Noah

No fixed feast day in the calendar

Noah: the back of the card, with its short story, lesson and a QR code that opens it in the Catholic Information app. The full text is below.

Flip the card and scan the QR code on the back to open it in the app

Noah, the righteous man who built the ark as God commanded and saw the rainbow of the covenant.

Who is he?

Noah lived a very long time ago, before the time of Abraham. The Bible says: “Noah was a righteous man and blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God” (Gn 6:9). Through him, God protected life on earth and made a covenant with every living creature.

Life story

In those days, people were doing evil everywhere. God told Noah to build a very big ark out of wood, and then to bring his wife, his three sons, his three daughters-in-law and pairs of every kind of animal into it (cf. Gn 6:14-22). Noah did everything God commanded.

Then “rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights” (Gn 7:12). The water rose and covered the whole earth, but the ark floated safely. Eight people in all were saved (cf. 1 Pt 3:20).

When the rain stopped, he waited many more days, then sent out a raven and a dove to see whether the water had gone down. The first time, the dove found no place to rest and flew back to the ark. Seven days later, he sent it out again. “The dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its bill was a plucked-off olive leaf!” (Gn 8:11). Then Noah knew the water had gone down (cf. Gn 8:6-11).

When he came out of the ark, the first thing he did was build an altar and offer a sacrifice to the LORD (cf. Gn 8:20). God promised never again to destroy the earth with a flood, and said: “I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth” (Gn 9:13). That bow is the rainbow. The Bible says Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years (cf. Gn 9:29).

Why does the Church honor him?

He obeyed God completely and patiently, even though he had to do something very big and very strange. Saint Peter teaches that the flood in Noah’s time “prefigured baptism, which saves you now” (1 Pt 3:21). The Letter to the Hebrews praises him: by faith, he built the ark to save his family (cf. Heb 11:7).

A lesson for you

Obey God in the little things of each day, even when your friends around you don’t.
Every time you see a rainbow, remember that God always keeps his promises, and thank him.
Love and take care of animals, because God wanted to protect them.

Identifying marks

A dove carrying an olive branch: the dove came back with a fresh olive leaf, a sign that the flood waters had gone down (cf. Gn 8:11).
The ark: he built the ark as God commanded, to save his family and the animals (cf. Gn 6:14-22).
A rainbow: the sign of the covenant God made with the earth after the flood (cf. Gn 9:13).
A grapevine (*): after the flood, he became a grape grower (cf. Gn 9:20).

(*) Only in some pictures and statues.

The text on this page is the card in the Catholic Information app, word for word.