Where do I find the Church?

Faith and life, truth and life, I and we are inseparable, and it is only in the context of a life shared with a 'we' of believers in the 'we' of the Church that faith reveals its logic, its organic structure. Doubtless the question will arise here: Where do I find the Church? Where can I experience her as she really is, apart from her official teaching and her sacramental system? This question can cause genuine anguish. And yet-today, beside the parish, where the Church is normally so experienced, there are also arising in increasing numbers newly formed communities that are direct offshoots of the jointly held faith to which they give in return the freshness of immediate experience. Communio e Liberazione is one such group where the Church is experienced as Church where the way is laid open for a closer association with Jesus and a deeper understanding of his teaching. If such a movement is to remain healthy and become truly fruitful, two aspects must be held in equal balance. On the one hand, such a community must be genuinely Catholic, that is, it must bear within itself the life and faith of the universal Church of every time and place and must let itself be formed according to this model. If its roots are not deep in this common ground, it will become sectarian and meaningless. On the other hand, however, the universal Church will become abstract and lacking in reality if, here and now, in this time and place, she is not represented in a concrete living community. It is, then, the task of such movements to live a true and deep Catholicism in their individual 'communities', of whatever kind they may be, even if this necessarily imposes restrictions on what they regard as peculiar to themselves. If they do this, they will bear fruit because they will themselves be Church, a place where faith is born and, consequently, a place where it is also reborn into the truth.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Auf Christus schauen, pp. 40-41