THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES · Handbook of Prayers

The theological virtues dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have God for their origin, their motive, and their object—God known by faith, God hoped in and loved for his own sake. There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.

Faith

• Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself.

• By faith “man freely commits his entire self to God.” For this reason the believer seeks to know and do God’s will through charity.

• The gift of faith remains in one who has not sinned against it. But “faith apart from works is dead’’ when it is deprived of hope and love, faith does not fully unite the believer to Christ and does not make him a living member of his Body.

• The disciple of Christ must not only keep the faith and live on it, but also profess it, confidently bear witness to it, and spread it.

• Service of and witness to the faith are necessary for salvation.

Hope

• Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

• The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.

• Christian hope unfolds from the beginning of Jesus’ Preaching in the proclamation of the beatitudes.

• Hope is the “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul . . . that enters . . . where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.”

• Hope is also a weapon that protects us in the struggle of salvation: “Let us . . . put on the breastplate of faith and charity, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

• It affords us joy even under trial: “Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation.”

Charity

• Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.