Being a practicing Catholic has to do with Jesus in our lives. It is the way we respond to and express two basic principles that were inherent in the life and ministry of Jesus and which continue to be operative in his church: the incarnational principle and the sacramental principle. 

The Incarnational Principle

The incarnational principle is that in Jesus God became a human being, a true and full human being with body and soul, with temptations and frustrations, with emotions and bodily pains. Only sin was missing in his human existence. Through the Incarnation, God became a participant in human space and in human time. By means of the human nature that he took on, Jesus redeemed the world.

Since the Incarnation, the world is God’s world in a way that it had not been before. But the Incarnation is not over. Jesus is still true God and true man, still active in our world, still offering us redemption. God still loves us today as he loved us during the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry. The action of Father and Son continues through the Holy Spirit in the church. The church is not God, but it is the chief instrument of God’s ongoing activity all around us.

The church works through its members, which means that those who strive to be active in their faith are both recipients and instruments of God’s redeeming action in the world. They benefit from and extend the incarnational activity of Jesus.

 The Sacramental Principle

The sacramental principle is a parallel to the incarnational principle. Just as Jesus uses his humanity and ours to bring about his saving activity, so also he uses other created things, things like bread, wine, water and words, to initiate and sustain his life in us. Practicing Catholics understand and appreciate the sacramental nature of Jesus’ activity in the seven canonical sacraments of the church. But the sacramental principle is also operative in the words of the church’s ministers, in the blessings that come to believers through their families and friends, in “ordinary” things like sunsets, rainstorms and the quiet passages of time.

Being a practicing Catholic is not a matter of going through a complicated series of special motions in order to keep God aware of us, but of engaging in a whole style of life that will keep us aware of God, receptive to what God is giving us, attentive to what God entrusts to us to hand on to others. It means being conscious of and responsive to the presence and action of the Lord in the church, in ourselves and in the world around us. It means taking seriously both the incarnational principle and the sacramental principle. This is what lies behind the practices that I have described here.

(Excerpt from Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk, Being Catholic: How We Believe, Practice, and Think, pgs. 165-166 (Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, 2006)

Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk

This article is excerpted with permission from Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyks book, Being Catholic: How We Believe, Practice and Think (Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, 2006). Listen on www.AmericanCatholicRadio.org to Sharing the Word, a daily, 90-second radio homily by Archbishop Pilarczyk based on the readings used at Mass each weekday.