Centred on the Trinity, it is a treasury of Catholic Truths
When I started reclaiming and relearning my Catholic faith about 20 years ago, I realised what I knew was probably at Primary 4 level. In my interaction with Catholics high up the pecking order, they used terms that were foreign to me.
Some of these I learnt quickly such as Magisterium. It comes from the Latin word magister, which means “teacher”. It refers to the teaching authority that Jesus Christ gave to St Peter and the rest of the Apostles. And from them to their respective successors. The Magisterium is exercised chiefly by the pope who can do so independently and the bishops who must teach in union with him.
One term that took a while to get my head round it is “Deposit of the Faith”. The words give the impression that faith is stored somewhere, such as in a vault. Something that banks do when we deposit our money with them. But faith does not have a physical form, and it took me a few years to understand the term fully.
Deposit of Faith simply means the vast body of divine wisdom that God has manifested to His people from the Old Testament. But it was especially revealed to us in the words and actions of Jesus Christ the Incarnate Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
It embodies all the teachings of Christ that He entrusted to the Apostles with the commission to make them known to the entire world (Matt. 28:16-20). They have since passed this Deposit of Faith to their successors to this day, without any additions or subtractions to preserve the purity of what they had received from Christ.
No one can change Jesus Christ’s teachings because they come from God. They are His divine plan for our Salvation – a roadmap to eternal communion with Him. Or else like a map that has had unauthorised alterations, it will lead us on the wrong path and we will be lost forever.
As St Paul in his epistle to the Thessalonians tells us, “We thank God constantly for this, that when you received the Word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the Word of God” (1 Thess. 2:13).
“Deposit of Faith” has biblical roots as it appears in the Greek version of the New Testament. In the apostle’s letters to Timothy, St Paul entreats his fellow missionary, “O Timothy, guard the paratheke (παρακαταθήκην) or deposit (1 Tim 6:20). He repeats this again in 2 Tim 14 to “guard the paratheke that has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit”.
This Deposit, then, is to teach Christians everything that Christ has revealed about Himself, the Father and the Holy Spirit. It serves as a bulwark against heresies that attempt to corrupt the Truth about God and His salvific plan for the whole world.
As the principal mode of transmission of His Teachings is through oral teaching, Christ gave the Apostles a simple formula to teach and recall them from the Deposit of Faith with the assistance of the Holy Spirit. This formula is founded on the Blessed Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Here, I’ll quote Monsignor Eugene Kevane, a pioneer in the field of catechetics, from his Introduction to Teaching the Catholic Faith Today (published in 1982 by Daughters of St Paul).
What was the content of Jesus’ teaching? How did He form the minds of His disciples? A catechetical reading of the Gospels shows that He taught them to understand who He Himself is and what the religion is by which mankind is to respond to this central doctrine.
“So that they would know who He Himself is, He taught them the mystery of the Trinity. Within the Godhead of Yahweh, the One God of the Hebrew revelation, there are three equal divine Persons …
“The Trinitarian pattern of this teaching that witnesses to Him is clear from His final mandate to His apostles as founders of His worldwide Teaching Church: “Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time” (Matt 28:19-20)
From the Trinity, springs forth all the teachings of the Catholic Church that are contained in the Deposit of Faith. “The Trinitarian profession of faith for baptism, with its subordinate topics for each Divine Person, became the Articles of Faith which the early Church called the Symbol and which we of the Latin Rite called the Apostles’ Creed from the Latin ‘Credo’,” Msgr Kevane wrote elsewhere.
“These Articles of Faith formed the first set of topics in the teaching. It formulated Jesus’ Deposit: it enabled his Apostles and their Successors to hand on the baptismal Profession of Faith by teaching. It was the substance of catechetical instruction then and now.”
Christ’s teachings do not change, even though the world went through a dramatic transformation in the last two thousand years. They are timeless and have addressed every issue of faith and morals in the ancient days of the Apostles and can do so now in our present day.
This does not mean our understanding of what Christ taught doesn’t develop. It does. A perfect example is the doctrine of “Outside the Church there is no salvation” or Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
This doctrine was strictly taught in its narrow sense in the early years of the Church, especially to combat erroneous teachings within and without the Church, such as the Albigensian and other heresies. But the Church gained a fuller understanding of this teaching at the Second Vatican Council.
The Fathers at the Council taught that those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart … can be saved (Lumen Gentium, 16).
In doing so, they preserved the substance of Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: That the Church is necessary for Salvation and without Her no one can be saved.
In essence, the Deposit of Faith is a treasury the Catholic Church – as guardians of the revelations of Christ – draws from to define, teach and defend the Truths about God. The four Marian dogmas, which essentially are about the Person of Christ, are such occasions when the Magisterium has unlocked this precious treasury.
In the Solemnity of the Trinity today, it is important to reaffirm this essential toolkit Christ gave His Church to lead us to God.
