DOCTRINAL MESSAGE
The central Christian mystery. "The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself." (CCC 234) – a God who is "one but not solitary" as a fourth-century Creed says. Through Christ and his Holy Spirit we have come to know that in God there are three Persons (Opening Prayer); each is wholly God, and the sole distinction between them is their respective relationship.

Jesus´ last command to his apostles, the mission he left them with was to "Go… make disciples of all nations." In our words, "make everyone Christian". How? "Baptize them in the name ´of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit´. By being baptized a person makes the most fundamental statement about all of reality that any human being can make: "there is only one God, the almighty Father, his only Son and the Holy Spirit: the Most Holy Trinity" (CCC 233). Profession of faith in the Trinity is what in the last analysis makes us Christians. To the point that religious groups who honor Christ and perhaps even call themselves or think of themselves as Christians, but do not share our faith in the "one God in three persons," are by this very fact non-Christian (this includes not only Muslims or Unitarian Universalists, but Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah´s Witnesses, for example). One might wonder, of course, if some of us Catholics are not so ignorant of this root of our faith that we might be said to be non-Christians also!

As the source of all the other mysteries of faith, it is the light that enlightens them. Not only everything Christian, but everything human, somehow bears the imprint of the Holy Trinity. From here we come, to here we must return.

Catechesis. The dogma of the Trinity (CCC 249-56) and its centrality in Christian faith (232-7).

PASTORAL APPLICATIONS
God opens up his intimacy to us. By revealing to us the innermost secrets of his life, God invites us into his intimacy in a way no human person ever has or ever can. Talk of "full disclosure"! No matter how much we might try, we simply do not know ourselves in this way. We can talk about our thoughts and feelings and our history- but who we really are is a mystery to us. God, on the contrary, is totally transparent to himself. Still, he did not have to reveal himself to us; we reveal ourselves "fully" (within our measure) to a very few, maybe just to our closest friend. But for him we are not mere creatures, but special friends (Jesus reveals the Trinitarian love in himself, cf. John 15:15) – in fact, his beloved children.

The First Person of the Trinity is Father. Even the most devoted parent, the woman who is more than anything a mother, the man for whom being a father is by far the most important thing to him, was not always so, and cannot always act as such. But what Christ has revealed to us about his Father is that this is his exclusive identity: he is "the Father"- in every fiber of his being, so to speak. Everything he does, every word he speaks, every way he looks at each and every one of us, is as the Father. How often, when we think of God, we forget this! And how it affects our lives not to live always under the loving, powerful shadow of the Father who loves us far more than we can know!

The Second Person of the Trinity is Son. The Son became one of us to teach us how to be, united to him and following his example, true sons and daughters of the Father ("Filii in Filio") in everything we do, and say, in every way we look at him.

The Third Person of the Trinity is Spirit and Love. The Love between the Father and the Son is also, necessarily, God. So powerful, so strong, that it is a subsistent Love. Love poured into our hearts by the sharing in Pentecost that came to us through baptism. He it is that enables us to relate to God as Father, to discover in Christ our Brother. "You received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ´Abba, Father!´ The Spirit itself gives witness … that we are children of God, … and joint heirs with Christ, (Second Reading; Galatians 4:6; 1 Corinthians 12:3).

God of our eternity. This is the God who awaits us. Isn´t it time we got to know him? True, we cannot even remotely begin to comprehend the mystery of his life that he has freely revealed to us. But we should not forget that the Holy Spirit in fact dwells in our hearts, and when we bring him into play – with living faith, in genuine prayer – we do actually come to an experience of God  that goes beyond human ability and assures us that we really do want to know him face to face in eternity.

God of our present. God is not solitary. Those who are single or widowed, those who feel alone, forgotten or abandoned, are at every instant the object of his love. God is rich and full of life, before he ever intervenes in the world. The elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the poor who struggle even to survive, are invited by him to discover that simply in their being, especially if they are baptized, they too are endowed with a richness, a vitality and a value (of divine-human dignity) indelibly imprinted in them. For everything bears the seal of the Trinity, but the human person, and much more still the Christian, is marked by it at an incomparably higher level.