My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Every Sunday after the homily at Mass, along with Catholics all over the world, we recite the Profession of Faith, known as the Nicene Creed. During this Jubilee Year 2025, we celebrate the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which is the basis of the Creed we still use today. Just imagine, 17 centuries during which, using these same words, billions of Christians have expressed their belief in God as the One who loves, the One who is beloved, and the One who is the Love between them. The First Council of Nicaea was a council of Christian bishops convened in the city of Nicaea, now İznik, in the country of Türkiye (Turkey). Around 220 bishops attended, mostly from the eastern churches.

The Council of Nicaea met from May until the end of July 325. It was the first ecumenical council of the Christian church, called by the Roman Emperor Constantine I, at the time an unbaptized catechumen, to address the problem created by Arianism, a heresy first proposed early in the 4^th fourth century by the priest Arius of Alexandria that asserted that Christ is not divine but a created being. The Arian heresy was popular throughout much of the Eastern and Western Roman empires. During that gathering in Nicaea, in the year 325, the Council delegates came to a unified statement of who Jesus Christ is.

The response that came from the Council of Nicaea was the Nicene Creed, a Christian statement of faith that is considered the only ecumenical creed because it is accepted as authoritative by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and major Protestant churches. We are the heirs of those who gathered so long ago, and we too believe in the mystery of God’s continuing presence in our world. When we say the words of the Creed, we are committing ourselves to beliefs that have practical, real-life implications. For example, when we say: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Begotten son of God … through Him all things were made,” we are expressing our belief in Christ’s identity as true God and true man. But we are also expressing our understanding of our own identity as human beings created in God’s image and disciples of Christ. In fact, when we say, “through Him all things were made,” we acknowledge that every part of God’s creation is graced and full of dignity.

Although the main focus of the Nicene Creed is meant to address the Christological question of the nature of Jesus Christ as both divine and human, it actually has a Trinitarian structure, with separate paragraphs about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, with a concluding paragraph about our beliefs in the Catholic Church and some essential dogmas, such as the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life. In this sense, the Nicene Creed closely follows the structure of the Apostles’ Creed, so called because it is rightly considered to be a faithful summary of the apostles’ faith, although the Nicene Creed is often more explicit and more detailed than the Apostles’ Creed.

Part One of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) provides a line-by-line and almost word-by-word analysis of the Apostles’ Creed, which is helpful as we consider the meaning of the Nicene Creed. Both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed start with the words, “I believe.” Thus, the Catechism of the Catholic Church starts its analysis of the Creed with these two words, saying, “Before expounding the Church’s faith, as confessed in the Creed, celebrated in the liturgy and lived in observance of God’s commandments and in prayer, we must first ask what ‘to believe’ means” (CCC n. 26). Since faith is our response to God, who reveals Himself and gives Himself to us as we search for the ultimate meaning of life, we must first consider that search, then the divine Revelation by which God comes to meet mankind, and finally our response of faith.

All people believe in something. Even atheism is a belief, namely the belief that there is no God. I would argue that atheism is actually harder to prove than belief in God. The Church “teaches that God … can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason” (CCC n. 36). In contrast, how does one prove the non-existence of God? It is sheer fantasy to imagine that the exquisite details of the ordered nature of the universe and of human existence came about by some random coincidence.

While we can know that God exists with certainty by natural reason on the basis of His works, there is another order of knowledge, which we cannot possibly arrive at by our own powers, namely, the order of divine Revelation. God has revealed Himself and His plan of salvation by sending us His beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. This revelation comes to us through Sacred Scripture and Holy Tradition, that is, the truths of the Catholic faith handed down through the centuries by the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops of the Church.

“By his Revelation, the invisible God, from the fullness of His love,” calls men and women His friends, “and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company. The adequate response to this invitation is faith” (CCC n. 142). But this faith does not come automatically. “Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by Him. Before this faith can be exercised, [we] must have the grace of God to move and assist [us]; [we] must have the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth” (CCC n. 153). May God give us this grace. Amen.