← The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Day 156: How the Liturgy Is Celebrated (2026)
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We continue to examine the celebration of the liturgy and sacraments. In the context of how the liturgy is celebrated, Fr. Mike explains that we are both body and spirit, and so signs and symbols are the way in which we communicate with and understand the world around us. God communicates spiritual realities in the same way. The signs and symbols which are utilized in the liturgy not only point to spiritual realities, but also make them present. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1145-1152.
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Foreign. Hi, my name is Fr. Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together toward a heavenly home. This is day 156. We are reading paragraphs 1145 to 1152, and as always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach. But you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own Catechism in a Year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com ciy and you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. Today is day 156. We're reading paragraphs 1145 to 1152. So yesterday we looked at the question of who celebrates the liturgy, and we talked about the celebrants of the heavenly liturgy. Right. Which is just bonkers. That is amazing. It's all the angel saints, all creation, the Lord himself, God, and then also the celebrants of the sacramental liturgy. So the whole community, the body of Christ united with its head, the baptismal priesthood, the ministerial priesthood, united, of course, to Jesus Christ, the one great high priest. Today we're looking at how is the liturgy celebrated? Remember those four questions at the beginning of this chapter is. Or beginning of this. Yeah, yeah. We'll call it a chapter. Chapter two in is who celebrates the liturgy? That was yesterday. How is the liturgy celebrated? That's today. And tomorrow, when is the liturgy celebrated? And where is the liturgy celebrated? Today is how. So we're looking at the reality of signs and symbols. That's gonna be kind of one of those. The key two words today, signs and symbols, basically, that we speak through signs. We've obviously heard of sign language and the way in which people communicate. Typically, we refer to sign language as people using signs with their hands. Right? That makes sense. But words are signs, they're symbols, and they're ways we communicate. So any. Any word on a page is a signification. Right. So if you read the word snow, it signifies something. Right? It is a sign for the reality of snow. So I don't know if you've ever thought about that. Even me saying the word snow, that is a sign that to you signifies the reality of snow. And so it's. Isn't that crazy. It's amazing. We communicate with each other through signs and symbols. And so basically, church is saying, why would it be any different when it comes to our relationship with God? That God speaks to us through visible creation. He speaks to us through signs. He speaks to us through symbols. All the way from the beginning in, through. In the old covenant, God spoke through signs and symbols. We communicate with God in signs and symbols. And in the new covenant, Jesus takes those signs and symbols and fulfills them. He. He makes them new in making them into sacraments. So looking at that today is how is liturgy celebrated? It is celebrated through signs and symbols. So as we launch into that, into this reality, let's call upon our Father in heaven and ask him to just be with us in this moment, in this day, as we're launching into this day, or maybe you're concluding this day, I don't know. Whatever it is, we're asking God to be present to us in this moment as we pray. Father in heaven, we give you praise. We. We ask you in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, to receive our thanksgiving, to receive our praise for you, for who you are, for all that you have done. We ask you to please, in the name of your Son, Jesus, send your Holy Spirit out upon us, that we can see you, that we can hear your voice. Lord God, in so many ways, you have spoken to us in the most complete and full way. You have spoken to us through your son. We ask that you please help us to be attuned to his voice. Help us to be attuned to his presence, his action, his reality in this world. Lord, for all the people that we come into contact with today, those we will see, those we have seen, those that are around us in this very moment, we ask you to please bless them as well, because they are signs of your goodness as well. They are signs of your presence. They are signs of your reality. They were made in your image. And so help us to just see. Help us to see. To see you and your creation, to see you in the people around us, and to see you in all things. We make this prayer in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It is day 156. We are reading paragraphs 1145-1152. How is the liturgy celebrated? Signs and symbols. A sacramental celebration is woven from signs and symbols in keeping with the divine pedagogy of salvation, their meaning is rooted in the work of creation and in human culture, specified by the events of the old Covenant and fully revealed in the person and work of Christ. Signs of the Human World in human life, signs and symbols occupy an important place. As a being at once body and spirit. Man expresses and perceives spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols. As a social being, man needs signs and symbols to communicate with others through language, gestures, and actions. The same holds true for his relationship with God. God speaks to man through the visible creation. The material cosmos is so presented to man's intelligence that he can read there traces of its creator. Light and darkness, wind and fire, water and earth. The tree and its fruit speak of God and symbolize both his greatness and his nearness. Inasmuch as they are creatures, these perceptible realities can become means of expressing the action of God who sanctifies men and the action of men who offer worship to God. The same is true of signs and symbols taken from the social life of man. Washing and anointing, breaking bread and sharing the cup can express the sanctifying presence of God and man's gratitude toward his Creator. The great religions of mankind witness often impressively, to this cosmic and symbolic meaning of religious rites. The liturgy of the Church presupposes, integrates, and sanctifies elements from creation and human culture, conferring on them the dignity of signs of grace of the new creation in Jesus Christ. Signs of the Covenant the chosen people received from God distinctive signs and symbols that marked its liturgical life. These are no longer solely celebrations of cosmic cycles and social gestures, but signs of the covenant, symbols of God's mighty deeds for his people. Among these liturgical signs from the Old Covenant are circumcision, anointing and consecration of kings and priests, laying on of hands, sacrifices, and above all, the Passover. The Church sees in these signs a prefiguring of the sacraments of the New Covenant, signs taken up by Christ in His preaching. The Lord Jesus often makes use of the signs of creation to make known the mysteries of the kingdom of God. He performs healings and illustrates his preaching with physical signs or symbolic gestures. He gives new meaning to the deeds and signs of the Old Covenant, above all to the Exodus and the Passover. For he himself is the meaning of all these signs. Since Pentecost, it is through the sacramental signs of His Church that the Holy Spirit carries on the work of sanctification. The sacraments of the Church do not abolish, but but purify and integrate all the richness of the signs and symbols of the cosmos and of social life. Further, they fulfill the types and figures of the old covenant, signify and make actively present the salvation wrought by Christ, and prefigure and anticipate the glory of heaven. Okay, so there we are, day one, 56, paragraphs 1145 to 1152. Man, this is just. I think that sometimes. Here's what I do. Sometimes I overlook the reality and the power of signs and symbols because we think, oh, they're just signs. They're just symbols. And yet, like we said in the intro here, those signs and symbols are the way in which we communicate with everybody. We would not know anything, I think, about. Remember Helen Keller? I mean, you might not remember her, but you remember the story of Helen Keller. She's a young girl who was both blind and deaf, and so she could not hear, she could not see, and so she could not communicate. And so, of course, there's the story, right, that she lived in this darkness and in this silence and was unable and incapable essentially, of communicating her needs, her thoughts. She didn't even know what other people around her were thinking, what they. What they wanted, until along came this teacher, right, who was able to, through touch, communicate the realities. I remember. Have you ever seen. Is it called the Miracle Worker? I can't remember. But the. The movie about Helen Keller's life and about this teacher who comes into her life. And the first time she touches water, and then the teacher, like, traces. Like a sign on her, maybe on her hand, the sign for water. And then Helen runs around, and she's just like, what's this? He's touching all these things and wanting her teacher to communicate. Like, she's given. She's given a name for the realities that she experienced, and she can understand them, that now she can not only hear from other people, she can communicate back to them what's been trapped this whole time inside of her. We can't understand ourselves, we can't understand others, and others can't understand us without signs and symbols. And so here's what the church is saying, that God himself has done this. He's written this into humanity, that he communicates to us through signs and symbols. So paragraph 1146 talks about signs of the human world. So in every human life, it doesn't have to be religious. Signs and symbols occupy an important place because we're body and spirit. We express and perceive spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols. And that's just reality. I mean, I don't know if you ever. I've heard the quote from St. John Paul II. But he said, the body, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine. So that reality, of course, is that here, you and I, we've been given bodies, and through our bodies we are capable of making visible the invisible. What does that mean? That means that no one has ever seen a soul. I mean, I guess we've seen ghosts and things like that. Not everybody, but some people have. But we know when Roger walks into the room. Oh, Roger's here. Why? Because the body is capable of making visible the invisible. Here's Roger's soul, but his body reveals his soul. Same thing for us, you know, everything you and I know, we've known in and through our bodies. And so here's what paragraph 1146 is saying. That human beings are at once body and spirit. And so we express and perceive spiritualities through physical signs and symbols. So here's Roger. He's here. And we know he's here because we see his body. How does Roger communicate anything to us? Well, he doesn't use telepathy. He doesn't just communicate to us in a spiritual way. He communicates to us by using his voice, right? His body to say words that we hear with our ears, our body. Or he waves and we see him elevating his hand and moving it back and forth. And we communicate to each other with our bodies. So we even can communicate to each other deep and profound spiritual realities. Think about this. For the last 156 days, you've been listening with your body because the ears are part of the body. You've been processing with your body, meaning your brain is part of your