EWTN News portal publishes a catechetical article on the Holy Trinity — the central mystery of the Christian faith — yet the entire exposition is conducted in a tone of rationalistic pedagogy that reduces the highest mystery of revealed religion to a series of logical propositions accessible to unaided human reason, thereby betraying the very supernatural character it claims to present.
The Mystery That Is No Mystery
The article opens by acknowledging that the Holy Trinity is “the central mystery of the Christian faith,” yet proceeds to treat it as though it were a merely intellectual puzzle to be solved through scriptural proof-texting and terminological etymology. The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is cited as the primary authority (No. 48), a document produced by the post-conciliar structures — an instrument of the very theological rationalism that has hollowed out Catholic doctrine for decades. The article states: “God has left some traces of his trinitarian being in creation and in the Old Testament but his inmost being as the Holy Trinity is a mystery which is inaccessible to reason alone” (No. 45). This is technically correct, yet the article immediately proceeds to do precisely what it acknowledges cannot be done: prove the Trinity through reason and Scripture alone, as though the mystery were merely a conclusion to be demonstrated rather than an article of faith to be received in humble submission to the divine revelation.
The Fathers of the Church and the great Scholastic doctors — St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Hilary of Poitiers — all insisted that the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity surpasses every created intellect, angelic and human alike. St. Thomas teaches in the Summa Theologica (I, q. 32, a. 1) that the Trinity of Persons in the one divine essence cannot be demonstrated by natural reason but is known only through divine revelation, and that the articles concerning the Trinity are preambula fidei (preambles of faith) that prepare the mind but do not compel it by strict demonstration. The article’s entire methodology — numbered points, logical proofs, scriptural citations arranged as evidence — reflects the spirit of rationalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood” (Proposition 3), and “All the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason; hence reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge of all truths of every kind” (Proposition 4).
The Silence on the Supernatural Order
What is most strikingly absent from this catechesis is any mention of the supernatural order — the elevation of man to a participation in the divine nature through sanctifying grace. The article speaks of the Trinity as though it were a theological fact to be known, rather than a living reality in which the baptized soul actually participates through the sacraments. There is not a single mention of baptismal grace, of the indwelling of the Holy Trinity in the soul in the state of grace, of the theological virtues, or of the lumen gloriae. The Holy Trinity is presented as a doctrine about God, not as the God in whom the Christian lives and moves and has his being.
St. Paul writes: “Know you not that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). And again: “Or know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God?” (1 Cor 6:19). The Council of Trent (Session VI, Chapter 7) teaches that the justified soul receives through the Holy Spirit an infused habit of sanctifying grace by which it is made a child of God and a partaker of the divine nature. This entire supernatural dimension — the very reason the Trinity was revealed — is completely absent from the article. The reader is left with a dry intellectual schema rather than the living faith that leads to eternal life.
The Filioque and the Eastern Question
The article addresses the procession of the Holy Spirit with the following statement: “The fact that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son is reflected in another statement of Jesus… ‘who proceeds from the Father’ (Jn 15:26). This depicts the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son (‘whom I shall send’). Here the outward operations of the Trinity reflect their mutual relations with each other. It may also be said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.”
This final sentence is a theological equivocation of the most dangerous kind. The phrase “from the Father through the Son” is the preferred formulation of the Eastern schismatics precisely because it avoids the Filioque — the dogmatic truth, defined by the Council of Florence (1439) and reaffirmed by every subsequent ecumenical council of the true Church, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (Patre Filioque) as from one principle and by one spiration. To suggest that “it may also be said” that the Spirit proceeds “through” the Son is to open the door to the very error that has divided East from West for a millennium. The article does not explicitly deny the Filioque, but by presenting the Eastern formulation as an equally valid alternative, it commits the sin of false ecumenism — the very error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (Proposition 21: “The revelation which is the object of Catholic faith did not cease with the Apostles”) and by Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928), which condemned the idea that “the union of Christians can be fostered by beginning with what is least common” and that “doctrines which are in mutual conflict” can be “easily reduced to a common form.”
The post-conciliar obsession with “dialogue” with schismatics and heretics has produced a generation of catechists who treat defined dogmas as negotiable formulations. The article’s coy addition of “through the Son” alongside “from the Father and the Son” is a textbook example of this modernist tendency. As Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (Proposition 18) — a proposition that applies mutatis mutandis to the Eastern schismatics as well.
The Linguistic Reduction: Etymology as Theology
The article devotes its first two points to the etymology of the word “Trinity” — Latin trinitas, Greek triados — and notes that the first surviving use was by Theophilus of Antioch around 170 A.D. This is presented as though the historical development of theological vocabulary were itself a form of catechesis. But the development of dogmatic language is not the dogma itself. The Church’s dogmatic definitions — the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the definitions of the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) — are not merely linguistic conventions but the infallible pronouncements of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church into all truth (Jn 16:13).
