I'm reminded this morning of a quote from my favorite modern Catholic writer, Herbert McCabe. He was a Dominican theologian who taught at Oxford. (If you've never read his book God Matters, you're missing a real treat.)
"The whole of our faith is the belief that God loves us; I mean there isn't anything else. Anything else we say we believe is just a way of saying that God loves us. Any proposition, any article of faith, is only an expression of faith if it is a way of saying that God loves us. I think we have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear. The Christian notion of God is based on a belief in a love which simply can never fail."
(It's from his Faith Within Reason, pp. 33-34.)