body. These words that you've been hearing me say, that I'm saying with my mouth and vocal cords, part of my body. So we recognize these deep and profound things. I mean, think about whenever you read sacred scripture, you are reading the words of God that are coming to us. Mediated, right? Mediated through stuff, through signs and symbols. And so this is just so important because God speaks to us this way. He speaks to us through the visible creation. Do you see the snow falling down? Or maybe wherever you're at, it's raining, or maybe the sun, maybe it's dark out. Whatever it is, God speaks to us through visible creation. We can read traces of our creator there. Remember, we talked about this almost at the very beginning of the beginning, days and weeks of this catechism in a year. We talked about how God reveals himself through creation. That the very fact of the reality that creation exists points to a creator. And the fact that creation is beautiful points to the beauty of the creator. The fact that creation makes sense, right, that we can do science, meaning the creator must be rational, not accidental, not random. So visible creation speaks to us and then we get to express our response to God. So paragraph 1148 highlights, yes, the perceptible realities of creation, of the world around us can express the action of God who sanctifies us and the action of men who offer worship to God. And that's just. And it's so, so remarkable, in fact, not just in like the normal creation, but also in culture. So think about the normal human actions of washing and anointing. Yet this just means you're washing, means you're anointing, you're putting on oil on yourself to like soothe your skin. But these normal aspects take on a new meaning when they're brought into the religious rites again. Baking bread and sharing the cup or breaking bread. You can bake bread too. Breaking the bread and sharing the cup, they are ways in which human beings, like, bond. You know, we do a thing at the beginning of every school year called Alpha. And Alpha is an introduction to Christianity. It was started out in England in the Anglican Church. And three elements of an Alpha evening is we first gather for a meal and we sit down at tables and just have normal conversation while breaking bread. Right? But while having food together, there's something about that unites people. And then later on there's a presentation on some aspect of the Christian life. And then we just have a discussion. These normal aspects of human life living, these normal aspects of social life. What God has done is he's taken these normal aspects and they've been elevated. And so what happens, how they've been elevated? Well, think about washing an anointing, breaking bread and sharing the cup. That's normal things people would do. But in the Old Covenant, what has God done? He's taken those and given them new meaning. He's repurposed them. We could say like that they become signs of the covenant. So signs of the covenant that are, I mean, if you've gone through the Bible, you know what those signs are? They're things like circumcision. That's a sign of the covenant. You think, like, wait, what, what would, how, how could a little mini surgery on a baby, how could that have any spiritual reality? And yet that circumcision was what brought a man into the covenant with the Lord God? And, and so these, these, these Normal things have given supernatural power. These natural things have been giving a supernatural power. So anointing and consecration, like laying out of hands, we reach out and we touch people, right? We, you know, put our hands on someone's shoulder, on their elbow, on, you know, if you have a deep friend or a family member and you just want to support them, to put your hand on their back, that makes sense that here's the Lord God who elevates that to something like the laying on of hands. And, you know, sacrifices. We recognize sacrifices people make for all sorts of things. In the old covenant, sacrifice becomes elevated to worship of God. And then of course, what Jesus has done is he's transformed them, he's fulfilled them. Jesus in his very self. I mean, think about how many times have you read the scriptures in the Gospels where, you know, Jesus breathes on someone or Jesus spits on the ground, makes, you know, some kind of paste or mud and puts it on, you know, someone's eyes or the man who is mute and deaf, and Jesus puts his fingers in his ears and touches his tongue and spits and you're like, okay, he's doing these physical things to communicate some spiritual healing. Of course. Even think about Jesus own sacrifice, the fact that he gives us himself at the Last Supper and he gives up himself to the Father on the crucifixion on Golgotha. Why would that have anything to do with you and me? How would that have any ramifications in your life and in my life? Well, it does because these signs and symbols, these things that Jesus actually did and actually said have spiritual power. And those things are spiritually communicated. That power is communicated to us in the sacraments. Does that make sense? So all of these things, like the words are communicated, gestures are communicated. These actions that are natural become supernatural. These actions of Jesus become salvific and they come to us in the sacraments. That's what these, this idea of spending the day today talking about signs and symbols, that's what this is all about, that these signs point to the reality. But even more, these signs and symbols make present the reality. Hope that makes sense, because it just blows my mind. I just think this is incredible. And so I hope you do too. But if you don't, that's right, press play tomorrow and maybe something else will blow your mind. Ah, man, you guys, today is 1:56 and we are trucking right along. I want to let you know, I don't know if I've told you yet, but I am praying for you. Please, please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.