INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE
Dear Friend,
Greetings and our warm welcome to you! Thank you for accepting our invitation to talk about the truths of the Catholic faith.
TWO OF US TOGETHER
Together, we are going to discuss things Catholic. Our purpose is not to cause friction or use any pressure whatever to force people into the Catholic Church. Our commitment is to truth, and in this, we believe, all people of good will are at one. So, if we might describe our relationship in visual terms, we see you and ourselves sitting not at opposite sides of a desk, each one making points and counterpoints, but rather, we see both you and ourselves sitting side by side, engaged in a common effort to know more about God and to know Him better through what we know about Him.
In this, we are not looking for useless information, nor planning to argue about human errors of the past. We are interested only in serving God more intelligently and with greater fidelity.
EASY DOES IT
Our inquiry course is somewhat different from many others. It is an informal reading course. We selected ten booklets from our extensive series. These cover in a general way, the fundamental beliefs of Catholicism. We have made them the basic texts of our course. We trust that you will appreciate this informality. In something of the same spirit, we decided to use multiple choice questions. These reinforce your knowledge of what is in the basic texts and also help you to go through the course with the kind of questioning attitude, which will guarantee its success.
AND FINALLY
A word now about this type of course: it is unique. God will be speaking to us through the text of the booklets, through the Scriptures referred to in the booklets, through the many events of our lives (since He is at the center of our being), through the very interchange which goes on between us. It is up to us to speak at the same time to God. That means prayer.
Prayer means many things. Three of them especially apply here. Prayer means conscious awareness of the presence of God. Let us pause from time to time to remind ourselves of His presence. Prayer means explicitly asking God for what we need. Let us ask Him for "light and life" as St John so often did. Prayer means contemplation, taking divine truths into the silence of our hearts and allowing God to expound them for us in those flashes of insight that come only from God.
As an aid to prayer and a continuation of its spirit, you will find this helpful: after every lesson, make some positive gestures of generosity toward God. Such gestures could be: Offer assistance to someone in need, visiting the sick of the aged, getting involved in some civic movement for the betterment of the neighbors, forgiving an injury, putting an end to a long period of silence and hostility toward someone, taking a positive step toward giving up excessive drinking or the use of drugs, - and so on. There is no limit to the creativeness of the human heart, when God's power is allowed to move it.
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