FRANCISCAN FAMILY - I

 

THE CHURCH

 

Guideline:

 

“Accentuate the vision of the Church as the People of God and as communion (Lumen gentium, Gaudium et spes, the final document of the 1985 Synod).”

 

I. MODELS OF THE CHURCH

 

            We can identify seven models for describing and understanding the nature of the Church since the Reformation. They are, in the order of time: The Political Society, The Body of Christ, the Sacrament, The Pilgrim People of God, The Human Community, The Servant, and Communion. These models are not mutually exclusive of one another. They all have positive aspects to contribute to a fully satisfactory working model of the Church.

 

            Let’s proceed to describe each model and to point out its weakness and its strength.

 

1. The Political Society model

 

            In the period between approximately 1600 and the year 1940, the dominant model of the Church was the secular political society, the State.

 

             "The one and true Church is the community of men brought together by the profession of the same Christian faith and participation in the same sacraments under the authority of legitimate pastors and especially of the one Vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman Pontiff.... The one true Church is as visible and palpable as the Kingdom of France or the republic of Venice" (Robert Bellarmine,  De Controversiis,1588).

 

Weakness:

 

            This model enumerates only the visible and structural characteristics of the Church,

understood as the "perfect society". The emphasis on visible, institutional  characteristics alone together with its polemical, exclusivist intent  makes it a very deficient model of the Church.

The over-emphasis on authority and a corresponding lack of lay involvement in the life and  mission of the Church results in a hierarchy rather than a church. Clericalism, juridicism, and triumphalism thrive in this model.

 

            The Church is much more than a social structure. Other essential characteristics must be  represented: the life of grace; a Christian communion of faith, hope and charity; the abiding presence of Christ and the gifts and assistance of the Spirit. In fact, the whole "mystery" dimension of the Church goes unrepresented in this model. It doesn’t express a reality that is above all a mystery of faith.

 

            It was a serviceable model in the Counter-Reformation period. The aim was generally to build up the Church society on earth. Efforts to save souls were directed precisely to bringing more and  more people into the Church society. Success for the missionary, and for the parish priest, was measured in statistics of conversions, baptisms, regular attendance and communions.

 

Strength:

 

            This model gave definite guidelines by which Catholics could identify one another at a time when they felt this need. Some of its elements must be incorporated into any complete description of the Church, such as: the bonds of professed faith, of  government, and of sacraments,. The Church is certainly a society that can be identified by visible characteristics, but it is more than that.

 

2. The Body of Christ model

 

            After such a long period of using one single model, it was the beginning of a new era for the Church when another model began to rise to prominence, through the encyclical Mystici Corporis, of 1943. This was an ancient model resurrected in the nineteenth century.

It was a welcome and much needed complement of the earlier Political Society model.

 

Strength:

 

            This model stressed all those things that were obviously missing from the Political Society model. It was a more democratic model as well, stressing the activity and gifts of the Spirit in all members and the dependence of all on the contributions of each.

 

Weakness:

 

            It raised  in an acute way the problem of the relationship between the mystical and the visible, between the supernatural community of grace in Christ and the visible society of very human beings.

 

         Stressing the visible community as the Body of Christ and the continuation of the Incarnation, can draw one towards a divinisation of the Church, making it one divine organism with the Head, hypostatically united with the divine nature.

 

            The Church as not just an invisible communion of grace, but it is also the visible community as the fullness and completion of Christ, Christ in the Church being in some sense brought to complete achievement.

 

            Stressing the mystical dimension of the spiritual communion can take an anti-institutional turn.

 

            In 1943, Pius XII, in his encyclical Mystici Corporis , stressed on the one hand that the Church is not  "something invisible, intangible, a something merely spiritual (‘pneumatical’)". Conversely, any presentation of the doctrine is to be rejected that  makes the faithful in any way pass beyond the order of created things. Not even one single attribute of the eternal God can be predicated of  them in the proper sense.      

 

            (Yves Congar) The fellowship with God and  with one another in Christ and the totality of means by which this  fellowship is produced and maintained are two inseparable aspects of the one reality. In Vatican II it is stated that the society furnished with hierarchical agencies and the Mystical Body of Christ are not to be considered as two realities, but the visible assembly and the spiritual community are "one interlocked reality" (Lumen Gentium, 8).

 

            The tendency to identify the human with the divine in the Body of Christ  model can probably best be counteracted by understanding that the Body of Christ model does not aim to represent the union of members in the Body of Christ as a biological union. It must remain an interpersonal communion in which individuals retain integrally their own individual distinctness.

