The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) - Day 18: The Unity of the Testaments (2026)

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

Fr. Mike unpacks the vital unity between the Old and New Testaments. Together, we examine prefigurements and types from the Old Testament being fulfilled in the New. We also examine the importance of the study of Scripture for each and every Catholic. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 128-133. This episode has been found to be in conformity with the Catechism by the Institute on the Catechism, under the Subcommittee on the Catechism, USCCB. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/ciy Please note: The Catechism of the Catholic Church contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.

Hi, my name is Father 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 our heavenly home. It is Day 18, reading paragraphs 128 through 133. I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, FYI, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach. You can use that.

You can also follow along with any recent version of the catechism of the Catholic Church. Also, to download your own catechism in your reading plan, you can visit ascensionpress.com slash C-I-Y. And lastly, you can follow or subscribe to follow along and receive daily updates and daily notifications and whatever place you listen to this podcast. That makes sense. It makes sense to me. Today we're going to talk about we're kind of getting towards the end of this little mini

section where we're talking about God's plan of your goodness, right? Obviously, the revelation of God. yesterday we talked about the canon of scripture and how here's God reveals himself to the Old Testament, the New Testament, specifically speaking in the Gospels. Today, we're going to kind of recover something that we heard yesterday. And the church really needs to be adamant about this, or is adamant about this. And that is the unity of the Old and New Testaments. Again, I mentioned this yesterday, but there are so many people who have this thought that because of the New Covenant, because of the New Testament, because of what Jesus revealed, the old covenant,

the Old Testament is defunct, is void, is useless, is purposeless, and the church really, really wants to do away with any of that temptation to think that way. In fact, the church highlights today the unity of the Old and New Testaments. Again, the common temptation is, it seems like there's two different kinds of gods, like God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament. As Dwight-Trute would say, false. That is not true. In fact, the more and more we dive deeply into scripture, both old and new covenants, old and new testaments, the more and more we see there is a vital unity between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

And we absolutely need them both. Lastly, we're also talking about sacred scripture in the life of the church and just how, how, I want to say deathly important, but how deathly important sacred scripture is for us, for anyone who wants to be able to follow after Jesus with their whole heart, with their whole life. So that's what we're talking about today. Let's say a prayer as we get started. Father in heaven, we give you praise, and we thank you on this day. We thank you for revealing yourself to us.

We thank you for all of the years, the countless generations that it took for you to reveal yourself in time to us. We thank you for the fullness of time. when you revealed yourself to us in the person of your son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Thank you for the Holy Spirit that you sent upon the church who continues to lead us, who continues to guide us, who continues to teach us. Give us a love, not only just to know more about you, give us a love for Scripture, put in our hearts a desire to seek after you, a desire to read your word, a desire to hear your word proclaimed, and a desire to share your word with everyone in our lives.

with everyone we love and everyone on this planet, especially for those who've never heard your word, Lord, or of those who have they thought they heard your word, they think they hear your word, but they're mistaken. We ask that you please correct our mistakes, correct our errors, and bring all of us into the light of your truth. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

As I said, it's Day 18, it's Day 18 reading paragraphs 128. to 133. The unity of the Old and New Testaments. The church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God's works of the old covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate son. Christians, therefore, read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such type. Typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament, but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as revelation reaffirmed by our Lord

himself. Besides, the New Testament has to be read in the light of the old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the old, and the Old Testament is unveiled in the new. Typology indicates the dynamic movement toward the fulfillment of the divine plan when God will be everything to everyone, nor do the calling of the patriarchs and the exodus from Egypt, for example, lose their own value in God's plan from the mere fact that they were intermediate stages. Sacred Scripture in the life of the church. Dave Rebam states,

