COMMUNION IN CHRIST

HYPER-INDIVIDUALISM

1. WE RECALL that Pope John Paul II of blessed memory traveled extensively. His trips to the United States and Europe revealed to him that members of Western societies are estranged and alienated from each other in significant ways. As he explains in his encyclical The Gospel of Life [1995], when hyper-individualism becomes an end in itself, such autonomy fuels widespread anger and breaks down cherished relationships. People who otherwise are productive and harmonious members of society grow to regard one another as enemies.

2. IT FOLLOWS, notes John Paul II as philosopher, that collaboration wrongly becomes a function of power. “Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other”, he observes, “and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail.” The Pope asserts that the dis-ease of social disorder becomes gravely threatening precisely when “any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost...”

COLOSSAL SCALE

3. AT WHAT point does creeping selfishness so disfigure a society that its citizens effectively cease to engage one another voluntarily for the common good? At what point will a people finally exhaust any remaining interest in their cultural heritage? Or cease to cherish their founding events and historical identity?

4. WITHOUT GOD'S grace, human beings are incapable of attaining just and harmonious societies. Human enthrallment to sin on a collosal scale has never been articulated more clearly than by the Evil One himself who tempted Jesus during his forty-day desert solitude:

AND THE devil took him up, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours." [Lk 4:5-7]

TO RESTORE "A-N-D"

5. IN CONTEMPLATING these troubling but not insurmountable issues, we find ourselves asking, How does the third-millennium Roman Catholic Church not only survive but flourish? From an encyclopedia of possible reasons, I wish to emphasize one point in particular—the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. A unique power flows out from Golgotha’s mystical cross, a medicine that heals wounded hearts, restores broken relationships and regenerates whole societies. This is the sovereign power of Divine Love, the mission of which is well-expressed in the grammatical conjunction “AND”.

6. OUR LORD Jesus Christ, a man like us in all things but sin, was birthed into humanity to restore the “A-N-D” to our essential vocabulary. He came to “conjoin” human beings who once were enemies of one another. Such reconciliation requires a radical embrace of love and a corresponding rejection of sin. The human person must abandon all idolatry to unrestrained autonomy—a servitude that so disfigures his original loveliness that it threatens to extinguish his humaneness altogether.

LAY DOWN VIRTUAL WEAPONS

7. THE CHURCH's mission is to persuade human beings to renounce their addiction to social aggression and to lay down their virtual weapons—the morbid and dangerous saber-rattling of me, myself and I and the perilous hatreds unleashed when “or”, “against”, “contend”, “dispute”, “oppose”, “fight”, “separate”, and “divide” are hurled and exploded by militant egos locked in psycho-social combat. St. Paul’s bracing words apply to our afflicted generation, “Let us have no self-conceit, no provoking of one another, no envy of one another.” [Gal 5:26]

8. THE PLEDGE of our communion in Christ will is not recognizable talent and zeal, personalistic revelations, flagrant compromise or any such exceptionalism. Our sole guarantor is Christ the King, always “faithful over God's house as a son. And we are his house if we hold fast our confidence and pride in our hope”. [Heb 3:6] It follows then that the indispensable preconditions for a just and harmonious “house” are these--cooperating members, a common vocabulary and a shared vision of the common good.

ORGANIC UNITY

9. AS ROMAN Catholics, we are a voluntary society of ordinary men and women faithfully serving one another side-by-side, hand-in-hand. We serve God as a Church, or we cease to be able to serve him at all. Therefore our unity must be organic. This is to say our oneness must be visible, lived-out and carefully cultivated as a fertile vineyard: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” [Jn 15:5]

10. JESUS OF Nazareth sends forth the Divine Love that demolishes the reign of the world’s arrogant strongholds. The crucified Christ of eternity enfolds us into the Divine Fire of the most Holy Trinity. The Flame of Love writes on hearts of flesh everywhere, “God and man, man and man”.

WE, OUR, US

11. WE ARE a people who revere “oneness” as the essential setting of our most cherished experiences, a people for whom we, our and us is the fertile soil which yields a rich harvest of genuine cooperation. To paraphrase Our Lord, God expects more from those who receive much—“and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more”. [Lk 12:48]