 

            So, the tension remains between the visible, institutional society and the essentially spiritual communion. Both are essential. But the Body of Christ model does not make it clear how they are combined.

 

            Besides, many were uneasy with Pius XII's dogmatic and exclusivist statement in Mystici Corporis that the Church of Christ is the Roman Catholic Church, a statement that he reiterated in Humani Generis, in 1950, with the words,  "The Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing" (a statement which he intended in the exclusivist sense).

 

3. The Sacrament model

 

            The next model to emerge, that of the Church as Sacrament, initially took on vigour in the late 1940's. Again, a very ancient model was resurrected. It was adopted and further developed by 20th Century theologians. Thereupon it was accepted  into the Vatican II’s Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, in the statement: "The Church is in Christ as a sacrament or sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of all mankind." It became a major theme of the Council (ch. L.G.9, 48; S.C. 26; A.G. 5; G.S. 42).

 

            A sacrament is both sign and instrument. It describes in some sense the indescribable and inexpressible spiritual reality. For instance, pouring of water expressed spiritual purification: the Church as a sacrament of Christ expresses Christ, and, as sacrament of salvation, the Church's community life expresses something of what salvation essentially consists in. At the same time, a sacrament is an instrument which effects what it signifies. The symbolic washing brings about the spiritual purification it expresses: the Church as a sacrament of Christ brings about the continuation of Christ's ministry and as sacrament of salvation builds a community of salvation in the world.

 

Strength:

 

            From 1949 onwards, this was a very popular model among Catholic theologians. It appeared to offer a solution to the dilemma of the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The visible community in this model was the visible form of the invisible communion in Christ. It was seen to have an advantage over the Body of Christ model in permitting a grey area in place of a sharp line of demarcation between Church and non-Church.

 

            In this model, the Church is the visible form of the invisible communion in Christ and the visible form of salvation itself. So, there is little basis for the exclusivist claim that the Church of Christ or salvation itself is coextensive with the Roman Catholic Church.

 

            Vatican II  officially accepted that conclusion in the famous change of wording in Lumen gentium, from "The unique Church of Christ is the Catholic Church", to, "The unique Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church".  This change was made in order that "the whole statement may be more in accordance with the affirmation of ecclesial elements which are found elsewhere".

 

            This model had the capacity to provide a new impetus to the missionary activity of the Church by stressing the fact that the Church community is essentially an effective sign as a light to the world, a beacon of hope, and a community-building force at the heart of the world. The model could also motivate loyalty to the Church from the realization of the importance of being in  the community and striving to be one with it. One would thus be striving  to accept its doctrines and discipline and yet be permitted the right to make constructive criticism in the light of the Church's collective effort to be a better sign. The model thus avoided the static, "perfect"  (complete) impression given by the previous models, since human expressions of the divine are never adequate!

 

Weakness:

 

            This model has never had the impact on the life of the Church that the Political Society model or the Body of Christ model  have had. It remains very much a theologian's model, not easy to popularise. This is most probably because "sacrament" is a technical term, the meaning of which is difficult to grasp and consequently poorly understood. Hence it would not impress with the simple clarity of the earlier models.

 

II. THE PEOPLE OF GOD

 

4. The Pilgrim People of God model

 

            The dominant model of Vatican II was that of "The Pilgrim People of God". Several decades of important work in the fields of scriptural, patristic and liturgical studies gave a renewed sense in the Church of "sacred history", the gradual unfolding through  history of God's plan to unite all peoples in Christ by means of a single  people. This people is itself on pilgrimage through history like the rest of humanity. But this is a favoured people; because it has hope, it is enabled to walk by faith, led by the Spirit of God. It sees itself in this model as in the vanguard of the whole pilgrim human race not in the old triumphalist way, but specially graced in order to lead the  rest of them on their pilgrimage to their ultimate destiny.

 

Strength:

 

            In this model the Church is no longer seen as an immobile, supra-terrestrial institution always the same, unaffected by time, change or history. It is a historical community on pilgrimage. Not only has it not "arrived", it still has a long way to travel. It has limitations that  are to be overcome with the assistance of the Spirit of God. It is not exempt from the common human lot of having to live with uncertainty. It must make its way tentatively, often by trial and error. The people have the consolation that all along the way God travels with them, and the  providential guidance of the Spirit will always be with them. New insights, ideas, methods and approaches are continually to be expected.  There is no provision made for "things" to settle down into a new static stability after a period of transition and updating.

