Strengthening Your Faith Through Study

Strengthening Your Faith Through Study

At Shield of Faith, we believe that all Catholics should deepen and strengthen their Faith through studying in matters related to their Catholic religion. Studying your catechism may be enough to save your soul; it is not enough though to defend the Faith against its enemies, to help fellow Catholics struggling with doubts and worries to stay firm in the Faith, or help converting other people to the Catholic Faith.

Our main goal is to help provide this kind of study materials, in order for Catholics to be more aware of the dangers of the modern world, and approach every aspect of life with the true principles of the Catholic Church.

Faith is defined as the intellectual assent to the truth revealed by God. It is not a feeling, or a mere confidence in the promises of God, but an intellectual act. The better your natural intelligence is formed, and the better your knowledge of the revealed truths is extended, the higher and stronger your acts of Faith can be.

That is not to say simple people cannot have a strong Faith. But these simple people are at a greater danger of losing it or compromising it: for they are usually not aware of the heresies when these are presented under a good pretense or in a pious way; moreover, they are usually not able to articulate a defense of the Faith in front of its deniers.

Our ancestors may have been poor farmers who never learned how to read: no one can blame them for a lack of knowledge. But who has that excuse nowadays, of not being able to read and even more of lacking free time? We live in the era of free time, an era whose culture is dominated by entertainment. Our ancestors hardly even knew the concept of entertainment: their lives were spent in work, prayers, community service and family time. In our era, most people can reasonably consider cutting off some entertainment time to replace it with study time.

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Let us reflect on St. Peter’s word: “sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you” (1 Peter 3, 15).

If we want to be true soldiers of the Faith, in our era specifically, we are called to follow the teaching of the first Pope, and improve ourselves in these two aspects:

-        Sanctification: he who wants to speak for Our Lord has to model himself out of Our Lord. There is no point in speaking about the Faith to other people when you are clearly not living according to the standards of the Faith, and if your interior life is shallow. As explained by Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the soul of the apostolate is interior life: only a truly sanctified and interior person can do good to others in matters of Faith and religion.

-        Doctrinal formation: we should be able to explain the reasons why we are Catholics, and explain what is necessary to do in our era in order to stay entirely faithful to the Catholic teachings and the will of God. We should be ready, as St. Peter says, to testify of that hope which is in us. As time goes, the “reasons” in support of unbelief or compromise in matters of Faith have grown in number and in complexity. It is impossible to address them only with prayers and good will.

If someone has one of these without the other, he will be a very defective soldier of Our Lord, and do harm in a way or another.

The pious and sanctified person who lacks doctrinal formation will be defective in recognizing and addressing the false ideas that dangerously threaten the Faith and the Christian virtues; he will be lied to, and led astray by false shepherds, or by his own faulty principles. Aren’t many good-willed people stuck in the Novus Ordo, where they are effectively deprived of any ability to truly lead souls to Our Lord, despite their good intentions? Tragically, some of them are doing a lot of harm while their distorted conscience tell them they are doing good. Doctrinal formation is what they lack.

Saint Francis at first did not want his poor friars to go through intense theological studies: he thought that such study would lead them astray from the perfect humility and simplicity they were seeking. But the circumstances convinced him to do otherwise: his pious friars, when preaching to the people, were not able to contradict the seductive doctrine of the heretics. Since then, the Franciscans have to study philosophy and theology as most of the clerics have to.   

This being said, a doctrinally well-trained person who lacks piety and interior life is another kind of disaster. You may know a lot about Catholic theology, apologetics, Church history and other sciences related to Faith: if these truths do not penetrate your heart, and become living principles of action, you will probably not help others to see them as the truth. You could even scandalize them by not living according to your own principles, which is the worst example one could give to his neighbor.

Moreover, experience tends to show that a person who seeks knowledge but lacks piety is at a great probability of losing the Faith or falling into foolish errors that are unworthy of a high intellect: for if one is too confident in his own wisdom, lacks fear of God and does not respect his superiors, he shall become a fool.

Thus we hope to provide contents that can nourish both the intellect and the heart: it is not enough to know more, we also ought to love more, if we want to be true defenders of Catholicism, In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith we may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one.
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