The Summer 2002 issue of Communio opens with the theme of
Christian Community. In “The Works of Communion: Christian
Community in Act,” Michael Figura offers a portrait of the Christian community that is the normal ecclesial context for most
Catholics: the parish. Figura underscores how the Second Vatican Council, by (re)defining the parish as a communitas, gave it a home
within the ecclesiology of communion. The parish community is a concrete manifestation of the reality of the Church as (hierarchical) communion in its fundamental works of martyria, leiturgia, diakonia,
and koinonia.
Stephan Ackermann, writing on “The Church as
Person in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” examines the
theological foundation of the ecclesial communion that Figura
considers from the point of view of its local manifestation. The
Church is a personal reality, Ackermann explains, not because it
erases the individual identities of its members, but because it
introduces these members into the mystery of circumincession,
whereby “they mutually pervade each other, analogously to the
perichoresis of the Persons of the Trinity.” The individual finds
himself precisely by being “de-privatized” into communion
analogously to Mary, the personal incarnation of ecclesiality.
Finally,
Massimo Camisasca’s “Priestly Fraternities: Living the Sacrament
of the Other” highlights the radical concreteness of ecclesial
communion. Stressing the centrality of friendship in the life of
priests (and, by extension, of all Christians), Camisasca shows that
only the insistent pressure of the presence of my brother, the
sacrament of Christ, can initiate and sustain the enlargement of my
self to the dimensions of the truly ecclesial that Christian love
requires: “None of us,” Camisasca says, “can proceed toward the
truth of his own being except through the change to which the
presence of others impels us.”
The four articles gathered under the title The Ecclesial Identity
of the Christifidelis—A Theological Explorationseek to point the way
towards an adequate theology of the “laity” based on the experience
of participation in ecclesial communion discussed by the first three
contributions. Despite their differing emphases and approaches, these
articles form a constellation in which “layperson” no longer signifies
one who does not yet have a specific vocation, but one whose
specific vocation is precisely to embody the “common” condition
of the christifidelis—a condition rooted in the sacraments of initiation
that, in the order of holiness, encompasses, without destroying the
specificity of, every particular vocation in the Church.
Robert A. Connor argues in “Why Laity Are Not
Ministers: A Metaphysical Probe” that the current tendency to
identify laypeople as “ministers” subtly clericalizes them, minimizing
the fact that they are already priests by virtue of their
baptism—“existential priests” called to live out their priesthood in
and through “secularity.” As Connor explains, secularity is nothing
less than the reality of creaturely being as disclosed by Jesus Christ
in his revelation of man to himself (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 22).
Antonio Maria Sicari, in “Ecclesial Movements: A New
Framework for Ancient Charisms,” approaches the reality Connor
designates as “existential priesthood” in terms of the charisms that,
Sicari believes, most comprehensively configure the ecclesial identity
of the christifidelis anteriorly to the distinction between vocations and
states of life in the Church because they anticipate the radicality of
the evangelical counsels. For Sicari, the counsels are the core of
anthropology as revealed in Christ.
Juan M. Sara, in “Secular
Institutes According to Hans Urs von Balthasar,” suggests that the
valorization of the christifidelis on which Sicari insists intrinsically
requires a specific form of life that unites literal profession of chastity,
poverty, and obedience with a fully lay existence—thus embodying,
by way of a vicarious representation, the manner in which the
vocation of the christifidelis is fundamental in the order of holiness.
Sara sets forth this form of life in exploring the trinitarian foundation
and mission of the so-called “secular institutes,” whose combination
of the evangelical counsels and work in the world has enjoyed an
official place among the forms of consecrated life in the Church
since the late 1940s.
Finally, in “Christian Community and the
States of Life: A Reflection on the Anthropological Significance of
Virginity and Marriage,” David S. Crawford complements Sara’s
contribution, arguing that the two basic states of life—consecrated
virginity and marriage—are the most comprehensive specifications
of the Christian’s baptismal commitment that accordingly provide
the most adequate context for understanding the nature of Christian
community and, indeed, of human community as such. Central to
Crawford’s proposal is the thesis of the analogy of the states of life,
according to which marriage, as an objective state of life, constitutes
a way of perfection that realizes, per analogiam, the evangelical
counsels of chastity, poverty, and obedience as indicating the
“paradoxical” inner form of nuptial community.
The next three articles, which we could group under the
heading of Reading the World from the Trinity,” bring into relation two central concerns of the preceding contributions—communion and secularity—against the background of the challenge
that modernity poses to what might be called a “Christian
worldview.”
In “‘Enough About Man’: Christians After Their
Modernity and the Postmodern Objections to Their God,” Jörg
Splett seeks to delineate the conditions for a fully Christian
affirmation of the world as world—one that overcomes a certain
characteristically modern deformation of this affirmation within a
primacy of God understood as trinitarian communion.
Michael
Schulz’s “Being, World, and Man: Images of the Triune God in
Gustav Siewerth’s Trinitarian Ontology” continues the reflection
initiated by Splett. Drawing principally on German Catholic
philosopher Gustav Siewerth’s (1903-1963) speculative retrieval of
Thomas Aquinas’ “real distinction,” Schulz aims to establish the
“presuppositions of a trinitarian worldview.”
Finally, Don H.
MacDonald, writing on “The Theological Formation of
Seminarians According to Recent Roman Documents,” highlights
the unity of spirituality and (serious) theology that the Magisterium
has set forth as a central desideratum of priestly formation. But
MacDonald’s article concerns more than just seminarians: it
underscores, as do the contributions of Splett and Schulz, the
urgency of a “Christian worldview” as an internal requirement of
the New Evangelization in the context of modernity: “Jesus is Truth
as well as Life, and being a Christian—especially today—demands
thinking Christianly in as rigorous and discriminating a way as lies
within our abilities.”
Notes and Comments features a “Funeral Homily for Juana
Delatorre” by Joseph Fessio. Echoing many of the themes
discussed in the present issue, Fessio unites theology with pastoral
sensitivity in unfolding to grieving family members the beauty of the
exemplary Christian marriage to which they owe their own lives as
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—a marriage that,
like all Christian marriage, reflects the unity and fruitfulness of the
Trinity itself: “God is entirely one; but . . . he is a community of
distinct persons . . . he is love. It is not just each of us as individuals
that is created in the image of God. It is man and woman together
that are the image of God as the love between persons.”
AW
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