The Communio school of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism also has a robust doctrine of holiness as the true end of the human being. It seeks to address the contemporary world from within the deepest convictions and insights afforded by the Christian tradition. It desires to reclaim culture, especially the claim that in that the Triune God is Love, love remains -- and must remain -- the fundamental background of all human cultural life. In so far as Western culture has left Love and substituted an instrumental rational control as fundamental, Schindler deepens our understanding of the ills that attend our society -- seen, for instance, in the refusal of the Bush administration to call for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. Human life is instrumental to the need for social control. War and death are "birth pangs" to quote Condeleeza Rice, necessary to bring about a free market, liberal democratic MIddle East. This is the cultural of death.

Schindler ends his book with a very nicely written conclusion. I would like to leave this with you for your contemplation:

"Christian mission takes form from within Christ's mission. Christ emptied himself into the world in its entirety, in order that the world might be reconciled with the Father. This, then, is the heart of the spousal union brought about in the eucharist: Jesus Christ enters us, so that we might thereby enter Christ, taking on his form and being brought into communion with the Father . . .; and so that we might in turn carry this form into the world, and help bring the world into communion with the Father.

Thus we have the primary meaning of liberation. God in Jesus Christ entered into every aspect of human being, with its temptations, its fears, its joys and aspiractions, even its sin (without of course sinning himself), in order that all of human being might be liberated through spousal union: ever-deeper penetration of the form of Christ into our being, to the end of communion with the Father. The only way of this transforming liberaion, which is above all a conversion from sin, is the way of the cross. This liberation and transformation will be complete only in heaven. . . . .

'Let it be done according to your word' (Luke 1:38): the phrase indicates an inexhaustibly rich range of dispositions that must inform any Christian spirituality: a disposition of receptivity toward God, as the condition for giving birth to God; of contemplation and interiority ('taking within'), as the condition for creativity ('going out'); a disposition of prayer (making a home for God) and of poverty (emptying oneself before God); of wonder at the gift of being -- and thus of humility ('the Almighty has done great things for me' [Luke 1:49]; a suffering disposition that already anticipates a passion: a willingness to bear the other (Christ) for the other (Christ), unto death." pp.312-13