THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES 35

The theological virtues dispose Christians to live in a close relationship with the Holy Trinity. These virtues have God for their origin, their motive, and their object-God known by faith, God hoped in and loved for his own sake.

• •"Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us
     and that holy Church proposes for our belief because he is truth itself."
• 
  •"The gift of faith remains in one who has not sinned against it. But "faith apart from works is dead'': when it
     is deprived of hope and love, faith does not fully unite the believer to Christ and does not make him a living
     member of his body."
• 
  •"The disciple of Christ must not only keep the faith and live it, but also profess it, confidently bear witness to
     it, and spread it...Service of and witness to the faith are necessary for salvation."

• •"Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness,
     placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of
     the Holy Spirit."
• 
  •"The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness that God has placed in the heart of every man; it
     takes up the hopes that inspire a men's activities and purifies them, so as to order them to the Kingdom of
     heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his
     heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to
     the happiness that flows from charity."
• 
  •"Christian hope unfolds from the beginning of Jesus' preaching in the proclamation of the Beatitudes."

• •"Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor
     as ourselves for the love of God."
• 
  •"Jesus makes charity the new commandment. . . . ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I
     have loved you.' The Lord asks us to love as he does, even our enemies, to make ourselves the neighbor of
     those farthest away, and to love children and the poor as Christ himself."
• 
  •"Charity is superior to all the virtues. It is the first of the theological virtues. The practice of all the virtues is
     animated and inspired by charity, which ‘binds everything together in perfect harmony.'"
• 
  •"The practice of the moral life animated by charity gives to the Christian the spiritual freedom of the children
     of God. He no longer stands before God as a slave, in servile fear, or as a mercenary looking for wages, but
     as a son, as children responding to the love of him who ‘first loved us.'"