I often thank Eric Lee at ericisrad.com for his insights and guidance. Today he gave me a site with an essay by the Archbishop of Grenada. It is an amazing essay. I've tried to abridge it some, and take away its jargony edge (I edited out most of the references to Radical Orthodoxy!!). The Archbishop here articulates the concerns and the positive program in a manner that I am not able to do. As an archbishop, he too sees the importance of holding together intellectual commitments, theological faithfulness, and the embodied life of the church in local congregations.

The essay might take awhile, and even a few attempts to get through. Yet I believe that it is worth it, for members of our parish, persons involved in PLNU, and friends throughout cyberspace to develop a language and a program to live out the unity that is the gift of God for us in Christ. If you'd like to get together and discuss the essay, let me know. I'd love to work through it with friends.

Some Contemporary Challenges for the Life and the Thought of the Church, as Seen from the West.
By Javier Martínez Archbishop of Granada
http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/martinez.htm
Abridged by John W. Wright

My reflections this morning, however, will not be concerned so much with the past than with our situation as Christians in the present and the future. . . .
The statement of this conviction is especially relevant to the complex phenomenon I want to address this morning, which I consider one of the greatest challenges Christianity has had to face in the twenty centuries of our history, comparable only in scope and in danger to the Gnostic or the Arian crises. . . .
I. Liberalism or Secular Reason
Let me formulate without further delay the challenge I have in mind. One name for it is "liberalism", and to be short, I understand by that name what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre names also "liberalism" in his works, especially in Whose Justice? What Rationality?1 It is (with its economic counterpart, capitalism) the dominant system of belief at the political, economic and cultural levels, which has remained in the world after the fall of communism (with the exception, perhaps, of the Islamic countries). And this system of belief I consider to be a major danger for the freedom of the Church and for the future of the world. In a sense, it is danger that could prove worse than communism, because it masks itself, it remains hidden, and for that reason it does not create resistances. It might well happen that liberalism could succeed where communism has failed, that is, in destroying the Church as a real people with a culture and a tradition, and in emptying Christianity from its human substance.
Instead of "liberalism" we could say, broadly referring to the same phenomenon, "the Enlightenment", or "Modernity". These names designate the ideal of a world that would be fully human by first domesticating, and then rejecting and substituting the Christian world. . . . . For MacIntyre has also shown that, for all its appeal to universal reason, the culture of the Enlightment is just one more tradition, born from particular circumstances in the history of European Christianity. Moreover, it is a tradition that:
1) it masks, and first of all to itself, its character as tradition;
2) it is constitutively intolerant, among other reasons, as a necessary consequence of its unawareness of its traditional character;
3) with all its predicament and power as the official culture everywhere in what was once the Christian world, it is already an intellectually dead culture, because it creates an alienated type of humanity, it disintegrates itself, and it is bound to dissolve itself into nihilism. In fact, its triumph coincides with its destruction2.
. . . .
A name that I particularly like for the whole of this phenomenon is "secular reason", which is in the title of this paper and I have borrowed from the title of what I consider to be an important book of the Anglican theologian John Milbank, Theology and social Theory. Beyond secular reason6. "Secular reason" includes what MacIntyre would name "liberalism", but has a wider scope: it has the advantage of including also the various fragmentary positions in which liberalism and the Enlightenment Project have disintegrated. . . .

My first point is then, after all, quite simple, and not especially original. Secular reason is both intellectually and morally exhausted. Its mythical character and its lack of foundation are already unmasked. It has all the power, but power is all it has; defeated by itself, in fact it has lost already the case of rationality, as has lost also all the cases it used to uphold in the past, like freedom, joy for life and love of this world. Even to say that what comes after liberalism is nihilism is just part of the truth, because the term "nihilism", in the form of "post-modernity" or in some other philosophical garb, seems to lend somehow a respectable, professorial halo to the phenomenon. . . . .

Nihilism is today not a philosophy, it is above all a practice, and a practice of suicide even if is a soft suicide. It is the suicide of the depressed. It is also a practice of violence. The secular society lives in daily violence, violence with reality. This violence shows that nihilism cannot and does not correspond to our being. But it shows also, in a very concrete way, how the secular society annihilates itself by engendering the very monsters that terrify it most and that it itself hates most: the twin monsters of fundamentalism and terrorism. After 11th September 2001 and 11th March 2004, it is more and more obvious that Islamic terrorism, like Islamic fundamentalism, by all its Muslim coloring and a certain vague connection with traditional Muslim ideas and practices, is not understandable or thinkable without the West, it is mostly a creature of Western secular ideologies. It is pragmatic nihilism using Islam instrumentally, very much like the emergent modern nation-states used in their own political interest a Church institution like the Inquisition.

II. The Destiny of Christianity within Secular Reason

One has to recognize that, at least in the West, the Church in general has not been successful in taking a stand that will allow her to recognize, not to say to overcome, the strategies of secular reason. . . .

And this is my main reason to distrust the urge that so many feel nowadays in certain countries (this is the case in Spain) of bringing the Church as Church into the political arena to fight propositions that utterly offend the Christian understanding of human life (the so-called "marriage" of homosexuals, other obvious destructions of marriage, the experiments with human embryos, "liberalization" of euthanasia and abortion, etc). The very interest that the proponents of these monstrosities seem to have in the provocation makes me extremely suspicious. On the other hand, I cannot bring myself to imagine the Church of the second or of the third century trying to overthrow and take over the Roman Empire to make it Christian, instead of converting it. For us Christians, that kind of "battle" is always a distraction and a trap. . . .

I do not believe, therefore, that any strategy to conquer influence or power in our societies will do any good to the Church or to the cause of Christianity in any sense. We as Christians cannot have any nostalgia of the days of the past and, least of all, for those very conditions that have led to the invention of the secular as a reaction against a decadent and already reductive image of Christianity. A strategy of looking for influence will only continue to hide to most Christians the fact that the real "enemy" is not truly outside us, but within us, in the exact measure (which is a very large measure) we share those very assumptions whose consequences we criticize so sharply in the decisions of some politicians (but in general only of some).

In consequence, that strategy will only distract us from the only "politics" that is needed in the present situation, and the only one can really make a difference in the world: being the body of Christ, living in the communion of the Holy Spirit in this concrete hour of history. In other words, the "politics" we most need is conversion in order to build up of the Church again as a banner among the nations, as "a nation made from all nations". An effect of this distraction is that it allows the immense energy Christianity unlashes to be used instrumentally in the favor of political programs that do not and cannot, in any way, be identified with the life the Lord has given us. That life lives in the Church, and not in a political party, not even in one that would eventually present itself as being at the service of the "Christian values". The circle closes when one realizes that the instrumentality of the Church to a political program becomes by itself – in complete independence of the content of that program – a hindrance to the freedom of the Church and to the faith of the world in Jesus Christ.

Let us turn to the question of what happens to the Church when she accepts to understand herself in the frame set up by secular reason. In the very beginning of the book of John Milbank I have already mentioned, he describes poignantly that situation in reference to theology:

The pathos of modern theology – says Milbank – is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease, because once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol, such as historical scholarship, humanist psychology, or transcendental philosophy. If theology no longer seeks to position, qualify or criticize other discourses, then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology; for the necessity of an ultimate organizing logic cannot be wished away. A theology "positioned" by secular reason suffers two characteristic forms of confinement. Either it idolatrously connects knowledge of God with some particular field of knowledge – "ultimate" cosmological causes, or "ultimate" psychological and subjective needs. Or else it is confined to intimations of a sublimity beyond representation, so functioning to confirm negatively to confirm negatively the questionable idea of an autonomous secular realm, completely transparent to rational understanding.

. . . Within the frame of secular reason the Church can only survive in one of the two modes of confinement indicated by Milbank. In the first confinement, "ratio" and "fides" are parallel lines that never meet, although it may be conceded that they do not contradict one another12. Now, the separation between "ratio" and "fides" is just the reflex of many other divisions, and ultimately of the division between God and reality. And so, the first confinement finishes always in the second one. There, at the end, there is only "ratio": "fides" vanishes among the fantasies of the human mind.
In fact, there is only one confinement, in two phases. As soon as the sphere of the religious, in which Christianity as a whole is placed, designates a particular sphere of human activity next to other spheres (philosophy, morality, the sciences, the arts, and so on), it is thereby severed of any other human reality; it becomes autonomous, but it has to become unreal also, since to every parcel of reality corresponds its own sphere of knowledge in rapport to which is completely transparent, with the implication that the different spheres of knowledge expect complete dominion over the assigned parcel of the real world.

