can know things for certain, how would we dare doing anything without being scared that we could be harmed in some way?

Faith, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself [Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶ 1814]. It is, along with the works that flow from following what God has taught us, the way in which we find salvation. The term salvation comes from the Latin word “salus,” which means “health.” The fullness of our health─body and spirit─is total union with God, which begins during earthly life and is fulfilled following our physical death.