And such is the force and power of the Word of God that it can serve the church as her support and vigor and the children of the church as strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting font of spiritual life. Hence, access to sacred scripture ought to be open, wide, the Christian faithful. Therefore, the study of the sacred page should be the very soul of sacred theology. The ministry of the word to pastoral preaching, catechetics, and all forms of Christian instruction, among which the liturgical homily should hold pride of place, is healthily nourished and thrives in holiness through the word of scripture. The church forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful to learn the

surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ by frequent reading of the divine scriptures. As St. Jerome said, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Okay, so there we are. Again, highlighting a couple of things, the unity of the Old and New Testaments. Now, we have that unity. We realize, as we've said so many times, that the sacred author, right, the human author of the scriptures is a real author and the divine author of the scriptures is the real author, right? So the Holy Spirit, the fact that the Holy Spirit has guided the writing, right, inspired

the authors, the human authors. That means that all of scripture has a unity. So the old covenant, Old Testament, and the New Testament, has a vital unity. And what is that unity? Well, not only is it part of God's teaching us, right? We've talked about that so many times that God is taking this as a mentioned yesterday, this raw group of humanity, and he's revealing himself to them bit by bit. But also, this is so remarkable. Also, there's this thing we've talked about before called typology. And typology is that prefigurement, right? That the prefigurations of in the Old Testament, here's God revealing something that gets fulfilled

in the New Testament. So, like, something like we have King David. And I talk when it comes to the Bible in the year so much about King David. I love King David. he's a very, very flawed human being. He is the type of Jesus being the king of the universe, right? David as king of Israel is the type of Jesus. He is fulfilled in the person of Jesus. Or another way to say it is we have the Ark of the Covenant as an example. Way back in the Old Testament, you have the Ark of the Covenant. And the Ark inside the Ark is what? Inside the

ark is the manna from the desert. Inside the ark are the Ten Commandments. Inside the ark are Aaron's staff. Right? And those three things symbolize they are, right? The bread come down from heaven. They symbolize the word of God and they symbolize the priesthood. So here is that the type. That is fulfilled in the New Testament in Mary. Mary is referred to as the Ark, the Ark of the New Covenant or even the New Arc of the New Covenant. Because why? Because in her was the word flesh, Jesus Christ. In her was the bread from heaven, the Eucharist. In her, God himself, Jesus himself, right? In her was Jesus the high priest. And so you have that, here's the type in the old covenant that's fulfilled in the new covenant. And that we see that again and again throughout the scriptures.

And the fact, it's one of the, I don't know what I say fun, but it is a really fun way to read scripture to realize it's inexhaustible. In fact, that's what paragraph 129 says. It says, such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament. At the same time, so there's typology, right, prefigurations. At the same time, it reminds us, it must not make us forget. This typology must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as revelation. And that is so, so important that we realize that, yes, the old is hidden, or is revealed in the new and the New is hidden in the Old.

but the old is still good and the old is still good. The Old Testament still tells us the truth about who God is. And that's so, so important. In fact, in paragraph 130, it says the calling of the patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt, for example, they do not lose their own value in God's plan from the fact that they were intermediate stages. Just because here's the calling of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here's that motion that God's setting his people free from slavery in Egypt in the Exodus. It's not as if those are no longer of value because we've seen the fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

Those have incredible value, even if they were intermediate stages. Okay, so last thing. This last section, paragraphs 131, 132, and 133 says sacred scripture in the life of the church. These three paragraphs are all about how vitally important it is that we as children of God, as disciples of Jesus, must, must have access to scripture. Now, here's one of the things. There are some stories, right, back in the day that says, you know, some people who were kind of anti-Catholic and some people who are very pro-Scripture, which is good. We want to be pro-Scripture, but so much so that they would denounce tradition and say, no, scripture alone.

There was kind of a rumor or a myth or a legend, whatever we want to say that would not be happy. We'll say gossip. We'll say a negative myth that said that the Catholic Church kept Bibles locked up and you couldn't actually have a Bible. Well, that's not exactly true. It'd be more accurate to say that, yeah, I've heard of stories where they would have in certain churches a Bible that would be locked up. But it would be locked up in the same way that if you remember back in the day, they used to have phone books. Remember phone books? Remember phone booths?