To religion there is no reality left, and therefore it cannot even be a kind of knowledge, it has to belong to the purely private and subjective realm of sentiment and preference. Its concern, if it is conceded that is for something "real", has to be for a wholly otherworldly "reality". And since this reality will have no relationship or bearing on anything of this world, in the end will have no reality out of the purely subjective imagination (Feuerbach's religion). . . .

In fact, as already stated, De Lubac saw this "dualism" as a cause of atheism:
On the one hand, though the dualist – or, perhaps better, separatist – thesis has finished its course [in the theology schools], it may be only just beginning to bear its bitterest fruit. As fast as professional theology moves away from it, it becomes so much more widespread in the sphere of practical action. While wishing to protect the supernatural from any contamination, people had in fact exiled it altogether – both from intellectual and from social life – leaving the field free to be taken over by secularism. Today that secularism, following its course, is beginning to enter the minds even of Christians. They too seek to find a harmony with all things based upon an idea of nature which might be acceptable to a deist or an atheist: everything that comes from Christ, everything that should lead to him, is pushed so far into the background as to look like disappearing for good. The last word in Christian progress and the entry into adulthood would then appear to consist in a total secularization that would expel God not merely from the life of society, but from culture and even from personal relationships.
. . . .

The obvious and inevitable question is then: What in that case could be the interest of a faith that cannot give meaning to reality, and can only be instrumental for an already existing philosophical social, moral and political system? Asking this question puts into a sharp light the atheism implicit (but not wholly hidden) in both of these positions, the "progressive" and the "conservative", and the great width of the common ground that these two positions share, in spite of all the bitterness of some of their debates during much of the twentieth century.

The combination, then, of modern compartmentalization, in the form of dualism or in other forms, with that metamorphose of the supernatural into a "double" of this word already mentioned causes two main phenomena:

The first of them is the "disappearance" of the Church, that stops being understood as "the body of Christ" and therefore as His "sacrament", as the human place of flesh where to meet Him, and becomes instead an aggregation of individuals that share (more or less) the same "beliefs" and the same "values" (these "values" being generally understood in Kantian or relativistic terms)19. . . .
The second phenomenon, consequence of the previous one, is the complete identification of Christianity with secular thinking, so that being a Christian becomes meaningless, and makes no difference in real life. David L. Schindler has expressed how this phenomenon happens in America this way:

My argument, as it concerns Christians, is that the problem of secularism in America begins in a significant sense within the (Protestant and Catholic) churches themselves and their theology and religious practices. To put it in its most radical and indeed what seems to me also most precise terms, the disappearance or indeed the death of God is a phenomenon occurring not only in the 5 percent of Americans who do not profess belief in God but also and more pertinently in the 95 percent who do.
. . . .

At the end, the paradox of the Church in secular society is the same that again MacIntyre expressed many years ago as a dilemma for (protestant) theology, in the following way:

We can see the harsh dilemma of a would-be contemporary theology: [1] The theologian begins from orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy which has been learnt from Kierkegaard and Barth becomes too easily a closed circle, in which believer speaks only to believer, in which all human content is concealed. [2] Turning aside from this arid in-group theology, the most perceptive theologians wish to translate what they have to say to an atheistic world. But they are doomed to one of two failures. Either [a] they succeed in their translation: in which case what they find themselves saying has been turned into the atheism of their hearers. Or [b] they fail in their translation: in which case no one hears what they have to say but themselves.

This is not only the doom of today's protestant theology. It is everywhere the dilemma of Christian media, of Christian morals, and of Christian education. It is the dilemma of today's Christian presence in the world at large.

And yet, with all this critique of secular reason as one more particular tradition, and with the observation of the deadly consequences that its uncritical acceptance has for the Church and for itself, I have to recognize, and it is essential at this point of our argument to note, in order that this argument not be misunderstood, that at least one aspect of secular reason is the direct heir of Christianity: the affection for reason as such (as for freedom as such, or for the human dignity as such) is so much so a characteristic of Christianity and of Christian tradition that Christianity is uniquely able to embrace whatever truth is contained even in the "secular" criticism of religion. In fact, the secular critique of religion, be that of Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim or Nietzsche, could not have happened or flourished outside Christian soil.

