Comunicación oral: escuchar, hablar y conversar

At first glance my treatment of this second condition may appear to do little more than reaffirm the problem under investigation. Staying in communion, that is precisely what is in question.

Nonetheless, there is a positive development here, a clarification about the idea of communion. It is the element of connection with the whole, the idea that, to avoid going off track in carrying out a prophetic mission or a reform activity, you need to stay in living contact with the whole body of the church.

The Whole Truth Is Grasped Only in Communion with the Whole Church

Some important insights in the thought of Möhler help to ground, build, and develop this idea. This has already been pointed out.56 Möhler’s key idea is that vital faith, just like vital human experience, depends upon the action of the Holy Spirit within us. Moreover, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love and fraternal communion whose task is not, strictly speaking, to clarify this or that particular matter. The Spirit’s work is to enliven and actualize the Body of Christ. Further, the conditions for the Spirit’s gifts (we might even say for the Spirit’s work) are essentially communal. The Spirit operates within the mutual love of the faithful as a Spirit of love and fraternal communion. True faith does not exist without fraternal communion.

What gives rise to the church, as Möhler says, is the fact that “no one can live a Christian life or be at home in their religion without the influence of the community of the faithful enlightened by the Holy Spirit.”57 Möhler was delighted to point out that the apostles only received the Holy Spirit when they were “gathered in the same place, with one heart, forming a single gathering of brothers.”58 He drew out the implications of this idea, using a formula that shows how great minds always have a touch of poetry: “As part of an organic whole, believers are shielded from deception only when thinking and desiring in accordance with the mind and the heart of all.”59

Only through communion with the whole body, which itself is subject to the guidance of the magisterium, can someone grasp a truth in its totality. It is clearly impossible that individual persons might know and profess the whole truth by themselves. Someone might have perceived this or that element of the truth, but not some other. Someone might have been struck by one aspect, but not see all the implications and consequences

of what he or she discovered and began to promote. Yet what they do not know by themselves, they can know through others. When we are in communion with the whole body, we have the benefit of corrections, clarifications, and the fullness that the whole body offers us effortlessly, simply in virtue and under the influence of being in communion. Because of the unity of the body, what others have, but I do not, also belongs to me and works to my benefit. What I can neither understand nor achieve, nor even formulate or hold explicitly by myself, I can subscribe to in the whole body with which I am in communion. St. Augustine says that every Christian speaks all languages by being in union with the church that speaks them all.60 The fullness of truth is only found in the whole body. Further, in communion with the whole body, persons have a grasp of the truth that is superior to what they might formulate personally by themselves. We could easily interpret Ephesians 3:18-19 in this sense.

Two days before dying, Luther wrote these lines (the last writing we have from him) in which this same idea is suggested in a remarkable way: “Nobody can understand Virgil’s Bucolics without being a pastor for five years; nobody can understand his Georgics without being a laborer for five years; nobody can understand what Cicero wrote in his Letters without being involved in running a country for twenty years. Let nobody think that they grasp the Holy Scriptures as they should, if they have not governed the churches for a hundred years with Elijah and Elisha, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles…”61 How right that is, and how much Luther, who was speaking against sacramentaries, would have profited by following his own idea more closely. How can one man, even a great religious genius, completely rethink Christianity all by himself? Impossible. You cannot taste and understand the Scriptures as you should, you cannot grasp the truth precisely and especially in its fullness (one affects the other), unless you are the contemporary, the disciple, the companion of Jesus Christ, the prophets, and the apostles—that is, unless you are in communion with the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

To tell the truth, the church itself can neither define itself adequately nor give an explicit account at any given moment of everything it carries within itself. It “defines” what it is not clearly enough, just as we ourselves know better what we don’t want and what we oppose better than what we are and what we hold. The church condemns formulas that don’t appear to respect or convey its conviction about whether to think or to hold one thing or another. But it still feels unable to furnish at any given moment an adequate positive expression of what it is and of everything it carries within itself. I used to think this was one of the reasons why the church refused to be represented at important ecumenical conferences.62 In any case, let us take note of this: for the church itself, complete truth is to be found only in total communion. No exterior form or particular formula either exhausts or expresses adequately the way it lives and thinks.

As we will see toward the end of this section, there is a matter of major importance here. Because no exterior form or formula produced at any given moment is an adequate expression of Catholic truth, it will always be possible, in the name of communion itself, to seek to go beyond the expressions held at a given moment. When it is a matter of

properly dogmatic formulas, this evolution can only mean development by way of clarification. So the progressive or “prophetic” side of serious reflection or of our activities can find its justification in the same reality, ecclesial communion, which is also its norm and its boundary line.