The article’s approach reflects the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907): that dogmas are not truths of divine origin but “a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (Lamentabili, Proposition 22), and that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Proposition 58). By focusing on the historical development of the term “Trinity” rather than on the immutable reality it signifies, the article subtly communicates the idea that dogma evolves — the very essence of Modernism, which St. Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies.”
The Absence of the Church’s Dogmatic Voice
Throughout the article, the only magisterial documents cited are the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2005) and Scripture. There is no mention of the Athanasian Creed (Quicumque vult), which contains the most precise and authoritative summary of Trinitarian dogma in the Church’s liturgical tradition: “The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; and yet they are not three Gods, but one God.” There is no mention of the Council of Toledo (589), which formally inserted the Filioque into the Creed. There is no mention of the Council of Florence’s Laetentur Caeli (1439), which defined the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as a dogma of faith. There is no mention of the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned the rationalistic approach to revealed truth.
The Athanasian Creed — the very document that for fifteen centuries served as the Church’s definitive synthesis of Trinitarian doctrine — is not even referenced. This silence is not accidental. The post-conciliar reform systematically removed the Athanasian Creed from the Sunday liturgy, replacing it with the watered-down Nicene Creed. The omission of this creed from a catechesis on the Trinity is symptomatic of the entire conciliar revolution: the replacement of the Church’s own authoritative formulations with modern compilations that reflect the spirit of the age rather than the mind of the Church.
The Proof-Texting Fallacy
Points 7 through 12 of the article attempt to “prove” various aspects of Trinitarian doctrine from Scripture. While the individual scriptural citations are orthodox, the methodology is deeply flawed. The article treats Scripture as a collection of propositions from which theological conclusions can be logically derived, rather than as the inspired Word of God whose true sense is determined by the living Magisterium of the Church. This is precisely the error condemned by the Holy Office under St. Pius X: “The interpretation of Holy Scripture given by the Church, while not to be scorned, is nevertheless subject to more exact judgments and corrections by exegetes” (Lamentabili, Proposition 2) — a proposition that, while condemned, accurately describes the methodological assumption underlying the article’s approach.
The Church has always taught that Scripture must be read within the living Tradition of the Church, under the guidance of the Magisterium. The Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum — a document of the conciliar sect — notoriously opened the door to the historical-critical method by stating that “the study of the written word should be the very soul of sacred theology” (DV 24) while simultaneously subjecting Scripture to “the judgment of the Church” in a way that, in practice, has meant the judgment of modernist exegetes. The article’s proof-texting approach, while superficially orthodox in its conclusions, reflects this same rationalistic methodology.
The Missing Liturgical Dimension
Perhaps the most glaring omission is the complete absence of any reference to the liturgical celebration of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity — instituted by Pope John XXII in the 14th century and elevated by the true Popes — is the Church’s annual solemn proclamation of this mystery in the sacred liturgy. The Preface of the Most Holy Trinity in the Roman Missal contains one of the most beautiful and theologically dense prayers in the entire liturgical tradition: “For with Your Only-begotten Son and the Holy Spirit You are one God, one Lord: not in the singleness of one Person, but in the Trinity of one substance. For that which we believe of Your glory, as You have revealed, the same we hold of Your Son, the same of the Holy Spirit, without difference or distinction.”
The article makes no mention of the liturgy, the sacraments, or the Church’s worship as the primary locus of Trinitarian faith. This is consistent with the post-conciliar reduction of the faith to intellectual content — a faith of the head rather than a faith of the heart, lived in the sacred liturgy and the sacramental life. The Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — in which the priest acts in persona Christi and the faithful participate in the eternal sacrifice of Calvary — is the supreme act of Trinitarian worship, for it is offered to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. That this is not even mentioned in a catechesis on the Trinity reveals the extent to which the post-conciliar religion has severed doctrine from worship.
Conclusion: A Catechesis Unworthy of the Mystery
The article from EWTN News presents a theologically minimal, spiritually barren, and liturgically silent treatment of the central mystery of the Christian faith. It reduces the ineffable mystery of the Most Holy Trinity — three divine Persons in one God, the Father unbegotten, the Son eternally begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son — to a series of intellectual propositions accessible to unaided reason. It omits the supernatural dimension of Trinitarian faith, equivocates on the Filioque, ignores the Church’s own dogmatic formulations, and reduces Scripture to a collection of proof-texts.
This is not the catechesis of the Catholic Church. This is the catechesis of the post-conciliar naturalism that has reduced the faith of our fathers to a set of propositions that can be “known and shared” — as the article’s subtitle revealingly puts it — like any other piece of information. The Most Holy Trinity is not a doctrine to be “shared” but a mystery to be adored, worshipped, and lived in the sacred liturgy and the sacramental life of the true Church. Adorare secretissimam Trinitatem, et unum in ea Deum adoremus et colla submittamus: sit laus, honor, virtus Deo Patri, Filio, Sancto simul Paraclito, in saeculorum saecula. Amen.
Source:
12 things to know and share about the Holy Trinity (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 31.05.2026