Divine Revelation

It is the gratuitous initiative by which God steps forth from His transcendent mystery to make Himself known to mankind. He does not merely transmit abstract information about Himself: He comes personally to encounter us, above all by sending His beloved Son and bestowing His Holy Spirit upon us.

Human reason can advance only to a certain threshold: it can ascertain with certainty that God exists by contemplating the created world and our own spiritual nature (God). Yet that is like knowing an artist solely through his artwork: from a magnificent painting one rightly deduces that a master painter exists, and something of his genius, but not his personal thoughts, whether he has children, or what his name is. Who God is in His intimate interior life—that He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that He loves us as His children—we know solely because He freely chose to disclose it to us.

Not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but out of sheer love: He desires to address us as friends and children, and to invite us into eternal communion with Himself. Revelation answers the deepest longing of the human heart (meaning of life): «Eye has not seen, nor ear heard… what God has prepared for those who love Him».

God did not disclose everything all at once, but progressively, as a loving father educates his growing child. He did not hand down a catalog of abstract propositions: He intervened directly in human history through interconnected deeds and words that illuminate one another. These are historical stages:

• The covenant with Noah after the flood.
• The call of Abraham, the father of all believers.
• The liberation from Egypt and the Sinai Covenant, by which He formed His chosen people.
• The prophets, who sustained the vibrant expectation of the Messiah.

This living historical progression is known as «salvation history» (Old Testament).

In the Incarnation. God no longer speaks merely through prophetic intermediaries: He enters history Himself by becoming man. Jesus Christ is the definitive and complete Word of the Father; after Him there will be no further public revelation. That is why the Church does not await a "new message," but rather seeks to contemplate and understand ever more deeply the definitive deposit of faith already received.

That we are not the accidental byproduct of blind chance. Before He ever created the world, God envisioned and chose each of us to be His children in Christ. The ultimate root of our identity is hidden in His eternal love, and only by entering into that divine mystery do we discover the transcendent purpose of our existence.

Through supernatural faith. Faith is neither a vague subjective opinion nor a mere hunch («I think it might rain tomorrow»); it is the free, loving, and trusting assent of the whole intellect and will to the God who reveals Himself. It means entrusting our whole life into His hands, as Abraham and the Virgin Mary heroically did.

Both: it is an interior illumination of the Holy Spirit that moves the heart and opens the mind, and simultaneously a truly free human act by which man cooperates with and embraces that grace.

God's redemptive action is not constrained by human limitations. To every soul He offers, at least in the quiet depths of moral conscience, the necessary grace to seek Him and attain salvation. Yet such implicit knowledge remains vulnerable to error and obscurity; it is enlightened, purified, and brought to joyful fullness through the explicit proclamation of the Gospel and the grace of Baptism. That is why the Church remains essentially missionary (Christian witness).