Norm and determined scope are even more necessary when it is not just a question of any kind of Christian, but of a “prophet,” that is, of a Christian whose mission is to take initiatives for development, to strive to shape exterior forms according to the inner sense and the fullness toward which they aspire. The prophet’s reactions and insights, as we have seen, always run the risk of unilateralism. As long as the prophet remains genuinely in communion with the church, his statements will remain impregnated with the attitudes and the thought of the whole church. Whatever is excessive or one-sided about these claims that might be a source of schism, if isolated from ecclesial communion, will be found repeatedly corrected or open to improvement within the bosom of the church. There, everything will be said and done in communion and thus in contact and in relation with all sorts of complementary and compensating claims. As long as the communion has not been broken, the claims which are made in communion will show the influence of all the other affirmations held by the church. Ambivalence, if there is any, will be resolved positively in the direction of orthodoxy. The prophets’ real meaning is modified by the relation they maintain with the full doctrine and the full life of the church. Consequently, not only what they fail to say is not, by that fact, denied, but what they might say insufficiently and imperfectly can and ought to be interpreted in a truly Catholic sense.

This Communion Makes the Difference between Catholic and Schismatic

This is very important, and it complements what I already said about the ambivalence of reactions to the “prophetic” style. It is easy to find historical examples of this normativity of Catholic communion for reforms without schism. The scholar or reformer who, while affirming a particular aspect of truth, clings to the desire not to deny other aspects and to remain in communion with all the others in the church, remains Catholic. By contrast, the scholar or reformer who insists first on “being himself,” in maintaining the special difference of his own initiative, and in denying compensating elements that modify his special insight, risks falling into schism. When St. Ignatius of Loyola published his Exercises, which were a novelty at the time, he appended to them “Rules of Orthodoxy,” which testified to his concern to keep his initiative in communion with the church.

By contrast, even the most powerful religious experiences and the most deeply felt truths risk becoming heresies if they are not regulated by the faith and the life of the entire Catholica. They develop then according to their own logic, in an abstract way that is autonomous and oversimplified. In affirming certain legitimate truths, they deny other truths equally Catholic and soon distort and spoil whatever good they originally had. Nicholas of Cusa reproached the Czech supporters of Holy Communion with the chalice for insisting on their demands (legitimate in themselves) without caring about

requirements or conditions for unity.62a Further, heresies, as we have seen, are born “from deductions followed only in one direction, springing from a principle of tradition or science isolated from the totality, held up as absolute truth, and to which are linked (by reasoning) conclusions incompatible with the general coherence of religion and of traditional teaching.”

In the history of the church there have been so many originally good and Catholic spiritual insights and experiences that have become the source of heresy, precisely because they developed in an isolated and abstract way outside the communion and the control of the Catholica.

What is Pelagianism other than ascetical experience (representing human moral feeling) pushed to an absolute dogmatic position, despite the clear opposing position of the universal Catholic faith? Pelagius had an authentically Catholic insight, but it could only have remained such if Pelagius, correcting his own personal experience by Augustine’s experience, and remaining genuinely linked to the whole Catholica, had not dared to make claims that became seriously heretical when separated from the community of faith and love.

Take another example, that of the most authentic and Catholic theology you might find, that of St. Augustine. If you were to sever its vital connection with the life of the universal church, to isolate it from that life and allow it to develop in the abstract, if you were to articulate its conclusions in a one-sided way, failing to relate and submit them to the totality of the church’s life, you would end up with Jansenism. In a way, the orthodox statements of the year 415 found in Augustine’s writings, although materially the same, were no longer orthodox in the writings of Jansenius in 1652. These fully Augustinian ideas were orthodox in Augustine’s thought because they were regulated not by Augustine himself, considering himself as his criterion or goal, but by the Catholica, that is, by the communion that kept them within despite themselves. So they had a positive orientation, an intention, and an active impulse to seek for Catholic harmony.

Yet they became heretical in Jansenius, being affirmed for their own sake through an autonomous and abstract logic no longer governed by the living unity of the Catholica, but governed by the literal text of Augustine. Further, Augustine, still remaining himself, would have been more in tune in the seventeenth century with the life of the Catholica of that time. He would only have compromised his catholicity (while remaining Augustinian) if he refused to be in communion with Ignatius and Molina, in the very bosom of the church. This means that the Augustinianism of Augustine and the Augustinianism of Jansenius, even if they are materially the same in their details, are nonetheless formally different.63 The concrete challenge for the “prophet” is to be a person of initiative without becoming an “innovator,” a reformer, but not a “revolutionary.” The norm for the “prophet” will be to do everything he can and must do conscientiously to avoid being disowned or rejected by the church.

