The Apostles’ Creed: the Prayer in Full, Article by Article

The words you hear at Mass. The Creed at the top of this page keeps the traditional Catholic English, prayed by generations of Catholics, with “Holy Spirit” and “rose again” as Catholics say them today. At Mass, and at most parish Rosaries, you will hear the English of the Roman Missal used in the United States since 2011. Its wording differs in a few places, for example “on the third day,” “is seated” for “sitteth,” and “from there” for “from thence.” Both translate the same Latin, both are the Church’s Creed, and neither is wrong. If you are learning the Creed to pray with your parish, or teaching it to a child, learn the Missal’s wording too, since that is what your parish prays.

Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit? Both. “Ghost” is the old English word for spirit (it survives in “give up the ghost”), and older Catholic prayer books, like the Baltimore Catechism of 1885, say “Holy Ghost.” Most Catholic books in English now say “Holy Spirit,” including the Missal used at Mass and the Holy See’s own Compendium of the Catechism, and so does this page. In Latin there is one name, Spiritus Sanctus. The meaning does not change.

Why is “catholic” sometimes written with a small c? “The word ‘catholic’ means ‘universal’” (CCC 830): the Church that holds the whole faith and is sent to the whole world. Many modern texts print “the holy catholic Church” with a small c to keep that old meaning in view; older prayer books, like the one this page follows, print “Holy Catholic Church.” Either way, Catholics say it of the Church they belong to. Many other Christians (Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and more) pray this same Creed too; it is a real bond among all the baptized.

The Creed is short, but it holds the whole faith. The Catechism divides it into three parts, one for each Person of the Trinity: the Father and the work of creation, the Son and our redemption, the Holy Spirit and our sanctification (CCC 190). By an old custom its articles are counted as twelve, “symbolizing the fullness of the apostolic faith by the number of the apostles” (CCC 191). The Catechism follows them too: the second section of its first part walks through the Creed one article at a time, and each article below ends with the Catechism paragraphs to read next.

1. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Everything starts here. The Catechism calls this first line “the most fundamental” of the Creed, because every other article depends on it (CCC 199). And “I believe” is more than an opinion: “Whoever says ‘I believe’ says ‘I pledge myself to what we believe’” (CCC 185). (CCC 198–421)

2. “And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.” His name says who he is and what he came to do: “Jesus means in Hebrew: ‘God saves’” (CCC 430). “Christ” is the Anointed One, the Messiah Israel waited for; “only Son” confesses that he is the eternal Son of the Father, God himself (CCC 454); and “our Lord” gives him the title the Scriptures give to God. (CCC 422–455)

3. “Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.” The Son of God became man without ceasing to be God: true God and true man (CCC 464). He had no human father: he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and truly born of her, a real child of a real mother. (CCC 456–570)

4. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” Apart from Jesus and Mary, the only other human being named in the Creed is a Roman governor whom Roman and Jewish historians also mention. His name fixes the faith in history: this happened in Judea, under a known magistrate. This is the oldest preaching of the Church, as St. Paul received it: “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: and that he was buried” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4, Douay-Rheims). (CCC 571–630)

5. “He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead.” Between his death and his resurrection, Christ went down to the realm of the dead; a section further on explains this line, which puzzles many people. On the third day he rose, and the Catechism calls his Resurrection “the crowning truth of our faith in Christ” (CCC 638). (CCC 631–658)

6. “He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty.” “Sitteth” is the old form of “sits.” Forty days after Easter, Christ returned to the Father, and to sit at his right hand means that the risen Christ, in his human nature too, shares the Father’s glory and reigns (CCC 663). (CCC 659–667)

Because it is, in the Catechism’s words, “a faithful summary of the apostles’ faith” (CCC 194). The Twelve did not write it word for word, though for more than a thousand years many Christians believed they had.

