In the liturgy for baptism a priest asks the person to be baptized or the sponsors of the candidate, what do you ask of the church of God and the answer is the faith. When we are baptized we receive the infused virtue of faith. We can either lose it or augment it, but it is given to us by God. It means of course that we believe in God and we believe what God says and the power of His grace

Sometimes we say we have faith but it is far more important that we have charity. Charity is love of God, the highest of virtues. The greatest of these is charity. It is often forgotten that faith is the portal to charity through hope. Our faith is a gift of God. We cannot merit it. It has to be given to us. The only thing we can do once we have it, is to lose it or to make it better. We cannot alter the basic fact that we are Catholics. We have it at our baptism and we will have the mark of it on our souls until death.

When we talk about a year of faith we have to realize we are coming out of what I think is a time of relative confusion about religion and about the future of humankind — a confusion that has been going on since the 60s really. The Holy Father is onto the answer to a lot of that confusion when he says we have to rededicate ourselves to our faith.

A Year of Faith will mean a lot of things. One of the things it should mean is that we express to Almighty God in prayer our gratitude for the gift of faith. We see in the life of the world the disaster of many people who do not have a faith to cling to. We see that example in the United States, because our political system maintains a stand-offish relationship with faith, how paltry and ineffective they are in dealing with the Islamists for example, who have a very strong relationship and adherence to a faith albeit very different from ours. Our politicians and leaders don’t know what to do with that. Having given up faith they find themselves confronted with people who have an erroneous but very vivid faith.

Think of what we can accomplish if we make our faith what it should be by virtue of our baptism and the reception of the sacraments. The Holy Father also stresses the fact that we should become more familiar with the teachings of our faith. The Church has gone to great lengths and great expense to redo the official Catechism of the Church and, for those of us who are slow readers, has even managed to forge a compendium from among that, so that no one has an excuse. If you cannot read the big book, at least become familiar with the catechism through its compendium form.

Time was when we used to have the priests at Mass on Sunday preach a sermon on some article of our faith. Now we have homilies which have a slightly different orientation. I am not about to say we should give up homilies, but we priests should supply instruction, like those sermons on the doctrine, the morals, the discipline, the prayer life and the liturgical life of the Church.

Finally, we should, in the Year of Faith, consider the value that our faith means in life. Its value is this: we do not have to be in doubt, we do not have to be insecure, we do not have to wonder about what is going to happen to us now or in the future because we are promised, that if we remain in our faith, we will be received by the Son of God at the end.