"Communio must first be understood theologically. Only then can one draw implications for a sacramental notion of communio, and only after that for an ecclesiological notion. Communio is a communion of the body and blood of Christ (e.g., 1 Cor 10:16). Now the Whole attains its full concreteness; everyone eats the one bread and thus they themselves become one. 'Receive what is yours,' says Augustine, presupposing that through the sacraments human existence itself is joined to and transformed into communion with Christ.
The Church is entirely herself only in the sacrament, ie., wherever she hands herself over to him and wherever he hands himself over to her creating her over and over again. As the one who has descended into the deepest depths of the earth and of human existence, he guides her over and over again back to the heights. Only in this context is it possible to speak about a hierarchical dimension and to renew our understanding of tradition as growth into identity. More than anything else, this clarifies what it means to be Catholic. The Lord is whole wherever he is found, but that also means that together we are but one Church and that the union of humanity is the indispensable definition of the Church. Therefore, 'he is our peace.' 'Through him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father' (Eph 2:14–18).
For this reason, Hans Urs von Balthasar has dealt a severe blow to the sociology of groups. He reminds us that the ecclesiastical community appears to quite a number of people today as no more than a skeleton of institutions. As a result, 'the small group . . . will become more and more the criterion of ecclesiastical vitality. For these people, the Church as Catholic and universal seems to hover like a disconnected roof over the buildings which they inhabit.'
Balthasar provides an alternative vision:
'Paul’s whole endeavour was to rescue the Church communion from the clutches of charismatic ‘experience’ and through the apostolic ministry to carry it beyond itself to what is catholic, universal. Ministry in the Church is certainly service, not domination, but it is service with the authority to demolish all the bulwarks which the charismatics set up against the universal communion, and to bring them ‘into obedience to Christ’ (2 Cor 10:5). Anyone who charismatically (democratically) levels down Church ministry, thereby loses the factor which inexorably and crucifyingly carries every special task beyond itself and raises it to the plane of the Church universal, whose bond of unity is not experience (gnosis) but self-sacrificing love (agape).' (9)
It goes without saying that this is not a denial of the unique significance of the local Church nor a repudiation of movements and new communities in which the Church and faith can be experience with new vigor. Every time that the Church has been in a period of crisis and the rusty structures were no longer resisting the maelstrom of universal degeneration, such movements have been the basis for renewal, forces of rebirth. (10) This always presupposes that within these movements there is an opening up to the whole of Catholicism and that they fit in with the unity of the tradition."
No comments:
Post a Comment