All Catholics believe that there is one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that God by His Word only created heaven and earth and all things out of nothing; that angels and men are the chief creatures of God; that some of the angels sinned and were punished. That Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, disobeyed the command of God and were punished by the loss of justice and innocence and by sickness and death; that this deprivation of justice is Original Sin; that through the merits of her Divine Son and because she was to be His mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved free from this Original Sin, which privilege is called her Immaculate Conception; and that Mary, at the end of her life, was assumed into heaven, body and soul.
That God the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit, assumed human nature of the Blessed Virgin Mary and is called the God-man, Jesus Christ; that for this reason the Blessed Virgin Mary although a creature, is called the Mother of God and is deserving of a very special, but not divine, honor – divine honor is paid to God alone.
That Jesus Christ, by His suffering and death, redeemed men and obtained for them grace or supernatural help whereby they may be saved; that the chief channels of grace are the seven sacraments all of which were instituted by Christ.
That Jesus Christ instituted a church or society, and that to certain ones, i.e., the priesthood of this Church, He intrusted the administration of the sacraments and the teaching of His doctrine; that the divinely appointed visible head of the Church, the Pope of Rome (the invisible head is Jesus Christ) is, by the aid of the Holy Spirit, and must be, infallible, i.e., he cannot err when officially7 teaching the whole Church a doctrine regarding faith or morals. This does not imply that the Pope cannot sin or make a mistake in some other matter.
That all are bound to belong to the Church, and he who knows the Church to be the true Church, and willfully remains out of it cannot be saved. While believing this in regard to the Church, they are not to be judges of their fellow man in regard to salvation, which finally depends on their interior disposition known only by God and by themselves.
That as Jesus Christ is God, He can do all things, and particularly that He can forgive sins and that He can change the substance of bread and wine into the substance of His Body and Blood; that he has given this power to certain men, viz., to the priesthood of the Church.
That all the doctrines of the Church are contained in the revelation of God; that this revelation is found in the unwritten and unwritten word of God or in sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture; that Tradition finds its infallible expression in the teaching Church; that both are of equal value in as far as they transmit the divine revelation—Scripture, because it contains and is the word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit to the sacred authors; Tradition, because it is preserved from error by the assistance of the Holy Spirit. While, therefore, the members of the Catholic Church revere and use the Bible, still they believe that the Scriptures alone do not contain all the revelation of God.
That the Marriage of Christians is a sacrament and cannot be dissolved by any court, but only by the death of either the husband or wife.
We believe in heaven, a state in which the good are rewarded eternally; we believe in hell, a state in which the wicked are condemned eternally; we believe in purgatory, a state in which those suffer for a time who die guilty of venial sins or without having satisfied the temporal punishment due to their sins; we believe in a general resurrection of the dead, followed by a general judgement, after which purgatory will cease and the souls of the just reunited to their bodies will be rewarded forever, and the souls of the wicked also reunited with their bodies will be punished forever.