It is thus with interest that I read Aidan Nichol's on Benedict XVI's doctrine of the church. Benedict has read and thought long and hard about the nature of the church from within the Christian tradition. His first doctoral dissertation was on Augustine's ecclesiology, in which he proved himself a very able, subtle reader of the Augustinian text and the Scriptures. This is very hopeful, and we can all take guidance from Benedict's reflections on the life and mission of the church -- indeed, we must for the sake of the Kingdom of God and the church's witness to this kingdom.

According to Nichol's, Benedict adopts from Henri de Lubac a eucharistic ecclesiology -- God makes a congregation the body of Christ visible in the world through the body and blood of Christ -- "The Church is 'the people of God by virtue of the body of Christ'" (p. 138) -- it is a spiritual/physical reality. Drawing upon Augustine (who himself drew upon the Scriptures), "Augustine's divine city is not some purely ideal community of believing people, yet it has noghitn to do with any earthly theocracy of a 'Christianised world'. Rather is it . . . 'a sacramental, eschatological reality' which exists in this world as a sign of the coming world. The State is, despite all Christianisation or apparent Christianisation, an earthly State, and the Church an 'aliens community', which may use earthly realities but is never at home here" (p. 149).

The church (which I don't want to abstract, but to talk in terms of a parish or a congregation -- for the church in its catholicity is also always local) therefore has a mission -- "Given that the Church has no other meaning or purpose except in being the instrument of Jesus Christ, . . . she is herself, as Christ's ecclesial body, the 'gesture' of the divine openness. She must ever place herself at the service of taht gesture, and actualise it in history. But the one and only aim of the divine gesture of openness is the drawing of all finite reality into that "holy exchange' which began with the Incarnation. . . . 'mission as the prolongation of the movement of the Word's procession, and the simle gesture of disinterested love in the actualising of the divine love, a love which streams forth even when it remains without response.' Here we have at last a criterion for judging the appropriateness or otherwise of 'openness to the world' in particular cases. The service of mission and the service of charity form together a 'two-in-one canon'. By reference to this canon, we make our discernments about what is 'true', that is Christologically fitting, openness on the part of the Church, and what is merely 'worldlified' and so false" (p. 151).

To see this in terms of a local congregation/parish is important because, on the basis of Jesus, the Word became flesh; thus the church as the body of Christ is not poetic word, but fleshly bodies. Yet what Benedict rightly shows us is: one cannot separate charity, works of mercy, from commitment to Christ as the openness of God; nor can one separate commitment to Christ from charity, works of mercy, in the world, even to those who might be ungrateful or even unaccepting, those whom Dorothy Day called "the ungrateful poor."

If we would anchor the life of a congregation in the life and sayings of Jesus, in devotion to the Triune God by faith in the participation in the Eucharist, one understands that "personal relationship with Jesus" language just does not approach the profound beauty of salvation in Christ by which we participate in the very life of God in faith, hope, and love. It also prevents the cooptation of the life of the church by powers, while calling us personally and cooperately into the sufferings of a fallen world in the name of its Creator, who desires to call it beyond these sufferings in a celebration of the Life that God is. When we see it this way, we understand the practical beauty, truth, and goodness that Benedict describes as the true life and mission of a congregation. We must live this out always within our concrete environment, but such a people will always be recognizable as the body of Christ, not the agenda of a state, amidst the world.