Ranier Fsadni's recent opinion article The Bishops On Faith Clubs (December 3) is thought-provoking. After reading it, I was challenged to ask the pivotal questions: What is the Church? What makes its collective consciousness?
The Church is mainly a communion of love assembled in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith document, entitled: Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Some Aspects of the Church as Understood as Communion it is written: "The concept of communion (koinonia), which appears with a certain prominence in the texts of the Second Vatican Council, is very suitable for expressing the core of the Mystery of the Church, and can certainly be a key for the renewal of Catholic ecclesiology" (§ 1).
What kind of communion is the document hinting at? Firstly, it is a communion in the faith. All Church members share the same faith as was handed to it by the apostles and their successors. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: "Faith is a treasure of life which is enriched by being shared" (§ 949). Sharing the same faith brings the Church's sons and daughters to actively participate from the life-giving fount of the sacraments. The Roman Catechism states that "the fruit of all the sacraments belongs to all the faithful. All the sacraments are sacred links uniting the faithful with one another and binding them to Jesus Christ, and above all Baptism, the gate by which we enter into the Church.
The communion of saints must be understood as the communion of the sacraments... The name 'communion' can be applied to all of them, for they unite us to God... But this name is better suited to the Eucharist than to any other, because it is primarily the Eucharist that brings this communion about" (§ 1, 10, 24). Partaking from the one bread and cup of Christ's body and blood at the Eucharistic table opens the Christian community to the
"varieties of gifts" imparted by "the same Spirit" (1 Cor. 12, 4) "for [the Church's] common good" (1 Cor. 12, 7). Thus, a communion of charisms comes into play whereby the Holy Spirit inspires and apportions to each Christian personally with the gifts he wills (see 1 Cor. 12, 11).
When used with discernment, gifts create a communion of sharing. The customary biblical portrayal of the first Christian community is that its members "had everything in common" (Acts 4, 32). On this pivotal point the Roman Catechism elucidates that "everything the true Christian has is to be regarded as a good possessed in common with everyone else. All Christians should be ready and eager to come to the help of the needy... and of their neighbours in want" (§1, 10, 27). Therefore Christians, by vocation, are "good stewards of God's varied grace" (1 Pet. 4, 10). When immersed in sharing, the Church becomes a communion of charity. In such a communion "none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself (Rom. 14, 7) so much so that "if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together" (1 Cor. 12, 26). The beauty of this communion is expressed in every act of solidarity, shown with everyone, both living or dead. In the Church, solidarity that is motivated by charity serves as its network foundation since "charity redounds to the profit of all [and] every sin harms this communion" (Catechism of the Catholic Church § 953).
While thanking Mr Fsadni for his remarkable analytical article I conclude that communion is the collective consciousness of the Church. Unlike the Durkheimian understanding, it is a communion that ventures outside itself precisely because the Church's faith (teaching), sacraments, gifts, sharing, and charity under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through its pastors, makes it so. Such a biblical communion instils in the heart of every committed Christian believer the attitude of "feeling with the Church" (sentire cum ecclesia), namely by thinking, feeling and acting with and through the Church. Thus, loving the Church.