Foundations

Our saint this week carries the Gospel all the way to the civilization we are studying. St. Thomas was one of the twelve apostles, remembered above all for one scene: after the Resurrection, when the others told him they had seen the risen Lord, Thomas refused to believe unless he could touch the wounds himself — earning him the nickname 'Doubting Thomas.' When Jesus appeared and invited him to touch his hands and side, Thomas fell to his knees with the greatest confession of faith in the Gospels: 'My Lord and my God!' (John 20:28). Jesus replied, 'Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe' (John 20:29). Thomas teaches us that honest doubt, brought to Jesus, can become deep faith. Ancient and unbroken tradition holds that Thomas then traveled farther east than any other apostle — all the way to India, around AD 52, where he preached, founded Christian communities along the southwest coast, and was martyred near Chennai (Mylapore). To this day, millions of 'St. Thomas Christians' in India trace their faith to him. As we study India this week, it is striking that the apostle of doubt-turned-faith may have been the first to plant the cross there. His feast is July 3.

While the West looked to the Mediterranean, two of the world's greatest civilizations were rising in Asia. In INDIA, the story begins with the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 2600-1900 BC), whose cities — Harappa and Mohenjo-daro — astonish us with grid-planned streets, brick houses, and the world's earliest known plumbing and sewers, yet whose writing we still cannot read and whose decline remains a mystery. Later came the Vedic period, when peoples speaking an early form of Sanskrit composed the Vedas, sacred hymns that became the root of Hinduism, with its ideas of many gods expressing one divine reality, of karma (actions having consequences), and reincarnation. Around 500 BC, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama, seeking release from suffering, became the Buddha ('the Awakened One'), founding Buddhism. In CHINA, civilization grew along the Yellow River under the Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1046 BC), famous for bronze-working and oracle bones; then the long Zhou dynasty, during which the sage Confucius (551-479 BC) taught his ethics of virtue, family, and order. The Qin dynasty first unified China (221 BC) and began the Great Wall; the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) made China a vast, stable empire, adopted Confucianism, and opened the Silk Road, the trade route that would one day connect China to Rome. Two civilizations, two enduring ways of seeing the world — and both, the Church holds, contain seeds of truth pointing toward the fullness found in Christ.

As we study civilizations that imagined the divine in many forms — India's many gods expressing one Brahman, China's 'Heaven' — the catechism turns to the Christian answer to the deepest question: Who is God? YOUCAT (Q19-Q21) teaches first that there is only one God, the eternal, all-good, all-powerful Creator. But Christians know something no human mind could have discovered on its own, something God had to reveal: this one God is a Trinity — one God in three divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (YOUCAT Q35-Q39, CCC 232-260). Not three gods, but one God; not one Person wearing three masks, but three distinct Persons who are each fully God, united in one divine nature and bound in perfect love. This is the central mystery of the Christian faith, the truth into which we are baptized. We cannot fully comprehend it — a mystery is not a problem we solve but a truth too rich to exhaust — yet it tells us the most beautiful thing about reality: that God is, in his very being, a communion of love. Where ancient peoples reached toward the divine with guesses and images, the Trinity is God telling us who he actually is. We make this faith our own every time we sign ourselves: 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.'

Today you traveled across Asia's great civilizations and met the central Christian truth that the one God is a Trinity of love — the answer to the longing for the divine that India and China expressed in their own ways. St. Thomas, by tradition, carried that truth all the way to India.