The Trinity is a United Community of Three

The Trinity – God in three persons, each distinct from one another – each with distinct roles in our salvation.

The catechism says the Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense and Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not simply names designating modalities of the divine being, for they are really distinct from one another (254). Yet I have come across the expression God is a community of three people? MR Kolbeck

In his excellent and lucid book God is a Community, Brian Gaybba, the South African Catholic theologian, explains that the complete unity of three persons in one God means that our one God is self-sufficient and eternally happy in himself.

This is not simply because God has no unfulfilled desires. It is because God is a community of persons who enjoy to an infinite degree the one most basic fulfilling experience that every human seeks: to love and be loved.

This understanding of the unparalleled mystery of one God in three persons provides an insight into another mystery: God made the human race in the divine image and likeness (Gen 1:27).

Therefore like God, humanity is a community, a single family despite its wars and divisions. We can say God in the Trinity is not alone and therefore it is not good for man to be alone (Gen 2:12).

God Becomes Man in Jesus

From the moment that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, God took humanity into his own inner life, his own community of shared love.

Heaven is the full flowering of the shared life of the community that already exists on this earth. Hell is the flowering of the refusal to share. It is the flowering of the power of self-centredness to destroy all happiness within the individual.

There are three persons in the Trinity, not three people, even if people is used loosely to indicate persons in the plural.

It would be incorrect to use the word person here in the everyday sense of an individual having consciousness. There are not three individual consciousnesses in the three divine persons because each is aware of being one God, whole and entire.

The trinitarian mystery is the revelation that there is one God in three persons, each distinct from one another.

The Father has no principle of origin, the Son is born of the substance of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle.