Gift of Communion
This post will catch me up on B16’s Wednesday audiences catecheses…until tomorrow. The title of the March 29th audience is the “Gift of Communion.” I have indicated that I think his trajectory is one of deconstructing modern Christian individualism with an approach infused with covenant theology and Christian personalism.
In this talk, he resumes the lesson from his discussion of the role of the apostolic witnesses testifying to the truth of the Person of Christ. Jesus Christ has been witnessed to each and everyone of us, by the Church. Benedict’s argument shows that it would not be possible for anyone to know Christ if the early Church had fallen into the modern error that claims that religion is a purely personal and private affair. But in this catechesis he shows that the Apostles are more than simply witnesses.
He cites Pope Clement who at the end of the first century showed that the structure of the Church was hierarchical. Benedict says:
The Twelve Apostles — as the third successor of Peter, Pope Clement, said at the end of the first century — took care to provide their successors (cf. 1 Clement 42, 4) so that the mission entrusted to them would continue after their death. Throughout the centuries, the Church, structured under the leadership of legitimate pastors, has continued to live in the world as mystery of communion, in which in a certain sense, the Trinitarian communion itself is reflected, the mystery of God himself.
B16 goes on, in the rest of the article, to discuss the relationship between a personal communion with Christ and the ecclesial union of Christians with one another. In fact, he says that you cannot have one without the other. There is no union with Christ without communion with His Church because the Church is the mechanism by which Jesus joins each individual into His Mystical Body. Benedict refers to this as a “double communion” in which our koinonia, our communion, with God and each other cannot be separated from one another.
The gift of communion requires that we come out of our solitudes and participate in the love, the communal life, to which God calls us. This of course, is reminiscent of JPTG’s emphasis that love and communion with God is achieved by means of a total gift of self. Communion is a remedy to this loneliness and alienation into which we are born because of our fallen world.
In the end, our call to Trinitarian communion can be actualized by means of the Incarnation, the latter to which we have access through the Church–Christ’s Mystical Body. This means we have access to this koinonia through the Church in Her totality, which includes the faithful and the hierarchy.
Cartesian presuppositions have deluded many into cafeteria types of religious sentiments. B16’s catechesis is showing why we cannot pick and choose. That to accept Christ is to accept the whole Christ, which includes His Catholic Church. Tomorrow’s audience will reveal where he is taking us next.
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