Looking at the world from the standpoint of faith

16. The Church continues to sow the Gospel in God's field. Christians, in the most diverse social situations, perceive the world with the same eyes with which Jesus contemplated the society of his time. The disciple of Jesus Christ deeply shares the "joys and hopes, the sadness and the anxieties of the men today".(¹²) He gazes upon human history and participates in it, not only from the standpoint of reason but also from that of faith. In the light of faith the world appears at once "created and sustained by the love of the Creator, which has been freed from the slavery of sin by Christ, who was crucified and rose".(¹³) The Christian knows that every human event—indeed all reality—is marked by the creative activity of God which communicates goodness to all beings; the power of sin which limits and numbs man; and the dynamism which bursts forth from the Resurrection of Christ, the seed renewing believers is the hope of a definitive "fulfilment".(¹⁴) A world-view not incorporating these three elements cannot be authentically Christian. Hence the importance of a catechesis capable of initiating catechumens and those to be catechized into a "theological reading of modern problems".(¹⁵)