III. "Return to the Center"

One cannot see the desert unless one belongs somewhere else. One cannot rationally criticize a position or perceive its limits unless one has seen something else. And of course, we have seen something else. We have seen the martyrs, the saints. We see their resplendent humanity, and we know two things: first, that such a nation of saints cannot be built on a falsehood, and second, that the promise of Christ "I will be with you to the end of time" (Mt 28, 28) holds true. We can make ours the words of Newman at the end of his now famous "Biglietto Speech", in which he expressed very strongly the dangers of liberalism in religion as the enemy he had fought all through his life:

Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. So far is certain; on the other hand, what is uncertain, and in these great contests commonly is uncertain, and what is commonly a great surprise, when it is witnessed, is the particular mode by which, in the event, Providence rescues and saves His elect inheritance. Sometimes our enemy is turned into a friend; sometimes he is despoiled of that special virulence of evil which was so threatening; sometimes he falls to pieces of himself; sometimes he does just so much as is beneficial, and then is removed. Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God. . . . .

This is a fantastic witness of faith and confidence in the promise of Christ. "The Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace". Nowadays, however, "religious liberalism" has gone so far in the delusion of Christian minds that even "her own proper duties", from preaching to the sacraments, are understood (or rather, misunderstood) in the frame of secular reason. Newman himself, seeing this danger, in that same speech, said also: "Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth". He knew that liberalism (or secular reason), and not only in religion, has an immense ability to disguise and mask itself, to present itself as "the natural way", the way things have always been, and should always be. It is therefore necessary a great effort, both intellectual and moral, to unmask its strategies, to show its ideological character, both outside and inside the Church, and to return again to the Holy Tradition, disentangling it from the bounds that have it tied and crippled, in order to propose it anew, in all its freshness, to today's man.
The problem with most critics to liberalism, as we have already insinuated, is that they have been made in the name of Marxism (or from the partial acceptance of Marxist outlooks). This has implied the acceptance of the beliefs common to Marxism and liberalism (since Marxism was, as MacIntyre says, "in the first instance a critic of liberalism and of bourgeois society in their own terms"), and with them, the implicit or explicit assertion of the unavailability and the uselessness of Christianity for the "things of this world". So, most critiques of liberalism, in the long ran, have worked in favor of the establishment of that same secular culture which was at the base both of liberalism and of its critics.
. . . .

Now, if liberalism is everywhere successful (although its very success constitutes the death of all its professed ideals), and if it represents a major danger – and, for the most part, a hidden or unrecognized danger – to the Christian Church, what can we do?
What is needed, in my view, is, as the title of the French version of a little book Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote in 1969 says, a "return to the center"27. Not the center as in politics, as the middle way between right and left, but the center as the point from which the whole novelty of Christianity springs. The "center" is the gift by which the Triune God gives himself through Christ in creation and redemption, a gift that is given today in the communion of the Church, a gift that constitutes the very meaning of all reality, and that recognizes Jesus Christ as "the heart of the world". In fact, one could describe the best theological efforts of the nineteenth and the twentieth century – at least in the West – , and the only ones that will survive the devastating effects of time, as attempts to recuperate tradition, and to recover the meaningfulness of Christian tradition for human life, beyond the dualistic or otherwise fragmenting distortions created by secular reason and the several variants of a secular reinterpretation of Christianity. In other words, these attempts try to recuperate tradition avoiding the dilemma MacIntyre had signaled and we quoted above: buying meaning by selling tradition, that is, by making tradition say what secular reason says already without the need of faith.

IV. On the way to "The Center": Landscapes/Landmarks

In this final part of my paper I would just like to call attention to a few signposts on this way to the center. Although I will remain mainly in the field of theology, as it is proper in the context of this conference, I want to mention that the "recuperation" of the "center" implies three aspects that are united between them . . . .

I mean the magisterial teaching of the Church, the theological effort and the charismatic life of God's people. Of course, from these three aspects of the life of Christ's body, one has the particular mission, given and guaranteed by the Lord Himself, of preserving and handing down the Holy Tradition: and this is the apostolic ministry. But none of the three aspects can be severed from the other two without destruction or grave damage to the whole body of Christ. That is the case, for instance, when the magisterium insists in the social teaching of the Church as an essential part of the Church's life: if most of the Christian people understands their own life in the frame of secular reason, that social teaching remains as an abstract theory, taken seriously by a few, unknown by most. And if it would happen that the teaching of the shepherds would not be "theological" (by accepting, for instance, the very modern and deadly division between theology and pastoral care), the Christian people will be without guidance, the Christian faith would be cut from reason, and soon will dissolve itself in the world, perhaps in the form of a religion with some Christian coloring. Conversely, when theology does not represent the systematic reflection on the experience of the Church, not paying enough attention to the authoritative role of tradition and the magisterium, then inevitably becomes instrumental to ideology and to the powers of this world.

Let us begin with theology. The works of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac, whom I have just cited and whom I consider by far the greatest Catholic theologians of the twentieth Century, have to be read clearly in the context of the concerns I have been talking about at the beginning of this paper. . . .

As for De Lubac, he wrote about his own work, in a note to be published in the Italian edition of his complete works: "My task has basically been (...) to help know better, and therefore, understand better and love more, the treasures of the great catholic tradition – I would say gladly, some of its great common places – misunderstood by so many, very little truly known even by those who would in all sincerity like to preserve it and to defend it"31. In his first book, Catholicism, published in 1938, a work in which he wanted to bring to the foreground "the social aspects of the dogma" as they are expressed in the Christian Tradition, De Lubac wrote: "By revealing the Father and by being revealed by him, Christ completes the revelation of man to himself"32. . . . Now, this is, in every sense, just what tradition has always said about Christ and mankind, what was already in the Creed of Nicaea and the New Testament. But the important thing about this quote is that, when taken seriously, makes impossible for a catholic to maintain a liberal position, and goes beyond any secular dualism or fragmentation: Christ belongs to the very definition of man, in such a way, that to think of man without Christ is just to leave the understanding of man incomplete, is to miss what matters most, even for the building of the polis: mankind's destiny and vocation to share in the divine life of the Son of God. One could say that the whole meaning of De Lubac's work has been to unearth tradition and liberate it from the confinement of secular reason.

Balthasar and De Lubac are not the only theologians in the West to have tried to free Christian experience and language from the bounds and reductions of secular reason. There are certainly others, although one has to admit that there are not many who relate that "center" of the Christian event with the different issues of Christian anthropology or moral life without falling into the dilemma spoken of by MacIntyre; . . .

All the "landscapes" we have mentioned up to this point are theological. But the journey "beyond secular reason" cannot be done by theology alone, is not primarily a problem for theology. Because theology is the intellectual articulation of the experience of the Church, and it cannot be done except from that experience. When that experience is lacking, or is confused, the thought cannot but be confused, and theology becomes just a variant of secular reason, just the expression of the dominant cultural outlook. Even the teaching of the Church, alone and by itself, is not enough. Because "the snare has overspread the whole earth" in such a way that the teaching of the Church is received and read mostly, even by people whose good will one knows and cannot deny, through the filters of secular reason: either is reduced in a pietistic manner, or it is reduced to "liberal values" and morality.

In fact, in my view, the challenge is so great that implies all of us, every single Christian, every Christian family and every Christian community, wherever we are, and whatever our history, and whatever the wounds we may have caused one another through that history. The challenge cannot be addressed without our being open to learn from one another both the failures and the achievements, and so to help one another with the charity that corresponds to members (suffering members, wounded members) of the one Body of Christ. The first fragmentation of the Christian experience is our division, the first fragmentation of the Church (and the first opening to the rise of secular reason) happens when we stop understanding one another as members of the one Body of Christ.

One of the truths that have been opened to me in the conversation with the work of MacIntyre is the awareness that life (history) is not the application of ideas, that there is always a very close interaction and dependence between practices (political and economical, familiar, educational, artistic, cultural), and theory. Practices embody theory – there is not the slightest human gesture that does not imply a whole ontology – but are also able to create or modify theory, as theory often serves to justify, modify or create practices. This is a key point in MacIntyre's work, scattered all throughout it. Community is prior to tradition, is the place of tradition. It is the place of rationality (both practical and theoretical), and therefore it is the place of intellectual and moral life. It is also the place for "the individual" to belong, and belonging, to become a person, to get an identity for the self and for the world. If this is true, as I think it is, the consequences for the challenge I have been discussing in this paper are of great import. The issue before us, in fact, is not a question of changing some of our ideas, or of our language. What is at stake is not only theology, as the articulated language of faith. It is faith itself. Or rather, it is the Church as the human space created by the Triune God for the fulfillment of humanity, and it is faith as the recognition of this fact.

