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Question

Dear Father Angelo,

I often follow the very clear explanations you give on theological questions.

I have one concerning grace, could you explain to me what it consists of? Is it the presence of the Trinity within us? Does grace come to us with the sacraments? And who is not Christian or does not attend the sacraments, does possess grace?

Thanks!

Flavia


Response from the priest

Dear Flavia,

1. Grace is a participation in the life of God, a communion with Him.

An example can explain what it is. Let’s think of iron: in itself it is cold and dull. But when it is placed in the fire, while remaining iron, it becomes a partaker of the nature of the fire and therefore becomes incandescent and luminous.

It is St. Peter who speaks about the sharing of the divine nature: “With this He has given us the very great and precious goods promised to us, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature” (2 Pt 1,4).

2. It could be said that grace is a participation in God’s divine splendor.

With this splendor God penetrates and envelops our whole soul, elevating it to the supernatural order, to a communion with Him.

3. And as the fire penetrates the iron and transforms it, so similarly this divine splendor infused in us transforms us and makes us “from sinners saints, from enemies friends, from unjust righteous” as the Magisterium of the Church says in the Council of Trent.

4. In that transformation or infusion of divine splendour Our Lord shares with us a germ of His divine life (1 Jn 3: 9), which makes us Sons of God by grace and adoption.

5. At that same moment, precisely because of grace, the three theological virtues are poured in us: faith, hope and charity which allow us to think as God thinks (faith), to trust in the power of His help (hope) and to love Him with His own heart (charity).

6. Likewise the Holy Trinity comes to dwell in our soul as in a temple: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him” ( Jn 14:23).

7. Precisely for this reason it is called sanctifying grace.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says of it: “Sanctifying grace is a habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God, to act for his love” (CCC 2000).

8. It also says that “belonging to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience and can only be known with faith. Therefore, we cannot rely on our feelings or our works to infer that we are justified and saved. However, according to the word of the Lord: “By their fruits you will be able to recognize them” (Mt 7:20) “(CCC 2005).

We have clues through which we can discern the presence of God’s grace in us, such as a sense of interior fullness due to his presence or of emptiness or an abyss through which one feels separated from Him.

However, these clues are not apodictic because there may be people very advanced in the life of grace who feel a great interior emptiness and do not minimally warn the presence of God due to particular purifications to which the Lord subjects them.

Conversely, there may be people who live in sin and confuse religious sentiment with grace, or enjoy only a particular and momentary divine favor (actual grace), but not the sanctifying one.

9. The ordinary ways of the infusion of grace are constituted by the sacraments which produce it by virtue of their own celebration (ex opera operato) in those who do not place an obstacle to it.

But alongside the ordinary ways God communicates his grace through extraordinary ways that He alone knows.

He communicates it further to those who already possess it and infuses it in those who at that moment pass from sin to a new life.

It is through this infusion of grace in extraordinary ways that we trust in the salvation even of those who have not been incorporated into the Church through Baptism.

With the wish to grow more and more in this life which is already an anticipation of Heaven, I present you to the Lord and I bless you.

Father Angelo