 

            So, after three and a half centuries in which we understood the Church by means of a static model, followed by a brief period under another although less static model, the Church had this model to live with. From a timeless model, long entrenched, we changed rather abruptly to a model of the Church situated in the heart of history.

 

            The change of imagery  imposed a kind of mental revolution. Once the mental revolution had been accomplished - if in fact it was accomplished in the Council - the real revolution had to begin: the Church had to start to assimilate the consequences.

 

            In the Exodus, a basic category that goes with this model, the people were trained to be content with few cumbersome accessories and stocks of provisions, but traveled with tents that could be quickly folded up and moved. Once one begins to apply the model, one catches a glimpse of how radical it is. It affects all concepts of Church structures, traditions, education in the faith, and liturgy.

 

            The Pilgrim People model is a democratic model, emphasizing the fundamental unity of all that precedes any diversification of roles or offices in the Church. Hierarchical offices are seen as different forms of service to the whole people. The model was used in the Council in a  designedly anti-hierarchical manner, to offset the clericalism and juridicism that tends to dog Catholic Church life. It is also designedly anti-triumphalist, emphasizing that the Church is a human group in history, stressing that the mercy of God is the basis of the people's existence, stressing the continual dependence on and inadequate fidelity to the Spirit of God, and stressing the need for repentance and renewal.

            Liturgical renewal is dominated by this model of pilgrim people, called into a covenantal relationship with God, inaugurated through the good news of Jesus Christ, called to announce that good news until the Lord will come again. This is the model of Church consonant with worship: a pilgrim people, wandering sometimes without any great sense of direction, but stopping at times, gathering on holy ground to meet God in worship and then, conscious of the marvelous tradition that has brought us to where we are, telling again in word and sacrament, the story of God, God’s Christ, and God’s people. Then we move on, but to engage again and again in this liturgical action.

 

Weakness:

 

            Although this model avoids the tendency to divinize the visible community, a difficulty  with the Body of Christ model, it does so at the expense of under-stressing the relationship between the people and Jesus Christ. It fails to bring out what is new in this covenant relationship, namely, that all persons become by adoption the children of God. Many authors, not exclusively Protestant, explain the model in a way that leaves the impression that Christians are still living under the conditions of the Old Law.

 

            The Pilgrim People of God model, even though it has the weight of the authority of the Council behind it, seems never to have imposed itself as a model outside the Council and its documents. While it is no doubt stronger now than the Political Society and Body of Christ models, it  seems to be rivaled at the present time by three other models which, if not arising from the Council, were at least given considerable impetus by the Council. These three models have taken on after the Vatical Council.

 

5. The Human Community model

 

            The first of these is the Human Community model, which owes less to theological theory than to basic human needs and to pastoral strategy. This model generates simple prayer groups, house churches and pentecostal gatherings. More sophisticated groups apply principles of sociology and psychology and related fields such as transactional analysis and group dynamics.

 

Strength:

 

            Such groups give promise to fulfilling a real need in modern society, for a style of Christian life that is more personal, less hampered by institutional structures, and in which friendship and trust have an essential place.

 

            The fruits of this model, hopefully, will be a large-scale loosening up of the rigid social system that has been constructed in the Church under the influence of the Political Society model. If institution and community can be moulded into one, we may well be coming much closer to realizing the Catholic ideal.

 

Weakness:

 

            The model can at times engender an exaggerated anti-institutionalism and narcissism, tending to encourage the formation of little communes in which people enjoy one another, and undergo rarefied and beautiful experiences, but do not contribute responsibly to the development of human society as a whole.

 

            This is a worry, for instance, when promoters of such groups speak of getting past the superficiality and unimportance of much of what  they have been experiencing in churches, and achieving relationships of depth and meaning and concern. If such groups are born of despair, then they can easily cast themselves loose from their institutional moorings, then become underground churches and finally sects. It is possible to be excessively optimistic about the capacity of simple unstructured human communities to fulfil humanity's deepest needs. Hence the conviction that  the institutional Church is essential is well founded, even from a  psychological and sociological standpoint.

 

6. The Church as a Servant Model

 

            This model owes a  great deal to theology, especially a theme that developed in an unexpected  manner in the Council itself: the model of the Church as Servant. This model is dominant in Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in  the Modern World, and all the official social documents that have followed  the Council have further developed and applied the model.

 

Strength:

 

            Commencing from an explicit acceptance that the Church must be part of the human community and intimately associated with all that is genuinely human, because that was what Christ became through the Incarnation, the Church sees that it is called to make a positive contribution to all persons, whoever they are and whatever their particular needs, after the example of Christ, who came not to be served but to serve. Briefly, as Christ came to serve, the Church must carry on his mission of service to the whole world.