At the light of this, one can perhaps understand better MacIntyre's call at the end of After Virtue, quoted already in part above. He is comparing our time with the epoch of the decline of the Roman Empire: "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us". . . .

So there is theology, there is the teaching of the shepherds of the Church, there are individual persons, families, parishes and monasteries, to whom Holy tradition and the teaching of the Church has reached and the grain found good soil, and the sowing is fruitful. They perceive the danger, they suffer it, and they can still lovingly recognize the infinite signs of the presence of Christ in the world. They know God loves them immensely, and they love God with all their heart. I have met them many times. They are frequently alone, with no roof, in the open. They are the scattered remnant of the Christian people, the most beautiful human reality ever grown upon this earth. They need to be sustained by the Church; they need to be recognized by the others at home.

Then there are the experiences that the Lord makes grow, a little everywhere, in parishes, in the centers of study and culture, wherever there are persons of faith who gather "in the name of Jesus Christ", and for whom Christ becomes the center of thought and action, because is a gift "more precious than life". They are sometimes called "movements", and they are in a sense like new forms of monasticism. They are realities in which the experience of being the Church – a Church with a body – is renewed with a freshness that fills life with joy and hope, in the midst of all the sufferings and trials of life. In them, even if sometimes in a different manner from the one has been usual, Christian rationality grows and can compare itself with other ways of living and thinking; there is again a tradition to pass on, and theology can flourish again.

I would like to finish mentioning some characteristics of this new discovery of the Church. Or perhaps I should say, this new disclosure, or "revelation", since the Father, the Risen Lord and the Holy Spirit are the ones who over and over again create and regenerate the Church in history, and allow us to see "what many prophets and kings wished to see, but could not see" (Lk 10, 24). These characteristics can for the most part be deduced from what has already been said.

The Church needs to become again, at all her levels, "the house and the school of communion", as John Paul II has reminded us. The Church has to be a community life, in a sense, "a family" life, like the life of "a body". She needs to recover "social" density. Not as a ghetto, but as real family life, always open to life and to society. "Family", "mother", "house, "nation", "body", are not just names for the Church, are social realities essential for the life of the Christian Tradition. The Church is a company for life, and for everything in life. In other words, the Church has to be "rescued", so to speak, from the drying and inhuman power of the managerial logic, and has to recover the sacramental logic, which is the one that belongs to her.

The Church is a community life centered in the liturgy and the Eucharist. The Eucharist, with all its dimensions (without being reduced in a pietistic and individualistic way) is the practice of the Church, and so, it is a school: a school of community life, a school that allows us to understand in a unique way who is God, who is Christ, who are we; who we are for God, and who we are for one another; and what is the world for us. The Eucharist is the only place of resistance to the annihilation of the human subject. And the Eucharist is also the place where one can learn and experience a universality, which is not the abstract and false universality of modernity, which is not in opposition to local realization, identity and fullness.

In that community, the movement of the heart (mind and all) is a movement that goes in the direction of a rediscovery of Christian tradition, with all the riches and the variations that this tradition has, and not of a flight from it. For us Christians, differences are not an obstacle, but a treasure, as long as those differences are understood and lived in the light of the sacramental logic of the Body of Christ. Even the Gospels are four, and God is the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The experience of life in that community is a human experience that, because it is an experience of Christ, becomes a way of looking at all reality, that is, it becomes a source for rationality, and it refers to all dimensions of human experience and human practice (knowledge, art, and all kinds of human relationships, including the political or economic).

Of course, to make these things to happen is not just in our hands. Even to desire them is already a grace. The Church is not ours, but the Lord's, although we know the Lord desires His Church shining in the midst of the night. To us it remains, first of all, to give thanks for what we have – which is everything already, since we have Christ and the Holy Spirit – , and for the graces the Lord does not stop giving us, like our meeting this morning. And then we can desire and pray that every one of us may flourish and grow "until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of god, to maturity, to the measure of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4, 13).