The legend. Around the year 400, Rufinus, a priest of Aquileia in northern Italy, wrote down an account he said came from the elders: before the apostles went out to preach, they agreed together on one short rule of faith, so that all of them would teach the same thing. Later sermons, from the sixth century on, went further and gave each of the twelve apostles one article to compose. It is a legend, and a lovely one. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907 already judged the detailed story unhistorical, while holding that the Creed’s outline may well go back to the apostles’ time. What the legend gets right is that the Creed hands on what the apostles preached: “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3, Douay-Rheims).

The name. The name is older than Rufinus. In about 390 a council at Milan, writing to Pope Siricius, appealed to “the Symbol of the Apostles,” which, it said, the Roman Church had always kept unchanged. A symbol, in Greek symbolon, was one half of a broken token: matched with its other half, it proved who you were. The Creed is “a sign of recognition and communion between believers” (CCC 188). The word “creed” itself comes from its first word in Latin, Credo, “I believe” (CCC 187).

This line puzzles more people than any other in the Creed. It does not mean that Jesus went to the hell of the damned, or that he suffered there. Here “hell” is the old English word for the realm of the dead, which the Bible calls Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek. All the dead waited there for the Redeemer, the just and the unjust, though their lot was not the same (CCC 633).

The line says two things. First, that Jesus really died: like every human being, he “experienced death and in his soul joined the others in the realm of the dead” (CCC 632). Second, that he went there as Savior. The Catechism is precise: “Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned” (CCC 633), but to free the just who had gone before him. St. Peter writes that Christ was “put to death indeed in the flesh, but enlivened in the spirit, in which also coming he preached to those spirits that were in prison” (1 Peter 3:18–19, Douay-Rheims), and that “for this cause was the gospel preached also to the dead” (1 Peter 4:6).

Of all the Church’s creeds, the Catechism gives these two a special place (CCC 193). They profess the same faith. They differ in age, in length and in where they are used.

The Apostles’ Creed is “the ancient baptismal symbol of the Church of Rome” (CCC 194): short, Western, and the Creed the Catechism follows in its own outline (CCC 196), calling it “the oldest Roman catechism.” The Nicene Creed comes from the first two ecumenical councils, Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 (CCC 195), and is still “common to all the great Churches of both East and West” (CCC 195). It was written to answer the great questions about who Christ is and who the Holy Spirit is, so it is about twice as long and says at length what the Apostles’ Creed says briefly: “God from God, Light from Light.”

This is the Latin as the Holy See prints it in the appendix of common prayers to the Compendium of the Catechism, which heads it Symbolum Apostolicum; the older name is Symbolum Apostolorum, “the Symbol of the Apostles.” The accents mark the stressed syllable.

In the Rosary. The Rosary begins on the crucifix: make the Sign of the Cross, pray the Apostles’ Creed, then go on to the Our Father on the first large bead. AngelGuard’s guide to how to pray the Rosary walks through every bead, and the complete Holy Rosary prays all of it with you. The Divine Mercy Chaplet opens with the Creed too, after an Our Father and a Hail Mary. Beginning this way is a small act of faith: before you ask for anything, you say what you believe.

By heart. For centuries the Church asked every Christian to know the Creed by heart, and many learned it in Latin. If you are learning it now, take it one part at a time: the Father on the first day, the Son on the second, the Holy Spirit and the Church on the third. Within a week it is yours.

Slowly, once. Because it is familiar, it is easy to rush. Say it once, slowly, and stop after each article long enough to mean it. St. Paul gives the reason: “with the heart, we believe unto justice; but, with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:10, Douay-Rheims).

On days when faith is hard. You can pray the Creed when you feel very little. You are not saying it alone: “To say the Credo with faith is to enter into communion with God” (CCC 197), and with the whole Church that hands the faith on to you. A father in the Gospel once prayed, “I do believe, Lord: help my unbelief” (Mark 9:23, Douay-Rheims), and Jesus healed his son.

A prayer of our own, to say after the Creed: