Fr. Tony's Bridge Builders

[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]

Conclusion

What has been outlined here is a brief introduction to the main lines of thought within the extensive theological labors of Père Yves Congar as they relate to the nature of ecclesial authority.Clearly, for Congar, the great Tradition of the Church reveals an understanding of that authority as an essentially theological reality that has its ultimate principle in God the Father who builds up the Body of his Son by the action of the Holy Spirit.Because authority in the Church is a theological reality—sharing in the life of the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit—it is at the same time decidedly anthropological in that it engages persons as subjects, with a diversity of charisms, in the fundamental plan of God which is the building up of the Body of Christ and the growth of the kingdom of God.

What this theological and anthropological foundation shows is ecclesial authority’s profoundly evangelical nature.As an evangelical reality, authority in the Church always calls for the conversion of all the baptized and finds its ultimate direction in the building up of the Body of Christ and the advancement of the kingdom of God.Because ecclesial authority is an evangelical reality in its very nature it far transcends any purely secular expression and practice of authority.Authority radically grounded in and flowing from the Trinitarian nature of the living God allows “that the measure of [authority] remain very evangelical, pure of pretensions of a temporal sort of power” (Yves Congar, « L’Avenir de l’Église, » in Avenir et éternité, ed. M. Olivier Lacombe, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1964, 211).It is precisely the inner-Trinitarian relationships by which authority is measured.In other words, the unique authority of each person of the Church is lived in relationships of love, generosity and receptivity directed at the common conforming of life to Christ, in docility to the action of the Father concretely present in the charisms of each by the action of the Holy Spirit. This evangelical authority finds its ‘glory’ in self-emptying love and its end in the mutual ‘lifting up’ of each into the very glory and life that is the Father’s (cf. Phil. 2: 5-11; John 17: 1-3).Through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon all the disciples ‘gathered together’ (cf. Acts 2: 1ff.) each one is filled with the authority of Christ, each in his or her own order, for the glorification of the Father. Because ecclesial authority is evangelical its exercise can only be based “within the fundamental religious relationship of the Gospel” which will always demand of Christians nothing less than “radical conversion” (Congar, Power and Poverty, 98-99).

In conclusion, Congar’s witness to the theological and evangelical nature of the Church’s authority serves to highlight the ultimate doxological character of authority within the Church.Ecclesial authority as given expression in the writings of Père Congar is ultimately from God the Father in Christ the Son through the Holy Spirit and back again by the diversity of charisms inspired by the Holy Spirit uniting all the faithful into the one Body of Christ for the praise and adoration of God the Father (Yves Congar, Esprit de l’homme, Esprit de Dieu, Paris: Cerf, 1983, 42-43).The absolute goal of ecclesial authority, whether in its hierarchical or life expression, is life in and the praise of the living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]

History, eschatology, and pneumatology

In order to gain an appreciation for Congar’s notion of the life or community principle of authority, it is necessary to give articulation to the decidedly historical perspective he applied to the theological task which is precisely the source of his profound appreciation for God actively present and engaged in the construction of the Church in the very ebb and flow of the People of God living the faith.The conviction possessed by Congar that history is a true locus theologicus has its bases in his relationship, beginning in his first years at Le Saulchoir, with his mentor and friend Père Marie-Dominique Chenu.Chenu says that, “The theologian, unlike the philosopher, works on history.His ‘given’ [sic] are neither the natures of things nor their eternal forms, but events according to a plan (economie)” (M. D. Chenu, Faith and Theology, trans. Denis Hickey, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968, 27).In Père Chenu, Congar had encountered “the history of the search for truth” which more and more unfolded as a “drama” before him (Yves Congar, “The Brother I Have Known,” Thomist 49:1985, 495). The return to the biblical and patristic sources of the twentieth century, Congar would insist, also revealed this renewed awareness that “[r]evelation takes place in the framework of history or of an ‘economy’” (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, Vol. 25, ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, É. Amann, Paris :Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1946, col. 314-502. English translation, A History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie, Garden City, NY:Doubleday, 1968, 12, page numbering that of the English edition).

This profound sense of the historical task of theology is what, for Congar, opens theology to its true eschatological end and, further, necessitates a certain ‘dialectical’ approach to theology.“Above all, in 1927-28, through the reading of Fr. Allo’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, I made a certain discovery of eschatology.Once I had accepted the eschatological point of view, I had to speak of the church dialectically” (Yves Congar, forward to The Ecclesiology of Yves Congar by Timothy I. MacDonald, New York:University Press of America, 1984, xxii).Christ, for Congar, must be, in light of this eschatological reality, seen not simply as the Alpha, the already established truth of revelation, but equally as the Omega, the “‘not yet said’ side to Christ and to the Word itself which, in order to find expression, requires the variety of history and of peoples which has not yet come about” (Yves Congar, “Church History as a Branch of Theology,” trans. Jonathan Cavanagh,Concilium 57, ed. Roger Aubert, 85-96, New York: Herder & Herder, 1970, 93).There is, because of its eschatological character, a necessity of speaking dialectically about theological truth as that which is given and that which remains as task.

History is imbued with such ‘theological weightiness’ because it has the Holy Spirit as its transcendent agent (Yves Congar, “Pneumatologie et théologie de l’histoire,” in La théologie de l’histoire :Herméneutique et eschatologie, ed. Enrico Castelli, Paris : Editions Montaigne, 1971, 62).Congar’s insists that it is precisely the Holy Spirit that ensures the continuity and substantial identity of the faith throughout the historical course of the Church from its establishment in the saving life, death and resurrection of Christ to its ultimate fulfillment in the eschaton (Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, vol. 3, trans. David Smith, New York: The Seabury Press, 1983, 39).The Holy Spirit does so not simply by insuring the efficacy of hierarchical acts, but also by raising up within the whole People of God charisms, initiatives of renewal, and the active reception of faith which both carries faith forward into the world and enriches the faith as proclaimed by the hierarchy.

The history of the Church—when all the exigencies of the life of faith lived by every Christian is regarded with theological seriousness because it is pneumatologically charged—shows the de facto action of God in the construction of the Church being accomplished from both outside and above itself and from within it, through the charisms and initiatives of the whole People of God.

Ontology of Grace

Finally, for a full appreciation of Congar’s notion of ecclesial authority as God actively building up the Body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit not simply through its hierarchical structures but through the life of the community as well, his stress on the ontology of grace must be highlighted. In Congar’s estimation, one of the most significant aspects of the teachings found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council was its decision to move the chapter on the People of God, in its document on the Church (Lumen Gentium), before its consideration of the hierarchical structure.By doing so, “the highest value was given to the quality of disciple, the dignity attached to Christian existence as such or the reality of an ontology of grace, and then, to the interior of this reality, a hierarchical structure of social organization (Yves Congar, “The Church:The People of God,” trans. Kathryn Sullivan, in Concilium 1, ed. Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx, 11-37, New York:Paulist Press, 1965, 13).Indeed, for Congar, one of the great discoveries made in the twentieth century’s return to the patristic sources was the discovery there of the profound sense of this ontology of grace.In the writings of the Fathers one always finds that “ecclesiology included anthropology” (Ibid., 22).

Within this notion of the ontology of grace is found what Congar considers to be the authentic personal principle within Christianity.“[E]very person is a subject who responds freely and who is always a source of free initiative, self-expression and invention…It inevitably goes together with an ecclesiology based on the idea of the Church as a communion of persons” (Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, vol.2, 153-154).Again the ‘ontology of grace’is underlined, granting due regard for the person in the Church and viewing each one as an authentic disciple of Christ, truly capable of and needing to contribute to the building up of the whole Body, the Church.

When Christianity is viewed from the primacy of discipleship based on election and new life gained in baptism, the place of charisms and initiatives, for instance, is amplified.All the Christian faithful must be seen in light of spiritual anthropology; that is, in view of their assimilation to the one Lord, Jesus Christ, in his Body the Church.This assimilation, certainly, depends on the instituted structures of the Church, but specifically as a service to the one work of Christ, in which all share (Eph. 4:11-16), the building of the Temple of God, the gathering of all persons into the fellowship of the divine communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.This is forcefully articulated by Elizabeth Teresa Groppe, commenting on Congar’s pneumatological vision of the Church.

This is an ecclesial vision in which all the baptized are indispensable members of the church, each bringing gifts and talents that become part of the plērōma of Christ, a vision in which charisms are not simply a matter of personal enrichment but gifts that contribute to the very constitution of the church…it is a vision of a church governed through conciliarity and reception as it seeks to discern the counsel of the Spirit of Christ, who is active in all its members (Elizabeth Teresa Groppe, Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 171).

[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]

Authority as sign of the Gospel

It was Congar’s contention, as I have said, that the way the Catholic Church throughout this history came to speak of its authority does not adequately express the full Tradition of the true nature of that authority.As Congar says,

[T]he Church must, in following Christ, seek an incarnation which would make her message transparent.Today we must energetically seek for modes of existence in the Church—including the area of the exercise of authority—so that she may be seen as clearly as possible and to the highest degree as a sign of the Gospel…In my opinion, the essential point to remember is that biblical and evangelical revelation is not, in its essential intention, a theoretical system, but an affirmation, simple and at the same time very rich, concerning what is the true religious relationship, that of man made in the image of God with the living God himself (Yves Congar, “The Council in the Age of Dialogue,” trans.Barry N. Rigney.Cross Currents: Spring, 1962, 149-150).

To speak of the Church’s authority as transparently evangelical demands, Congar would insist, that beyond her structure—but not excluding that structure—one recognizes the reality of Christ’s authority active in the very life of the whole Church and in its members.To raise the question of authority as transparently evangelical is to ask:Where does one in fact—existentially, practically and concretely—encounter the reality of Christ acting to build up the Church?

The methodology of structure and life

Here it is important to give brief articulation to Congar’s essential methodology regarding the ‘way’ or the hermeneutical lens through which he reads the sources of the Church regarding her nature.

In the measure that I advanced in the knowledge of this reality that is the Church, I better realized that one could hardly study its structure and not also speak of its life.This very distinction between life and structure appeared to me to permit the better posing of, and therefore clarification of, a large number of problems.The Church has its structure, from which it receives its constitutive elements; but, structured, it lives, and the faithful live in it, in unity.The Church is not solely a framework, a system, an institution; it is a communion (Yves Congar, Vraie et fausse reforme dans l’Église, Unam Sanctum 72, 2nd Ed, Paris: Cerf, 1968, 7-8).

Clearly, for Congar, in order to comprehend the full reality of the Church one has to look, in addition to her essential structure—that is its rule of faith, the sacraments of faith, and the apostolic ministry—to the actual life of faith lived by the People of God; to the charisms and initiatives possessed by its individual members and the variety of charisms and initiatives found within local Churches.Why this is of such significance, according to Congar, is that when one looks seriously at the historical journey of the Church one simply must acknowledge that the Church as the Body of Christ is built up not simply by its established structures from outside and above it, but from within it by the very life of faith lived by the People of God and the actual charisms and initiatives that God raises up from within this people.Again, the gospel question is posed here:Where is the actual authority of God encountered acting to construct his people into the Body of Christ?

God as the living God

This fundamental conviction of Congar, that to speak authentically of the Church and her authority requires one to speak both of her structure and her life, drew him into a yet more profound conviction.“[I]t is not only our idea and our presentation of the Church which must be renewed in its source, it is our idea of God as a living God, and in light of this, our idea of Faith” (Congar, “The Council in the Age of Dialogue,” 148).In other words, to speak of the true nature of the Church demands an authentic understanding of the nature of God as encountered within Christian revelation.For Congar, what flows from the Christian understanding of the living God is a profoundly Trinitarian conception of God and of the nature of the Church as a participation in the Trinitarian communion.

Authority as essentially Trinitarian

In relation to its authority, this means precisely that it is God the Father who builds-up the Church by means of his “two hands,” the Son and the Spirit (Cf. Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit, 34).This serves to underscore the essentially theological nature of authority by clearly showing God the Father as the chief architect, who constructs the Church through his ‘two hands’, the Word and the Spirit.For Congar, then, the whole of the Church’s life is grounded in the very reality of God, specifically in the Church being “from end to end …built on the image of the Three-in-One” (Yves Congar, A Gospel Priesthood, trans. P.J. Hepburne-Scott, New York: Herder and Herder, 1967, 165).

Congar highlights the significant implications this has for the proper understanding of the reality of authority in the life of the Church.Here again is found Congar’s insistence on the united action of the Son and the Spirit in building up the Church.

The gospels show Jesus as having authority over his Church…but they also show him as the life of his Church, dwelling in her by his Spirit…The one Christ is both transcendent to his body the Church by his power and immanent by his life; the one body is both fellowship in the reconciled life of sonship and means, ministry or sacrament of that life (Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church, trans. Donald Attwater, rev. ed., Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1957, reprint Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, Inc., 1985, 167).

What this implies, for Congar, is that within the Church there is what might be described as “two authorities,”the one hierarchical and possessing power from above to structure the community, the other of life and unity flowing from the interior action of the Spirit in the life of God’s people (Ibid.See also 234, 246-47, 279-285, 290, 327-328). This highlights the “living organic reality of the total Church” in which authority is concretely expressed.“In life as it is lived, the hierarchical principle (determinant for structure) combines with the communal principle (which calls for all to be associated together according to their order) for a work which is the work not of the hierarchs but of the Church” (Ibid., 282).Essential to Congar in this vision of authority is that in the Church is found

an earthly order that follows the pattern that exists in God himself, in whom the Father is Principle, but he is not alone.The witness that God has raised up on the earth, the Church, is also many and one, a concord, literally a symphony.The fatherly and fertilizing voice of apostolic authority is echoed by the voice of the faithful people, in such a way that the second voice, while in exact agreement with the first, does not repeat it mechanically: it amplifies it, carries it further, enriches it and corroborates it (Ibid., 294).

Congar’s fundamental ecclesiological dialectic of structure and life becomes, in relationship to the question of authority, the dialectic of hierarchy and community or life. While the hierarchical principle of this dialectic, an essentially Christological principle, allows Congar to clearly articulate the nature of the Church as a given reality, the life principle, essentially pneumatological, enables Congar to give clear and consistent articulation to the dynamic, organic reality of the Church.Importantly, Congar’s methodological approach enabled him to give expression to the complex theological Tradition, allowing the various distinct aspects of this Tradition to interact in a dynamic whole, all in light of the rich, deeply profound reality of the mystery of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is the very essence of the Tradition.

It is important, here, to offer a note of clarification concerning the use of terms in regard to authority when speaking of ‘two authorities’ in the Church.“Auctoritas designates moral superiority, power founded in right, potestas, the public power of execution” (Congar, L’Église : de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne, 32-33).Authority is, then, the larger reality which, in the case of the Church, designates a spiritual authority possessed by ‘right’ by the individual within the community.This ‘right’ may be based in the office one holds (ex officio), such being the case for the hierarchical authority, or in the charisms or holiness of a person (ex spiritu), such being the case in the community or life principle of authority, though the two cannot always be precisely separated (Congar, Power and Poverty in the Church, 87. Congar, Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église, 190).Power in the Church, as such, designates the public authority to pronounce laws, define dogma, carry forth discipline.In this sense, power refers solely to the hierarchical principle of authority.There is no such public power of execution in the community principle of authority.This is well summarized by the biblical scholar Francis Martin.He says that while both the life principle and hierarchical principle

are endowed with authority in that they can affect the life and the direction of the church, the authority of office [hierarchical authority] adds to this the dimension of objectivity—office is transmitted through some form of human historical activity (Francis Martin, The Feminist Question:Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI:Eerdmans, 1994) 92).

Within the Church, then, there is present these two principles or aspects of authority which both flow from the auctoritas of God who is the ultimate auctor in the building up of the Church (Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 312).

The gospel for this feast of St. Mary Magdalene, John 20: 1-2, 11-18, offers us a glimpse into the very hinge of human history.

The hinge of human history?Really?Is this a case of hyperbole, a dramatic flair of overstatement?

I think not.Notice Mary over the course of the first part of this gospel.She is absorbed by death, the death of Jesus.Mary’s orientation given by the horizon of death leaves her cast down, consumed by sorrow and an anxious need to control the circumstances surrounding the burial of Jesus.She grasps and grabs for something tangible and certain.She cannot see straight or rightly through the horizon of death.

Suddenly, and this is the hinge of human history, Jesus risen from the dead breaks in upon her.As the ascending one reveals himself to her, the horizon is transformed.The horizon of death has been smashed to bits on the rising Son.

Since the first mysterious moments of humanity’s beginnings, in those moments marked by what we have come to call original sin, the original break with God, with life, human beings’ horizon has been that of death.Death has provided the last word, the final note, the dreadful conclusion to everything beautiful and not so beautiful.

Now, however, since the resurrection of the Son, the horizon is altogether different, transformed from death to life.Death is not the end, but a passing through.The symphony that is each human life has its final note in a sound that beautifully sings forth into eternity.

Concretely, this changes everything.No matter the darkness, doubt, desperation, defeat, failure of the moment, none of that is the horizon but only a stage on the journey toward the real horizon, the horizon of the rising Son.What is ultimate now is life.The present darkness and death as final is shattered.What stands in the end as real is eternal life.

No matter the place we stand at the moment and the time of day it might be in our life, let us set our eyes on the horizon and see the rising Son.

[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]

Historical evolution of a juridical understanding of ecclesial authority

Congar returns frequently to the period of the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century as deceive in the evolution of the Church’s ecclesiological self-articulation.He is absolutely

convinced that the reform begun by St. Leo IX (1049-54) and continued with such vigour by St. Gregory VII (1073-81) represents a decisive turning-point from the point of view of ecclesiological doctrines in general and of the notion of authority in particular (Yves Congar, “The Historical Development of Authority in the Church: Points for Christian Reflection,” in Problems of Authority, ed. John M. Todd, 119-56, Baltimore: The Helicon Press, 1962, 136).

The crisis faced in the Gregorian Reform was that of, primarily, the problems surrounding lay investiture; that is, ecclesiastical offices being conferred by secular rulers which often involved the demand for payment from the one being invested (simony) and implied allegiance to the secular ruler.

That this was indeed a crisis that desperately needed redress can be dramatically illustrated by the case of Henry IV, the German king who, in 1075, Gregory VII had forcefully forbidden to continue his practice of appointing high-ranking ecclesiastical offices.Yet, Henry continued on after as before, making appointments not only in distinctly German lands, but on the very doorstep of the pope, appointing bishops to the sees of Spoleto and Fermo in the very year of Gregory’s decree to cease the investitures.Most dramatically, Henry appointed, in this same period, two different men for the Archdiocese of Milan. This brought to three the claimants to the position, the pope himself having made his own appointment (Walter Ullman, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed, London: Routledge, 2003, 154).Clearly, this was a problem.

In addressing itself to the problem of lay investiture, however, there was a decisive turn in the way the Church came to conceive of its authority.Through the gathering of various juridical texts from papal and conciliar statements into an ordered compendium—and thus the birth of canon law—all of which favored the maximum degree of papal authority, the Church “was led to adopt very much the same attitudes as the temporal power itself, to conceive of itself as a society, as a power, when in reality it was a communion, with ministers and servants” (Yves Congar, Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar, ed. Bernard Lauret, trans. John Bowden, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988, 42).

This, of course, was not entirely new as Congar himself points out, and as already alluded to, in regards the matter of the Donation of Constantine.Congar says of this document that it is

one of the most harmful pieces of forgery known to history (and not merely to the history of Rome).It was a weapon…which betrayed the very cause of Rome, since by argument ad hominem, the Donatio in seeking to check an Emperor, presents the dignity of Peter and his successors and the privileges attached to that position as emanating from the political power of an Emperor and not from the Apostolic institution (Yves Congar, After Nine Hundred Years, New York:Fordham University Press, 1959, 15).

To be underscored here is the tendency for the Church’s hierarchical authority to establish its rights, its own proper authority on the bases of a secularly granted jurisdiction rather than on the particular nature of authority as is entrusted to it by Christ and witnessed to in the apostolic testimony.

Congar insists that it is precisely this tendency of the Church’s hierarchical authority, in view of “the need to shake off the tutelage, if not the domination, of the temporal power,” that came to dominate the entire medieval period of the Church (Yves Congar, Power and Poverty in the Church, trans. Jennifer Nicholson, Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1964, 105).As a matter of fact, Congar would insist that, “The whole medieval period is full of struggles between the priesthood and the empire—or the priesthood and the monarchies” (Congar, Fifty Year, 24).Clearly, such a struggle could not help but leave a deep, characteristic mark on the Church’s understanding and practice of authority.

This effort found within the Gregorian Reform to establish the independence of the Church from secular rule was not limited, however, to the simple gathering of juridical texts.There was a certain promotion of what Congar refers to as the mystique of authority.In this regard, Congar claims that the

effectiveness of his [Gregory VII’s] action results from his inspiration of a radical programme of reform of the structures and legal status of ecclesial life, by means of a simple, fervent and intransigent mysticism of the sovereignty of God, of which papal authority was the reflection and instrument (Yves Congar, “Renewal of the Spirit and Reform of the Institution,” trans. John Griffiths, in Ongoing Reform of the Church, ed. Alois Muller and Norbert Greinacher, 39-49, New York: Herder and Herder, 1972, 43).

This ‘mystique’ of authority served as a powerful vision for the link between God and the pope, which strengthened the papal claim to universal authority over the Church.Significantly, connected to this ‘mystical’ vision of authority was the tendency to exalt “obedience as the virtue of the good Catholic” (Yves Congar, Laity, Church and World, trans. Donald Attwater, Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1960, 32).

Congar identifies another central movement within the life of the Church that is of great significance; that is, the various movements of critique against these growing claims of authority.These are the various anti-ecclesiastical movements—such as the Cathars, the Petrobusians, and the Lollards—beginning from the twelfth century, which rose up against this encroaching legalism within the Church.“Although these movements are very different from each other,” they do share a fundamental orientation (Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit, trans. David Smith, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986, 48).

Their common denominator indeed consists in protesting against an excessive development of clerical authority and an absolutization of its legal or formal reality, in the name of certain requirements of an evangelical content and of a truly spiritual end (Yves Congar, Ministères et communion ecclésiale, Paris :Cerf, 1971, 83).

These movements continued in various forms right up to the eve of the Reformation. The fact that these movements, or initiatives, have often, in Congar’s mind, been minimized by the hierarchy in their significance and the ability they possess to affect the life of the Church significantly contributed to the climate that led to the success of the Reformation (Congar, The Word and the Spirit, 48).

From crisis to crisis, from abortive reform to abortive reform on the part of the Church, from cultural advance to cultural advance, from demand for independence to demand for independence on the part of laity and sovereigns—and eventually the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was reached (Congar, Laity, Church and World, 53).

By denying the place of the Church and its mediatorial role in the relationship between God and persons, and placing all criterion of truth on the object of Scripture, the Reformers were led to “the necessity of placing in the personal, or even individual, religious subject, all the elements of this spiritual relationship.” The denial of a “hierarchic priestly title and a hierarchic teaching authority” led the reformers to their strong insistence on “the priesthood of each and every one and the personal interpretation of Scripture under the interior and personal influence of the Holy Spirit” (Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 142).

Though the Council of Trent was able to hold in balance the authority of the Church and Sacred Scripture, the period of the Catholic Counter-Reformation nonetheless witnessed an increasing emphasis on the Church’s hierarchical authority (Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 157). The Catholic response, then, to the Reformation’s denial of hierarchical authority and its mediating role—a response that dominated its pastoral and theological efforts into the twentieth century—was to reassert its authority, emphasizing “the aspects of the hierarchy” and ending “up seeing the Church as practically nothing more than a society in which some commanded and the rest obeyed” (Congar, Power and Poverty, 109).This trend was only furthered in the climate of “the absolutist and centralistic ideas which characterized monarchical power in the sixteenth century” and which resurfaced again in the nineteenth century “with the haunting memory” of the French Revolution (Congar, “Renewal of the Spirit and Reform of the Institution,” 42).

The reduction of the Church to its structural aspects is witnessed to most forcefully in the classic definition of the Church of Robert Bellarmine.

The one and true Church is the community of men brought together by the profession of the same Christian faith and conjoined in the communion of the same sacraments, under the government of the legitimate pastors and especially the one vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman pontiff (Robert Bellarmine, De controversiis, tom. 2, liber 3, De ecclesia militante. cap. 2, “De definitione Ecclesiae,” Vol. 2, Naples: Giuliano, 1857, 75; trans. and quoted by Avery Dulles in Models of the Church, expanded ed., New York: Doubleday, 2002, 8).

What is to be noted here is that the Church is defined exclusively by external acts:profession of faith, participation in sacramental rites, and, most decisively, submission to the hierarchical authority of the Roman Church.The absence within the definition of the need for a living, interiorly assimilated faith lived in charity is striking.Indeed, Bellarmine goes on to say that in belonging to the true Church “no interior virtue is required, but only exterior profession of faith and communion in the sacraments, things accessible to our senses” (Ibid).Clearly, the Church is here reduced to its external structure and, in the context of the antagonism toward Protestants, “the influence of Bellarmine was immense and lasting, felt up to the First Vatican Council” precisely in this direction of emphasis on the exterior elements of the Church to the neglect of its interior life (Congar, L’Église : de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne, 374).

It is worthy of note that this same tendency can be seen, as the German theologian Hermann Pottmeyer points out, during the course of the nineteenth century when the Church adopts the language of sovereignty in relation to papal authority by way of analogy with the claims being put forth in the course of the development of the modern nation states (See chapter four of Hermann J. Pottmeyer, Towards a Papacy in Communion:Perspectives from Vatican Councils I & II, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, New York:Crossroads, 1998).

[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]

There is a rather striking, and pointed, observation recorded by Père Yves Congar in his recently published Mon journal du Concile.The observation was occasioned when someone approached him with the possibility that Pope John XXIII would beatify Pope Pius IX, intending to show in this way the integral connection between the two Vatican Councils.Congar used the occasion to comment in his journal on Pius IX’s response to the fall of the Papal States to Italian unification in 1870 in which, according to Congar, he “was invited by the events to leave the awful lie of the ‘Donation of Constantine’ and to come finally to adopt an evangelical attitude, [but] he perceived nothing of this call and, rather, drove the Church in its claim to temporal power” (Congar, Mon journal du Concile, vol. 1 (Paris: Cerf, 2002) 115).

This characteristically forth right comment, recorded in the early stages of the Second Vatican Council, is significant not so much in what it says of Pope Pius IX as what it reveals of the mind of the French Dominican.Indeed, the whole trajectory of Congar’s work as a theologian might be viewed through his desire to move the Church’s self-understanding and self-presentation—including how it conceives its authority—from what had often been reduced to a purely secular and juridical conception to one that is transparently evangelical.This is powerfully testified to early in his life as a priest in the striking prayer he wrote on a visit he made shortly after ordination in 1930 to the chief places connected to Martin Luther and the Protestant reformation.

My God, why does your Church always condemn?True, she must above all guard the “deposit of faith”; but is there no other means than condemnation, especially condemning so quickly? ...My God, you know how I love your Church; but I see clearly that only concerted action has force:I know that your admirable Church once played an immense and splendid part in civil affairs and in the whole of human life and that now she plays hardly any part at all.My God, if only your Church were more encouraging, more comprehensive; all the same! …My God, there is so much work; give us leaders, give me the soul of a leader.The union of Churches!My God why has your Church, which is holy and is one, unique, holy and true, why has she so often such an austere and forbidding face when in reality she is full of youth and life? (Congar, Dialogue Between Christians, trans. Philip Loretz (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1966) 5-7, footnote 5).

That this orientation runs through the theological career of Congar, maintaining itself as a motivating force in his thought through the decades, is testified to by a journal entry he made on November 24, 1962.“My God, who made me understand since 1929-30 that if the church would change her face, if she would simply take on her true face, if she would simply be the church, all would become possible on the path to unity” (Congar, Mon journal du Council, vol. 1, 257).

In Matthew 8:28-34 we read of two demoniacs who are “so savage that no one could travel by that road.”After their encounter with Jesus liberates them from the tormenting demons, “the whole town came out to meet Jesus.”

From a total lack of personal engagement, emptiness brought about by fear and terror, to an enthusiastic gathering almost in celebration.

Evil is here depicted as the destruction of authentic human relationship.The work of Christ is a work of overcoming those forces that seek to destroy human relationship and the healing of the human community.

In our world today, troubled by war and terror, can there be any doubt that we still look to the saving work of Christ to confront and drive out the evil in human hearts and social structures.It is the Holy Spirit abiding in the lives of the disciples of Jesus that carries this work into our world today.In the power of the Spirit of Jesus, we who call ourselves friends of Christ, must still powerfully address fear causing demons of savage hatred and tormenting terror.

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 10:7).

This is the message every disciple of Christ, in every age, is meant to carry into the world, to every person encountered.

‘Kingdom’ here does not refer to a place.Rather, it is the announcement of God’s active relationship with the world, presently bringing the world to life, healing, reconciliation and fruitfulness.The kingdom is God’s reigning presence acting through the lives of Christ’s disciples and pulsating through the energies of the universe.

This announcement is the antithesis to the modern scientific ideology (notice, I do not say the antithesis to science).Scientific ideology declares that the world rules itself, all the world’s energy and movement is internally explainable, discoverable within the system closed in on itself.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand.The system, our world, is not closed to God.God is actively involved in the whole of the created order, overcoming forces of destruction, violence, and hatred, bringing life and communion.The kingdom of heaven is at hand.God is alive.God is present to us.God can be trusted to give life, even life out of our brokenness and death.

This passage we are prayerfully pondering this afternoon falls within a context of St. Matthew’s record of Jesus’ powerful deeds of healing and exorcising demons.Jesus’ power attracts would be disciples.People are drawn to the miracle man.

What draws me to Jesus?What about Jesus’ words and deeds make me want to follow him more closely?

Notice the honesty and transparency of Jesus.He is upfront and always clear about the demands of discipleship.Jesus never coerces or manipulates us into following him.He is clear that the choice to follow him demands a willingness to follow him on his path of downward mobility.

What have I had to set aside in order to follow Jesus more closely?What might Jesus be asking me to set aside now?

“Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”With these words, Jesus sets himself above the Torah, the law of God to Israel through Moses, the great prophet.“Honor your father and mother.”A sacred expression of this law is the demand to stand with one’s parents to their death and to bury them religiously.We encounter here one greater than Moses.Faithfulness to Jesus calls us to put our faith in him above even our families.

Does Jesus occupy the first place in my life?Is he more important to me than even my family?

The disciple follows Jesus onto the boat.Here the boat is an image of the Church.Again, we are given a realistic view of life with Christ in the Church.The Church, this bark of Peter, will be tossed about at times by storms, even violent storms.Jesus, though, sleeps as the sea rages, so profound is his confidence in the providential care of his Father.Jesus reveals to his disciples that he has power over the elements of the cosmos, the forces of evil, all that seeks to capsize the little flock, the Church.“Lord, save us!”“…and there was great calm.”

Consider the violent storms that rage against the Church today.Do I have confidence in the power of Christ to bring the Church through the storm?Where is the violent tumult in my personal, my family life?Can I cry out in faith, “Lord, save us!”

Having immersed ourselves for fifty days in the mystery of the resurrection and contemplating over the last three weeks the mysteries of Pentecost, Trinity and Eucharist, we now return fully to what the Church calls Ordinary Time.Doing so, we find ourselves again taking our gospel lead from St. Luke.

It should come as no surprise that in joining up with Jesus again in Luke’s gospel, we find him at a dinner party.In some sense, one could outline the whole of Luke’s gospel simply by connecting the stories of Jesus moving from one dinner party to another.

These meals that Jesus shares in are always, in one way or another, marked by the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation.In the ancient, Jewish world of Jesus, to share food was to share life, to become family.

I am, however, particularly struck by Luke’s description of those who share Jesus’ company as he goes from place to place preaching and healing.There are the Twelve and then this group of women, whose lives, Luke is very direct about pointing out, have all been touched by evil spirits or infirmities.The companions of Jesus are the broken and bedraggled of this world.

This gets me to thinking.Remember the traditional, four marks of the Church found in the Apostles Creed?“I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”Specifically, I am reflecting on this mark of holiness.Of course the Church is holy, because God enfolds it, and God is holy.Still, calling the Church holy has sometimes confused matters.The Church, like that band of women and men following after Christ, is the gathering of the broken, burdened and bedraggled of humanity.Wherever the Church is authentically gathered, you will encounter the emotionally disturbed, morally shamed, physically vulnerable.The Church is not the gathering of the perfect and pure.The Church is the gathering of the perturbed and perplexed.

Of course, there is a reason why wounded humanity is drawn to Jesus in the Church.The Church is that place where the broken find compassion and love.The Church is that place where moral failures find hope for forgiveness and reconciliation.

And this brings us to the power of Christ, the power of the Church in Christ.The power of Christ is compassion, love, and forgiveness.This compassion is what heals the broken hearted and restores their capacity for love, to live extravagant generosity.

Where have I encountered the compassion of Christ meeting me in my failure and shame?Where do I long for that compassion today?

How has my life become a reflection of Christ’s compassion to those I encounter?

And those who enter into our community, perhaps without really knowing Christ, do they experience in us the compassionate face of Christ?

The gospel for this Feast of Pentecost places us back “on the evening of the first day of the week” (Jn 20: 19).In truth, since the resurrection of Christ, Christians never really leave the ‘first day of the week’, the day of resurrection, the day of re-creation, the Eternal Day.John’s gospel makes it clear that Easter Day is Pentecost Day, Jesus’ resurrection is our day of resurrection.

On that evening of the first Easter, “Jesus came and stood in their midst” and said to them, “‘Peace be with you’…he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the holy Spirit’” (vv. 19, 21).Pentecost!

Because Easter is at the same time Pentecost, Easter is the eternal day, for “the Spirit is ‘freed into’ the world precisely from Easter onwards” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 190).Jesus, the Living One, who is now beyond all time by the resurrection, ‘breaths’ for all time his Holy Spirit into time, bringing shape to the very contours of history.

Christians touch this reality most explicitly, of course, in the Eucharistic Liturgy.There, in the Mass, our epiclesis, our prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit meets the already breathing forth by our Lord of the Spirit and we are ‘born again’ into the very Body of Christ.From the Mass we are sent forth, as Jesus was sent forth from the Father and as the Spirit was sent forth from the Father and the Son, to communicate the new life of Jesus’ resurrection to all the world (cf. Jn 20:21).

There is an ancient Syrian Eucharistic Prayer that contains this epiclesis, this prayer for the Spirit, in such a powerful way.“Have mercy upon us, God the Father almighty, and send upon us and upon these gifts…thine Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, who shareth thy throne, God and Father, and shareth the kingdom with the Son, who is of one substance and coeternal, who spoke in the law and the prophets and thy new testament, who descended in the likeness of a dove, upon our Lord Jesus Christ in the river Jordan, who descended upon thy holy apostles in the likeness of fiery tongues…that coming down he may make of this bread the life-giving body…of our Lord, for the confirmation of thy holy church…delivering it from all heresy” (Quoted in Kilian McDonnell, The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, 40, n. 45).

The early Church recognized, and would say, that when we receive the Holy Eucharist in communion, we receive “Fire.”To receive Holy Communion is to receive simultaneously the living body of our Lord Jesus and his Holy Spirit.Holy Communion is, clearly, our immersion into the Holy Communion of the Divine Trinity.It is to be drawn into eternal life by being made participants in the very life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; all the while remaining fully immersed in this world of time as persons sent to communicate this divine life to our world of history awaiting its full re-birth.

And so, ‘How is one who has grown old to be born again?How does one share the resurrection of Jesus Christ?’The epiclesis, the pray of intense longing at the center of our beings to know the eternal life and love of God, is meet by the resurrection of Jesus, the breaking forth from death into our own death of sin, that breaths forth and frees the eternal Spirit, source of eternal life from the Father, bringing us to new birth.

From Easter, from Pentecost on, the Spirit permeates the very fabric of creation, as living water, and arises from the center of the cosmos—having been instilled there when the earth was pierced through by the cross of our Lord—gently persuading all created reality with the vibrations of the voice of the Good Shepherd, to, “Come to the Father…Come to the Father…Come to the Father.”Indeed, as Fr. Yves Congar so beautifully puts it, the Spirit is the “Breath of return to the Father.” (“Renouveau charismatique et théologie du Saint-Esprit,” 737)

In order to summarize and draw together all that we have reflected on during these days of Lent and Easter, yesterday we ‘set up’, you might say, the scaffolding by which God constructs and maintains his people in faith, making of them the Temple of the Holy Spirit.By means of Word and Sacrament God communicates and makes effective in our lives his plan, hidden from all eternity, now revealed in Jesus Christ, to reconcile all things to himself in a communion of love and life.

Scaffolding is put in place, however, as a means for workers to get close to the place that needs repair with the tools needed to accomplish that work in a particular place of a building or monument.Just so, the Word and Sacraments are God’s means by which he draws closes enough to us to do the work in each particular heart that needs to be done.In other words, there are tools, spiritual practices, by which we allow God to make effective in our personal lives the objective action of God unfolded for us in Word and Sacraments.

We have spoken much of these tools.The first, and absolutely essential element of the Christian life, is repentance of sin.Better yet, it is to live a life of reconciliation and forgiveness.The Sacrament of Reconciliation, certainly, but daily, in prayer, bringing our brokenness, failings, anxieties and fears to the Lord.Acknowledging, as difficult as it can be, our failures to those we live in relationship with.Yes, asking for forgiveness.And, further, a relentless letting go, through forgiveness, of the hurts and occasions to feel offended that come our way, seemingly, daily.To live the Christian life “is to enter in the dynamism of a reconciliation which wishes to be put into action continually…Communion is not the same as a gathering together of friends…It is a coming together in Christ of men and women who have been reconciled.It is communion in the victory over hatred…This victory is achieved by the Cross of Christ” (Tillard, Church of Churches, 48).

Word and Sacrament establish the structure of a relationship between us and the Living God.The spiritual life is nothing if not this relationship of intimate friendship.Friendship is marked, in turn, by conversation and presence.In short, the spiritual life absolutely demands daily time spent with the Father in prayer.We can not afford to kid ourselves on this one:if we are not praying, then we are not putting ourselves in a place to be transformed by the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.In prayer, where we reflect on the Sacred Scripture, we learn to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd who leads us to fields and streams of abundant life.

Another tool of the Christian life has been highlighted throughout this Easter season by our readings from the Acts of the Apostles.When someone hears the word, is moved to baptism, the next, intrinsically necessary step is entrance into the company of disciples.The spiritual life, our life in relationship with God the Father, depends so much on spiritual friendships.It needs people who are examples of faith, who encourage us to pray, who challenge us to move deeper, who are there to pick us up when we fall.

Finally, a disciple of Jesus is one who is marked by the ‘movement of gift’ which is the movement of Jesus’ gift in love on the cross to the Father for us.To grow spiritually we need to challenge ourselves in generosity, finding ways to offer our lives in service and care to the people close to us and, just as essentially, to those we might prefer to avoid.

And again, our Easter question:“How can one, once old, be born again?How does one share in the resurrected life of Jesus?”

To be born again is to be born, not of flesh and blood and not by simply willing it, but from above, received as gift.Concretely, new life in Christ comes in receiving his life poured out abundantly in Word and Sacrament.This Word and Sacrament, gift of knowledge of and participation in the very life of God, is made alive and active for us in the practice of daily forgiveness, prayer and learning to hear Jesus’ voice in Sacred Scripture, supported by fellow disciples, and the expansion of our hearts by acts of generosity.

From the midst of all these ‘tools’ of the spiritual life, necessarily, arises the epiclesis—our prayer of intimate longing for the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit who brings all things to life in Jesus Christ on the way to the Father!

Visitors to the Eternal City, to Rome, will always encounter at least one disappointment.While moving about the city, they will eventually come to one of the great monuments, works of art, or Churches that they had looked forward to seeing and find that it is completely obstructed by scaffolding.It is simply inevitable.It is, too, something understandable since these great structures are hundreds of years old and dwell in a large city with pollution. They simply demand periodic cleaning and maintenance.

As we move toward the end of this Easter Season, I would like to invite us to look back on all we have reflected on these past weeks and highlight from it those elements that make up the scaffolding and tools of the spiritual life.In Christ we have, after all, been made into the Temple of the Holy Spirit from where the worship of the Father flows forth.This Temple, too, demands consistent cleansing and maintenance.

First, to speak of the scaffolding, or those aspects of our life of faith that provide the ‘structure’ for building and maintaining the spiritual house of God.(Tomorrow we will reflect on the ‘tools’ needed for this maintenance.) We have seen, many times, how the very heart of Christianity is the reality of faith.We have come to understand that faith is the revelation, the free self-disclosure by God of the ‘mystery’ concerning God’s plan for human beings and the whole cosmos, that plan hidden from all eternity in the heart of God, now revealed to us in Jesus Christ.The content of faith is the self-communication of God the Father through Jesus by the action of the Holy Spirit to us human beings.Faith becomes for us, then, a way of seeing, understanding, and living in the truth of how things ‘really are’ and how they ‘will come to be’ fully realized in the Second Coming of Jesus.All events, personal and global, come to be viewed in the light of this knowledge of faith which is God’s saving action to draw all things into a communion, a relationship of love which is the true foundation of all that is.

To say that faith is the self-disclosure of God, and this is central, is to say that it comes from another, the Divine Other, and is not something to be found within ourselves.It is not given by ‘flesh and blood’ but by our ‘heavenly Father’ (cf. Mt 16:17).As we have seen, the Father communicates this concretely in time through, first, the prophets and, then, finally ‘in the fullness of time’ in his Son, Jesus Christ.This revelation travels the course of time, to us today, by the action of the Holy Spirit.And yet, as all of God’s self-disclosure reveals, this is not done in some disembodied, merely spiritual way.The Holy Spirit acts in the very concrete realities of Word and Sacrament to communicate to us the saving plan of God and to make that plan effective in our lives today.

And in these two realities—Word and Sacrament—we have the ‘scaffolding’ for the building and maintenance of the structure of our spiritual lives, the Temple of the Holy Spirit.The Word, we know, is not a book but a person, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.This living Word, the person of Jesus Christ, touches us through Sacred Scripture and Tradition.Scripture and Tradition are carried, and this is how we encounter them as Living, in the Church by a ‘cascade of missions’ from Jesus to the apostles to the bishops to the whole People of God.The Sacraments are those signs, respecting our human nature, through which we see, hear, and touch the spiritual reality of Jesus Christ drawing us into the saving plan of God by the action of the Holy Spirit.

Our Easter question, you remember well, has been ‘How can a person, once old, be born again?How can we share in the resurrected life of Jesus Christ?”We are born again and sustained in that new birth, first and foremost, by the living faith communicated to us in Word and Sacrament.Here we see that the Church truly is our ‘Mother’, giving us the life we can not create for ourselves.Bringing us to life in the plan of God, by knowledge of (Word) and participation in (Sacrament) the divine life of the One Divine Communion, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Today we are encouraged by the gospel (Jn. 17:20-26) to reflect on ‘foundations.’“Father, they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (v. 24).

Throughout the course of these past weeks we have seen this over and over again.The absolute heart of the gospel, all that Jesus sought to entrust to his disciples, is found in the Name he gave to them, that name Father, which is not the name of an ‘individual god’ but the name of God who is person, which is to say God who lives in relationship of eternal love as Father of his Son.

This is the very foundation of all that is.It is the foundation of the cosmos, the earthly order, human existence, and our personal existence.It is the foundation because it existed ‘before the foundation of the world,’ time before time, in the eternal day.

My friends, this is simply too precious, too beautiful to be fuzzy about.The foundation, and therefore at the same time the key to all that is, is this relationship of love between Father and Son.The foundation, then, is the very life of the eternal and blessed Trinity.

As Christians we proclaim faith in One God.And yet, this One God is, we proclaim, Three Persons.The Father is God.The Son is God.The Holy Spirit is God.Yet, be careful, there are not three gods.How is it at all possible to maintain this faith in Oneness while at the same time claiming a trinity of persons?It is possible, because the Three dwell in One perfect relationship of love.They dwell in the One relationship.The Father is absolutely poured out, from all eternity, in the Son and the Holy Spirit and therefore exists absolutely in the Son and the Holy Spirit.The Son, absolutely poured out into the Father and the Spirit.The Spirit poured out absolutely into the Father and the Son.

This being poured out is the nature of love.And so to speak of Three Persons in One God is to speak of God, absolutely One, as nothing but Love Eternally.

So the foundation of the world is God and God is nothing other then Eternal Love.This is why the foundation of our lives as Christians is nothing other then love.Concretely, in a world broken because of its refusal to love, it makes the foundation of our lives forgiveness.Forgiveness is the concrete expression that love takes in a broken world.All the obstacles put in my life between me and another, put there by my own failures or the failures of the other, separates me from the foundation, and separated from the foundation the whole structure comes tumbling down.

Our weeks of Lent and Easter have moved along within a period of history marked by the incredible anguish of a world separated from its foundation, threatening to come tumbling down.All the ugliness that is taking place in Iraq these days is only the largest and most obvious example.When will the world come to know its true foundation?When will the world discover that life is never, ever found in ‘getting even’, ‘exacting revenge’, and certainly not in ‘preemptive strikes’?

Here we are again!The epiclesis must rise up from within us, that pray for the Holy Spirit who builds, one heart at a time, the foundation that places the world in order.The prayer that arises from within the disciple, from within the heart of the Church, especially in her Eucharistic Liturgy, that we might at last be placed in communion with the Love that is the foundation of all that is, the Love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, eternally a communion of One.The epiclesis opens out to the Holy Spirit and places us ‘where Jesus is’, in the midst of this communion of love with the Father.

The French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, would claim that throughout Christian tradition two essential ‘principles’ show themselves over and over again.They are the principle of purity and the principle of plentitude, both of which show themselves so powerfully in today’s reading from Acts (20:28-38).

As Paul prepares to depart the area of Ephesus, he calls together all the leaders of the nascent community.He instructs them:“Keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock of which the holy Spirit has appointed you overseers…So be vigilant and remember that for three years, night and day, I unceasingly admonished each of you with tears” (vv.28, 31).Here we see that for three years St. Paul carefully taught the disciples of Christ in the ways of the Lord.Now, after him, the leaders of the community must continue this work of teaching and protecting the seeds of faith within the People of God.Within this is seen that ‘principle of purity’ that exists, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, in the Church.That principle by with the teachings and ways of our Lord Jesus Christ are honored, guarded, and lived.This principle highlights the treasure, the beauty, the preciousness of the faith we have received and instills deeply within the heart of the Church the desire to ‘add nothing to it and subtract nothing from it.’It is, in other words, the Holy Spirit speaking always to the Church to hold fast to Jesus and let nothing come between us and the purity of the simple truth proclaimed and enacted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus our Lord.

Still, there is a second principle, that of plentitude, inherent in gospel living.It is more subtly present in this reading—though it dominates in other ways the whole book of Acts.Why all the tears of the Christians and admonishments from Paul in this reading?They are there because Paul is, after three years, leaving them in order to proclaim the gospel elsewhere.In the simple phrase, “Then they escorted him to the ship” (v. 38), is found this principle of plentitude.The gospel simply must always move out further and penetrate the world more deeply.This principle of plentitude exists in the heart of the Church from which the Holy Spirit ever pushes the disciples of Jesus to move forward with the gospel.It is the reality in the Church that proclaims to us that the gospel of Jesus must be applied to the entirety of our personal lives and is directed at the whole of the world.The gospel of Jesus is a ‘plentitude’, it contains the fullness of all the human heart longs for and everything the world needs to know its fulfillment. The Church can never say, nor the individual Christian, ‘there now, we have done enough with that.’ The gospel simply demands always being allowed to move toward its plentitude, its fullness in all aspects of life and the world.

How do I know that the Living Lord Jesus is living indeed in me?He is living in me because there is within these two movements of the Spirit that always act to keep me tenaciously close to Jesus, ever attentive to his word, his voice in my life and that pushes me, from within, to apply his teaching to every aspect of my life and to always share Jesus with the people around me.The Spirit will always move the Christian and the Church to remain pure in the gospel, which is to say in its eagerness to cling to Jesus.The Spirit, too, will always move the Christian and the Church to a plentitude of faith, which is to say an insistence on seeing all things in the light of Jesus and in bringing Jesus to all things.

I wonder, has our Easter journey made us more conscious of the precious gift that it is to be called a disciple of Jesus (the purity principle)?Has it made us, also, more anxiously concerned about bringing the life with Jesus into all aspects of our lives (the plentitude principle)?

The readings put before us for these last few days remaining before Easterand the celebration of Pentecost this Sunday are distinct.Through Thursday the gospel is taken from John 17, known as the “High Priestly Prayer” of Christ.The Acts moves along with St. Paul rather quickly now to its culmination in Rome, the ‘ends of the earth.’

Today, I would like us to reflect on this prayer Jesus offers for his disciples and ‘all who will believe in [him] because of their word” (v. 20).Let us situate ourselves in order to dwell in the sacredness of these words offered by our Lord to his heavenly Father.Jesus has just now completed his ‘farewell discourse’.The discourse itself, of course, is the culmination of his three years of ministry, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan by John, the calling of the apostles, the first miracle at the Wedding Feast in Cana and the preaching, teaching and works of wonders that followed.He is now on the threshold of the act of love in which he will offer his life in complete fidelity to his Father on the cross of Calvary.He has entrusted everything to his disciples.He has revealed his heart.He has pointed them to the promised Spirit who will ‘seal’ in the very depths of their spirits all that which he has done with them and taught them.And now, in this prayer to the Father, he ‘gathers them up’—and all of us who have come to believe because of their word—and places them into the sovereign hands of God.

At the heart of Jesus’ prayer is the desire that his Father might ‘consecrate his disciples in the truth’ (cf. v. 17). He reminds the Father that he has given to them the Father’s very own word (cf. v. 14).“Your word is truth” (v. 17b).But what is the word?What is the word containing Truth that Jesus has so carefully given over to us, his disciples?Stop a moment. Ask yourself, “What is the word, the Truth that Jesus has given me, has given his People?”We have walked together with Jesus and his disciples now through the 40 days of Lent and nearly all of these 50 days of Easter.What is the word that Jesus desires the Father to consecrate us in?

Jesus says, in verse six, “I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world.”Then in verse eleven he says, “Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one.”Finally, the ultimate request, offered in the last verse of this chapter 17, “I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.”

There it is!The word that is truth!It is none other then the name by which Jesus addresses God and has taught us to address him with—my Father, our Father.This name which is not the name of an ‘individual’ but of a relationship.There is no ‘father’ if there is no ‘son’.To be ‘father’ is to be in relationship with another whom is your ‘son’, your ‘child’.The truth, and this we have already said several times, is that precious and tender name, Father.But the name opens up, by the very nature of the name, to the relationship that exists from all eternity at the very heart of God—the relationship of love between Father and Son.To know this name, to have this name revealed to us is to share, to participate in this very love.It is to be made child before our eternal Father.It is, in other words, to be ‘born again.’To have received the ‘name’ is to receive a new identity, an entirely new structure of relationships—introduced into the eternal relationship of the Trinity and the relationships of brothers and sisters of the baptized—it is to have been given new life.

“And I consecrated myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in the truth” (v. 18).The consecration which Jesus makes by offering himself on the cross is the consecration in this truth which is precisely the purpose, the very end for which the Holy Spirit is poured out upon us in baptism and confirmation.To seal within the depths of our hearts that we are no longer strangers, no longer solitary individuals, no longer ‘ragamuffins and misfits.’ The Holy Spirit consecrates, seals in the very core of our spirits that we are in fact children of God, brothers and sisters of all the baptized, members of the family of God, participants in the relation of love that is the Son’s and the Father’s from all eternity.

Jesus assures his disciples, “I have told you this so that you might have peace in me.In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world” (Jn 16: 33).

It would be altogether ridicules to ask whether or not these words, as recorded by St. John, are the ‘historical words’ of Jesus.Clearly, they are the words of the Risen, Living Lord Jesus Christ.They are words addressed to the disciples, addressed to John’s community, addressed to us today, by Jesus himself, from his place as Lord at the right hand of the Father.

This affords us the opportunity to reflect a bit further on the Ascension reality that Jesus is Lord.This phrase, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ is the most precise and earliest of Christian creedal statements.It is, in other words, the most ancient Christian statement of belief.Those who encountered Jesus Christ in the preaching and breaking of the bread encountered the one who had ‘conquered the world’ and now draws all things to life.This short phrase, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ brings expression to the essence of the experience people who encountered Jesus in the preaching of the apostles had.

I recall sitting with a young couple preparing them for marriage.At some point in our discussion, they informed me that they had ‘reserved’ a time in a park somewhere to have the wedding.Now this was a problem.It was because Catholic weddings are held in a Church, not a park.Catholics get married in a Church because their marriage is not viewed as simply a ‘private thing’, between themselves and their family and friends.It is, rather, an ecclesial, a Church ‘thing’ and their marriage is to be a sacramental sign of God’s covenantial love for his People.When I informed this couple, a really faithful and generous young couple, of this fact, they were not just a little disappointed.And they wondered, out loud to me, how can the Church ‘tell them where to have their wedding.’I attempted to explain it to them by going back to the fundamental reality of our Christian existence.I asked if they recalled our Baptismal promises.“Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?”“Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit…?”Of course they recalled all that and certainly they responded with a yes to each of these baptismal questions.I then asked them what the implications might be that we affirm that Jesus is Lord.

It is a good question.That word, Lord, is not a small word.It is a word, as a matter of fact, containing a relational implication most modern Americans are not altogether comfortable with, I would bet.To say someone is Lord is to say some others are in submission to this ‘Lord’.Of course, most of us prize very much our autonomy.To have a ‘Lord’, however, implies that we are not autonomous in relation to this other.That this other, who is Lord, can command and direct our lives.The one who is Lord can say, “Go here,” and we go; or, “Do this,” and we do it.It is an altogether ‘weighty’ word with immense implications.

You see, the phrase ‘Jesus is Lord’ is what the biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson calls a “performative statement” which means that it is “a statement that finds its sense not only as a declaration about reality but as a declaration concerning how the speaker really lives” (Living Jesus:Learning the Heart of the Gospel, 5-6).To say, then, that Jesus is Lord is to say that I have submitted my life to his teaching, his way, his living voice directing my life.It is to say, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

I went on to speak to that young couple about Jesus’ living presence in the Church, how he continues to speak and direct the lives of his disciples and he does so most explicitly through the Church.So, if the Church asks you to have your wedding in a Church building, and this impinges on your freedom to have it where you might want, it ought not come as such a big surprise.If Jesus is Lord, then there will be times that my freedom and my desire must give way to his command.The case of where they would hold their wedding was an expression in their lives at that moment, most concretely, that Jesus is Lord and that they have in fact placed themselves under his authority.

I wonder, where do we encounter the Lordship of Jesus over our personal lives?If Jesus is Lord of our lives it is to be expected that at times his directing of my life will impinge on the direction I would want to go.Where has that happened in my life?How has my faith statement, Jesus is Lord, effected the way I really live my life?

I want to make an attempt at getting at the reality of epiclesis—the prayer of the Christian and of the Church for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit—that we looked at yesterday as a ‘theological’ reality.I want to move from the ‘theological’ to the ‘existential’, the concrete experience of this prayer in the life of the disciple.

I am doing this, to be honest, because it is forced upon me at this very moment quite existentially.That is to say, the question of being transformed into the Body of Christ, and thus sharing in his life over death, has pressed in upon me.A couple of days ago, an emotional cloud descended around me.This cloud does not have the ominous darkness of a giant, summertime thunderstorm.Rather, it is more like the hanging clouds, of the not quite able to rain sort, of mid-Autumn, more gray than black.Such moments of emotional ‘grayness’, depression, are not all that unusual for me.There is a sort of ebb and flow to it, I would say.It comes, for no apparent reason, stays for a bit, and then departs, again for no apparent reason.Now, I have no desire to over spiritualize the reality of my, or anyone else’s, depression.Certainly, it could be something physiological.It could be, too, something emotional and psychological.And for all that I might be helped by medication or counseling.

That all being true enough, it still behooves me, as a disciple of Jesus, to pierce deeper still, without neglecting the other possibilities.And so that is what I have been trying to do these past couple of days.I have been thinking about the truth of Easter and the coming Feast of Pentecost under the veil of this darn depression.Thinking, specifically, about the Holy Spirit communicating the fruits of the Resurrection of Christ to me in baptism and confirmation, daily in Eucharist.I know well what those fruits of the Spirit are, they are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23).Yes, I know them.But at the moment I do not ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ them.

And another passage of St. Paul came to mind.“We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 22-23).

Indeed, I have known, even at this moment can draw to mind, those ‘firstfruits of the Spirit.’They are indeed real and true.And yet, they are only firstfruits—and this emotional ebb reminds me of that.And in this, my friends, there is something deeply significant contained about that epiclesis thing we have spoken of.The depression does create sighs coming from within me, a weighted sluggishness that demands to be pushed against as I attempt to get from one thing to another.But in this, St. Paul’s insight about prayer tells me, there is a prayer to be prayed.Somehow, the sigh, the groan of grey emotions—or maybe it is for someone else anxiety, frustration, anger, fear, battle with temptation, whatever—can be the very prayer crying out, groaning within, “Come, Holy Spirit.Come at last to restore me in joy, healing, reconciliation, peace.Come, Holy Spirit and communicate the life of Jesus to me, to our world.”

This Feast of the Ascension is, essentially, about the Lordship of Jesus.Jesus once condemned to death as a criminal has been vindicated, he lives, and is at the right hand of the Father.He who was dead is alive.His triumph, by his ascension to the Father’s right hand, is the victory that rules the world.From his throne in heaven, Jesus the Lord breaths forth the Spirit, communicating his triumphant life to me, to the Church, and indeed to all creation.

But Jesus does not reign, in me or in the world, by force.He awaits our free submission.We make a place for Jesus the Lord renewing all of creation by our epiclesis, by our opening out in prayer for the Holy Spirit.This we must do even from the midst of sighs—and sometimes most powerfully precisely from such sighs—that come forth from hearts still not fully healed, bodies yet to be made fully alive, relationships still awaiting full restoration.

You see my friends, and now I know I am getting too long here, this life of discipleship can not simply be about pious platitudes and pie-in-the-sky theology.It must reach right down there into our guts.That place sometimes in turmoil, other times dark, at moments just dull.From that place, way down deep, and from the very ‘stuff’ going on in there, our prayer must arise.From that deepest core of ourselves, we must allow the ‘truth of what is in there’ to speak our longing for the breath of God.When that happens, we stop ‘saying prayers’ and we become a prayer.

So yesterday we spoke of the Church as that place where those who are dedicated to the Word of God are gathered together by the ‘breaking of the bread’ where is encountered the saving reality of Jesus Christ sacramentally made present in the Eucharist so as to become the living Body of Christ toward the Father and toward the world.

This truly remarkable ‘event’ taking place in the disciple of Jesus in the midst of the Church is highlighted in today’s gospel (Jn 16: 23b-28).There Jesus says to his disciples, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you” (v. 23b).Then, just a moment later, he zeros in on the ‘approach’ of the disciple to the Father, “On that day you will ask in my name, and I do not tell you that I will ask the Father for you.For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God” (vv.26-27).In this second, clarifying statement about prayer the subject is no longer “the promise that such prayer will be heard, but to the idea of direct access to the Father…Jesus reveals to the disciples the relationship of friendship that the Father promises to them for his sake.Jesus’ own friendship…is extended to them to a direct friendship of God” (Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, Vol. 3, 162-163).Notice the intimacy and, even, identity that is meant to exist between Jesus and ourselves.Jesus has no need of making our requests known to the Father.The Father knows them because he knows us ‘in Christ his beloved Son.’ This is precisely what we have said is the direction of the Word and the Sacrament—these two which together make Jesus sacramentally present to us and make us mystically his Body, the Church.

The liturgical prayer life of the Church, however, reveals that this transformation into the Body of Christ—of bread and wine and of us, his People—demands an epiclesis, that is, prayer for the divine intervention of the Holy Spirit.In the Eucharistic Prayer, number three, we prayer:“And so, Father, we bring you these gifts.We ask you to make them holy by the power of your Spirit, that they may become the body and blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose command we celebrate this Eucharist.” It is the ‘power of the Holy Spirit’ that makes bread and wine the very reality of Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity.Later, in the second half of the Eucharistic Prayer, wepray another epiclesis, “Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may be filled with his Holy Spirit, and become one body, one spirit in Christ.”Again, it is the ‘power of the Holy Spirit’ that makes us, the disciples of Jesus, into his very Body, the Church.

This is an enormous truth being proclaimed by our Liturgical Prayer.“[T]he part played by an intervention of the Holy Spirit and by an epiclesis is to affirm that neither the ‘earthly means’ nor the institution of the Church produces these [the body of Christ sacramentally or mystically as the Church] themselves.What we have here is an absolutely supernatural work that is both divine and deifying.The Church can be sure that God works in it, but, because it is God and not the Church that is the principle of this holy activity, the Church has to pray earnestly for his intervention as a grace” (Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Vol. 3, 271).

What all this tells us is that “the life and activity of the Church can be seen totally as an epiclesis,” a sustained prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Ibid.).

We are to become the very Body of Christ, Christ living in us and we living in Christ.This is only a work of the Holy Spirit!For it to happen, we need—each disciple of Jesus—to make of our lives an epiclesis.From the very center of our human lives—the joys, sorrows, anxieties, fears, anger, longings—all must go up to the Father as a sigh, a cry for the outpouring of his gracious Holy Spirit, that we might be conformed to Jesus Christ, our peace, our reconciliation, the fullness of everything for which we long.

The Acts of the Apostles provides us with what might be called a “narrative ecclesiology” (Joseph Ratzinger, Called To Communion, 41).That is to say, to the question, “What is the Church all about anyway?”, St. Luke offers the response, “Well, let me tell you the story of the first disciples of Jesus”, and we come to understand, through the telling of this story, the nature of the Church.

Today’s reading from Acts (18:9-18) opens up for us, then, another aspect of ‘what the Church is all about.’After many days of following St. Paul and his companions from one town to the next, from one encounter to another, today we see him ‘settling down’ in Corinth for a year and a half (v. 11).What does this tell us about the Church?Well, for one thing, it indicates very concretely that simply proclaiming the Word of God is not enough.Somehow, it tells us that there is a need to be ‘built-up’ in that Word, which is just the nature of discipleship.

Or another way at this point, it is one thing to encounter the Word, be gripped by it, and even respond to it by accepting baptism;it is another to be actually ‘fashioned’ to the Body of Christ.

Now this is of such incredible significance that we need to reflect carefully on it.Remember way back, early in St. Luke’s telling of this story, he shared the essential characteristics of the early Christian community.“They devoted themselves,” we were told, “to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (2: 42).Now this reveals two essential ‘aspects’ to the life of the Church.The first has to do with the Word.The second, with the Eucharist.

The Word of God is directed toward the communal life.Now this can be appreciated only if the deepest sense is given to both the ‘Word of God’ and the ‘communal life.’The deepest sense of the Word of God is nothing less the Jesus Christ himself, the Word made flesh.It is by this Living Word, by Jesus Christ that “you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.” (Eph. 2: 19-20).The direction of the Word, then, is toward the building up of the one Body of Christ.The ‘communal life’, in its deepest sense, is nothing short of union in the very life of Jesus.

Now to the second aspect of that early Church community, that of the Eucharist.They devoted themselves, Luke tells us, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.Now the Eucharist is not the only prayer offered, but it is where all the prayers of the community find their summit.What happens in the ‘breaking of the bread’ of course is the ‘re-presentation’, the made effectively living, the very life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.In the ‘breaking of the bread’ is encountered the very person of Christ given over as gift for our lives.The prayers, then, and in particular the Eucharist, is directed at the making sacramentally present the Body of Christ.

Now please follow me on this.One can imagine St. Paul preaching the Word, gaining converts to the faith and teaching and empowering leaders among them, to celebrate the Eucharist—all in rather short order.That this is true is witnessed in our own lives as Christians today.The Eucharist, directed at the making of the Body of Christ sacramentally present to us, only occupies an hour on Sunday of most Christians’ lives.

The making of Christians themselves, by adhesion to the Word of God—which is Jesus Christ—takes a significantly greater amount of time.In fact, it takes a life time.This is witnessed easily by turning to St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.After his year and a half in their midst, they still encountered incredible obstacles on the way to conforming their lives as the one, unique Body of Christ.

And so, St. Paul stops, he takes time to do the hard work of preaching, teaching and discipleing the new Christians at Corinth.This he does, and here is the point I am really after, because the Body of Christ made sacramentally present in the Eucharist is directed essentially to making us the Body of Christ active in the world, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the praise and glory of the Father.And this takes time:time to be formed in thought and action by the Word of God, present in Scripture and the teaching of the Apostles.

And that is what the story of Acts tells us the Church is all about.