 

            This model is not an invention of Vatican II. One of the earliest clear formulation of the model in recent times is to be found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, in which, after presenting Christ as the Man for Others, he proceeds to call on the Church  to become a servant Church, sharing in the problems of human life, not dominating but helping and serving, after the example of Christ. The  revival of the theology of hope has come under  the influence of this model. The Church is at times presented in this  theology as an "exodus community" pioneering the future of the world. The Church is pictured as God's avant-garde.

 

            Surprisingly, this model is developed in a low-key, non-authoritarian, even humble vein. Emphasis is placed on the need first of all to scrutinise the "signs of the times", a phrase originating in the  New Testament (Mt. 16:2-4), but given a particular twist by Pope John XXIII, especially in Pacem in Terris.  These "signs" can be summarised as the major movements towards  personalization (development) and socialisation (grouping for the  achievement of common purposes). These movements are considered to reflect  the movement of the Spirit in the world towards the achievement of the plan of God. So, this model introduces a rather new attitude of listening to the world and learning from it. It makes the world a reality to be investigated by a proper theological method.

 

            Having scrutinised the signs of the times and discerned the action of the Spirit in the world, the Church's task is then to associate itself as an institution and through its members with all movements working for the values of peace, liberation, justice, development and  reconciliation in the temporal order.

 

            This model makes many demands on the Church institution to become more obviously structured towards the mission of service instead of building up its own house. In mission territories, it is being concretely worked out by  rapid indigenisation and greater concentration on ministering to the basic human needs of under-developed nations.

 

            This model dominates the theology of liberation. Its impact has been most felt in the third world, especially in Latin America.

 

            In some areas, the theology of liberation has further evolved into "political  theology", and fostered alliances with social movements originally  inspired by humanist and Marxist ideologies, a turn of events that was given a measure of positive official encouragement under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, but not much under John Paul II.

 

Weakness:

 

            This is an exciting and hazardous model, and it impresses many theologians as fundamentally sound. But further clarifications are yet required. The special mission of the Church, its proper and distinctive contribution in the socio-political sphere, is not clear. More basically, it is not clear what is the relationship between human development and the growth of the Kingdom of God, the progressive restoration of all things in Christ. Also the  terms used in this theology are often biblical terms: liberation, salvation, peace, justice, charity, community, life, oppression, injustice. But being biblical terms they originally belong to biblical  models, and there is a danger of confusion if terms are taken over by a different model without advertence to inevitable shifts of meaning. In  this Servant model, they are given a rather clear and definite social meaning. It has yet to become apparent where the shifts of meaning and over-simplifications lie.

 

            The Servant model of the Church features strongly in the Church’s social teaching, which we will discuss tomorrow.

 

III. COMMUNION

 

7. The Communion model

 

            This is a recent development of the Body of Christ model. The Pastoral Instruction on the Means of Social Communication, Communio et Progressio promoted this model in 1971. In 2000, Pope John Paul II, in Novo millennio ineunte (n. 43) proposed  “to make the Church the home and the school of communion.”

 

            The Church is Christ's Mystical Body, the hidden completion of Christ Glorified who "fills the whole creation". As a result, we move, within the Church and with the help of the word and the sacraments, towards the hope of that final unity where "God will be all in all".

 

            The Church is a communion of persons and eucharistic communities, rooted in the intimate communion of the Trinity and mirroring it. There can be no communion without a community, and a community will quickly fall apart without communication.

 

            All communication is grounded in that among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Trinitarian communion reaches out to humankind. The Son is the Word, eternally "spoken" by the Father; and in and through Jesus Christ, Son and Word made flesh, God communicates himself and his salvation to persons. "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son" (Heb 1:1-2).

 

            Jesus Christ's communication was, in fact, spirit and life. In the institution of the Holy Eucharist, Jesus gave us the most perfect and most intimate form of communion between God and man possible in this life, and, out of  this, the deepest possible unity between people. Further, Christ communicated  to us his life-giving Spirit, who brings all persons together in unity.

 

Strength:

 

            In the Christian faith, the unity and brotherhood of man are the chief aims of all communication and these find their source and model in the central mystery of the eternal communion between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who live a single divine life.

 

            Communication, at its most profound level, is the giving of self in love. Communication in and by the Church finds its starting point in the communion of love among the divine Persons and their communication with us.

 

Weakness:

 

            Being a development of the Body of Christ model, this Communion model may have inherited a weakness. The tension may still remain between the essentially spiritual communion and the visible, institutional society.