As a means to offer our parishioners additional education on the tenets of the Catholic faith, we will be adding one page of the COMPENDIUM of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The Compendium, which I now present to the Universal Church, is a faithful and sure synthesis of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It contains, in concise form, all the essential and fundamental elements of the Church’s faith, thus constituting, as my Predecessor had wished, a kind of vademecum which allows believers and non-believers alike to behold the entire panorama of the Catholic faith.
Read the entire COMPENDIUM here.
Decalogue means “ten words” (Exodus 34:28). These words sum up the Law given by God to the people of Israel in the context of the Covenant mediated by Moses.
This Decalogue, in presenting the commandments of the love of God (the first three) and of one's neighbor (the other seven), traces for the chosen people and for every person in particular the path to a life freed from the slavery of sin.
The Decalogue must be understood in the light of the Covenant in which God revealed himself and made known his will. In observing the commandments, the people manifested their belonging to God and they answered his initiative of love with thanksgiving.
The Church, in fidelity to Scripture and to the example of Christ, acknowledges the primordial importance and significance of the Decalogue. Christians are obliged to keep it.
The Ten Commandments form an organic and indivisible whole because each commandment refers to the other commandments and to the entire Decalogue. To break one commandment, therefore, is to violate the entire law.
It does so because the Decalogue expresses the fundamental duties of man towards God and towards his neighbor.
Yes, because Christ without whom we can do nothing enables us to keep it with the gift of his Spirit and his grace.
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