(Trinity Sunday (B): This homily was given on May 25, 1997 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I. by Fr. Raymond Suriani. Read Matthew 28: 16-20.)

"We are called to teach the truth of Christ. But in order to teach it, we must first know it."

On Thursday morning, I decided to visit the kindergarten class over in our school. When I arrived, I discovered that the kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Marino, had left the room for a few minutes. However Mrs. Synan, the teacher’s aide, was keeping everybody under control--which is no small task in a kindergarten! I said to them, "Good morning, boys and girls. Tell Fr. Ray what you learned earlier this morning in your religion class."

One boy immediately raised his hand. He said, "We learned that sometimes God does bad things in the world and then we have to straighten it out."

I thought poor Mrs. Synan was going to have a heart attack. I also figured that this young man had somehow missed a couple of key points of the daily lesson, so I proceeded to take the next five minutes to talk about God’s goodness and our responsibility to love others and respect God’s creation.

Finally, Mrs. Marino came back into the room. I said to her in front of the children, "Mrs. Marino, we were just discussing what the boys and girls learned today in religion class."

She said, "Oh yes--we taught them that God created us and the whole world; and that God wants us to take care of his creation."

I said, "That’s what I thought." (Hopefully everyone got the right message the second time around.)

About an hour later I was walking from the rectory to the church, and I met up with some of our second graders. They were marching along in almost perfect military formation--heading to the church hall for their gym class. I joined up with them, and as we were crossing the street one of them said, "Fr. Ray, how long was Jesus a priest?" (That’s one I had never heard before; at least I’d never heard the question asked in quite that way.)

I said, "Well, in a certain sense, Jesus was always a priest. But when he suffered and died on the Cross, he was a priest in a very special way. A priest is one who offers a sacrifice. That’s the definition of a priest; and the sacrifice Jesus offered was his own life for the forgiveness of our sins."

By then we were at the front door of the church, so I stopped. The boy turned to the right, looked back and without missing a step he said, "Hmm, he must have been a pretty nice priest!"

Believe it or not, there are some occurrences that render me speechless--and that was one of them. I just smiled.

I share these stories with you this morning in order to make a point: We need to be making the effort to grow in the knowledge of our Catholic faith. And one of the reasons we need to do this is for the sake of our young people. Our children have questions--real questions, valid questions, sometimes very troubling questions. And the answers we give them will very often determine the direction their lives take in the future. Jesus says to us in today’s gospel, "Teach them everything I have commanded you." But in order to teach we have to know; you can’t teach someone what you don’t know yourself. In Matthew 7: 24 Jesus said, "Anyone who hears my words and puts them into practice is like the wise man who built his house on rock. When the rainy season set in, the winds blew and buffeted his house. It did not collapse; it had been solidly set on rock. Anyone who hears my words but does not put them into practice is like the foolish man who built his house on sandy ground. The rains fell, the torrents came, the winds blew and lashed against his house. It collapsed under all this and was completely ruined." Our young people need to learn from us how to build their lives on the rock of Jesus Christ--on the rock of his gospel. Because if they don’t learn that lesson from us, they certainly won’t learn it from the television and the radio. And if they don’t learn it from us, they won’t be ready to face the storms of their lives, as Jesus indicates in this text from Matthew chapter 7.

I focus on this issue this morning because this is Trinity Sunday--a Sunday when we reflect on a very important teaching of our faith--a teaching that we need to be clear about. The New Catechism says that the mystery of the Trinity is "The central mystery of Christian faith and life." (# 234) The central mystery. That means if a person has the wrong ideas about the Trinity, he’ll probably have the wrong ideas about everything else that concerns the faith. And I dare say there are many Christians who do have the wrong ideas about the Trinity. For example, I was also in the sixth grade class on Thursday morning and I said to them, "Okay, here’s an important question (Please don’t disappoint Father!): Is Jesus God?" In unison they said, "Yes." I said "All right!" Then I decided to ‘go for broke.’ I said, "Is the Holy Spirit God?" Some of them immediately responded, "No." When I began to act as if I had just been shot with a bazooka, they realized that this was not quite the answer that Fr. Ray was looking for!

I then took them to some Scripture passages that make it quite clear that the Holy Spirit is divine. Of course, that does not mean that we believe in 3 gods--which is another error people sometimes buy into. In this regard, notice what it says in today’s gospel text from Matthew 28 concerning how we are to be baptized. The New Catechism makes the point this way: "Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: not in their names, for there is only one God, the almighty Father, his only Son and the Holy Spirit: the Most Holy Trinity." (# 233) One God, three divine Persons.

My brothers and sisters, if we do not know our Catholic faith, and aren’t clear about dogmas like the Trinity, then we will not only fail to teach our young people the truth--we will also ruin our own lives and lives of others. Here’s a timely example of this phenomenon: In a recent encyclical, Pope John Paul II notes that there is an intrinsic and unbreakable bond between faith and morality. In other words, what we say we believe is supposed to influence every aspect of our lives. It’s not just a "private matter." This is a truth that’s rooted in the gospels. Obviously so-called Catholic Senators like Jack Reed, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry either don’t understand this truth; or they don’t care to understand it--which is far more likely. In which case, objectively speaking, each of them has now committed a mortal sin--having voted this week against the bill that would ban partial-birth abortions. When you don’t know your faith (or don’t care to know it), you ruin your own spiritual life (as each of these senators has apparently done); and you ruin the lives of others--sometimes even the lives of little babies who are waiting to be born.

And so, may our prayer today be the one found in the 86th psalm. This prayer was obviously written by a devout Jew who wanted to understand his faith as deeply as possible. He wrote, "Teach me, O Lord, your way so that I may walk in your truth." May we have the same deep desire to know and understand the fullness of the truth that comes to us in our Catholic faith.