Chapter 6 pp Practice pp. 235, #1-3

 Faith is a gift coming from God. (of course our entire being, our planet, everything, is also a gift coming from God…)  Belief (in God) is a conscious and free human act.  Peter’s response to Christ’s question about who He was is an early example of what faith is and how we respond to it:  Peter was not praised for figuring out who Christ was.  Peter was accepting and articulating the gift of faith.  Believing is possible only by grace, but it requires a response.

 The church is the people of God.  The magisterium is what the Church teaches.  The idea of the Church as the people of God can be found in 1 Peter:  We have been called together, Jew and Gentile  We are all one according to spirit, not flesh  A chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people.  We are a church of the faithful journeying toward god.  Remember we are also hierarchical which implies the need for us to practice obedience.

 Common priesthood: shared by all the faithful  We all share in this by virtue of our baptism.  We are called as priests to offer sacrifices, of ourselves (possessions, work, prayer, suffering, relationships with others, every thought, word, and deed)  The ministerial priesthood: ordained leaders at the service of the faithful.  It is the means by which Christ builds up and leads His Church.

 Laity: All the faithful except those in Holy Orders.  We laity have a completely secular nature.  Our vocation is to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and to order them according to the plan of God.  We live in the world, in all of the secular professions and occupations.  We live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life.  We work for the sanctification of the world from within, the way yeast works on flour through water from within.  We are the front line shock troops, taking the word of God to places that don’t really care about it any more.