And what they'd have is you'd have a phone booth and you'd have the phone book. And the phone book would be locked up connected to the phone booth. Why? Not so that you couldn't use the phone book, but so that you could so that no one would steal it. So there were times when the church made the scriptures available but had to lock them up. Why? Because I remember hearing statistics that would say something like for a village, you know, a parish to have its own Bible would be the, basically the gross income of every single person in that village to pay for one Bible because it was handwritten, right?

It was copied out because all the materials were very expensive. The production of the Bible was very expensive. all of that changed, of course, with the invention of the printing press. But thanks be to God, right? That's so amazing. But people would say, yeah, but then the church was even very, very adamant about not necessarily people couldn't have the Bible in their homes. And that is not necessarily accurate as well.

What the church was concerned with was the translations of the Bible, because as we know, we want to make sure that our translations are as accurate as possible to the original, right? It's not a matter of like, this is a Catholic interpretation or sorry, a Catholic translation. it would be a matter of we want to make sure this is an accurate translation. And so, yeah, the church at various times throughout history did say, okay, don't read that Bible, don't read that other Bible, not because we don't want people to read the Bible, but because we don't want people to read a mistranslated version of the Bible that could

mislead people. But that's how it's so important, so important to understand that as the church does, it says, access to sacred scripture ought to be wide open to the Christian faithful. Absolutely. We should have access to this. moving on. Study of the sacred page should be the very soul of sacred theology. We mentioned that, yes, there's sacred scripture, sacred tradition, and the magisterium of the church. The very soul of sacred theology should be the study of the sacred page, a study of sacred scripture. That

doesn't mean we deny sacred tradition or ignore the magisterium, but it does mean that all of our teaching, all of our preaching, all of our instruction, all of it should be healthily nourished and thrives in holiness to the Word of Scripture. And this isn't just for priests. This isn't just for theologians. This is for every one of us, every one of us. In fact, this is the last thing. I said last thing, but this is the real last thing.

Paragraph 133 says, The church forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ by frequent reading of the divine scriptures. Again, I mentioned yesterday, that is so good, those people, those saints who would have a copy of the Gospels and they carried around with them all of the time. That's good for us. Why? Because we need to be nourished by the Word of God. We need to be nourished by

Scripture. And that last quote by St. Jerome, which is so powerful and so convicting for so many of us, especially when we say something like, well, I remember hearing this way back in the day. I haven't heard people say this recently, but I remember hearing it said when I was maybe in high school, college, maybe early seminary. But they'd say things like, well, you know, I'm Catholic. I don't need to know the Bible. Of course, they were saying, hopefully they were saying that tongue in cheek because I think there was kind of a, again, that stereotype of Catholics who might not be overly familiar with the Bible. I'm Catholic. I don't need to know the Bible. Well, then you have to bring up St. Jerome's quote, which he says, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. So someone could say, well,

I don't need to know Jesus. That's essentially, if someone says, I don't need to know the Bible. What they're saying is, I don't need to know Christ. I don't need to know Jesus. Because St. Jerome will be saying that we need to know the scriptures. Why? Because it's in the scriptures that we encounter our Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, in the church, yes, in the sacraments, of course, but ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ. That's why we did the Bible in here. That's why we're doing this, because I don't know if you've noticed, but virtually almost every one of these paragraphs has some kind of scriptural reference. It's almost entirely based off of sacred tradition and off of sacred scripture. So hopefully that's been communicated. Hopefully that's been something you've

in gathering as well. I'm just so, this is so exciting. I cannot convey enough how great it has been to be able to walk with you for the last 18 days. I don't know if you could tell, but the first few days for me personally were kind of a battle. The fact that we've gotten to day 18 is just, it's a relief, but it's also just, it marks something in my own heart. I'm so grateful to be able to walk with you in this because it's kind of been a little bit of a, it's a new challenge. And I just want to bring you in. I just want to share that with you to kind of bring you in to kind of kind of my heart as we're walking through the catechism in this year. I'm so grateful for you. And so because of that, I am always, I'm always praying for you. Please pray for me. My name's

Father Mike and I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.