For that to happen, certain internal dispositions are decisive. No external means can keep someone with a systematic or rebellious heart in communion. Because my interest here is essentially ecclesiology, I cannot spend much time on this question of inner

dispositions. A study that would bring out the psychological and spiritual implications of the sin of schism (such as St. Thomas Aquinas and his commentator Cajetan did)

64_{could become the topic of special research. Following St. Thomas, Cajetan identified}

the essential element of an attitude of communion not with conformity in doctrine and worship, or even with submission to one central authority, but with a particular way of living the Christian life. What is at stake is a way of leading Christian life, says Cajetan, ut pars [as a part of the whole]. This means the feeling of not being alone, of being part of one single body, leading one single life, pursuing one single enterprise with all other Catholics. It means not considering yourself to be the “whole,” not acting or thinking as if your own issues are self-sufficient. Rather, it means living without losing contact with others, without disengaging from the group of which you are a part, clinging to your insertion in the concrete church (something already described above); it means linking your own thinking and actions in some way to a virtual presence of all the other faithful of the whole church. Möhler’s formula for this is wonderful: “thinking and desiring with the spirit and heart of all.”

This deeply rooted attitude of communion, whose formal rupture is the sin of schism, is made real and brought to the fullness of ecclesial communion through a living relationship with the hierarchy that comes from the apostles. The church is a body organized and structured apostolically. There is “Catholic communion” only in communion with the apostles, in fidelity to their preaching and to the communal life governed by the sacraments and the prayers they celebrated (Acts 2:42). The church is those who are with the apostles, and we can even say that the apostles are those who are with Peter,65 expressing in this way the profound norm of Catholic communion linked to the apostolicity of the church. Here the Holy Spirit’s interior governance, bestowed upon believing hearts on the day of Pentecost (replacing the Mosaic Law, whose promulgation the Jewish feast of Pentecost celebrated), prompts the faithful from within toward unanimity in communion and puts within them an inclination and an instinct to measure their lives by the guidance of the apostolic magisterium.

Communion will always mean not something servile or mechanical, but a living relation to the apostolic authority given by the Lord to structure his church, both at the local and the universal level. By this very fact, communion means a kind of submission that is neither servile nor mechanical, but enthusiastic, loving, and simple, like the acquiescence of children. The Catholic Church has always seen pride and self- centeredness in the perpetrators of schism or heresy. Theologically speaking, just making a material mistake does not suffice to constitute the sins of schism or heresy. There needs to be obstinacy, that is, arrogance in clinging to one’s ideas. Bishops love docility, not because they hold

authority and like to exercise it, even less because it makes the demands of administration easier, but because docility, according to St. Cyprian’s expression, favors the sacrament of unity. Bishops want this because they are fathers, doctors, and pastors.

We are going to see how the periphery of the church has to ratify its initiatives through the agency of hierarchical structures—this is extremely important, but not sufficient.

Someone like Waldo was able to come with his companions to the Roman Synod of 1179 to seek approval. We can only wonder if he came there with a serious intention of being docile to the synod, when we see with what ease his little group fell into heresy as soon as he was condemned. The break took place in 1184. If, as it seems, the Waldensian treatise (fragments of which A. Dondaine rediscovered)66 goes back to the beginning of that movement, anterior to its condemnation and its break from Rome, then Waldo and his companions had been disposed, from the beginning, to pursue their own line of thinking, even if they should be condemned and rejected by the church.67 They responded to the prohibition to preach, ordered by the Archbishop of Lyons, by invoking Mark 16:15 and Acts 5:29: “We must obey God rather than any human authority,” a principle that is at once sacrosanct and difficult to apply.67a In responding to the church’s question for all innovators, “Where was the church in your relationship to Christ?” they claimed to be themselves the church, and in so discerning, had already separated themselves from the Catholic Church.68 Such is the recurring, tragic story of so many great minds who believed they could be faithful to the truth only by clinging to their own interpretation, rather than to the sense of the church.

Sentire cum Ecclesia

The sense of the church—Sentire cum Ecclesia: this slightly vague formula still has a strong power of attraction. We can feel that it has profound meaning. It cannot be reduced to simple obedience to the demands of authority, no more than the very word church can mean exclusively the hierarchy, cut off from the body of the faithful. To interpret it exclusively in this sense, as Abbé Doerner has done recently,69 is to grasp only one aspect of the reality, and in a defensive way. It is not impossible to imagine a different perspective; and church history seems to offer cases where a genuine Sentire cum Ecclesia did not easily fit into the formula of sheer material obedience (superficial fidelity), something that lacks the plenitude of Catholic fidelity. Above all, that kind of interpretation treats the Body of Christ only as a huge administrative apparatus, where everything is determined from on high and where the members, required only to obey, don’t seem to be really alive themselves. In fact, the whole church lives from the truth and in the truth—and under conditions which respect completely the prerogatives of the hierarchy, as we will see. St. Ignatius, from whom this formula comes, did not write