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IN PRINT: BOOK REVIEW ECCLESIOLOGY FOR A GLOBAL CHURCH: A People Called and Sent Reviewed by Liz O’Connor, editor of CHURCH magazine.
Communion and community are important concepts in Gaillardetz’s thought. He begins by writing about the Hebrew concept of community, and then about the small Christian communities of New Testament times and the diversity-in-communion among them. He later draws analogies between these small gatherings and contemporary basic ecclesial communities (BEC) in Latin America and Africa, where Catholics gather to study the Scriptures and apply them to their daily lives. The BECs are in communion with each other, with the priests who visit them to celebrate the sacraments, and with their local bishops, but they operate democratically with openness to the movement of the Holy Spirit. Gaillardetz spends considerable time on the role of bishops in the emerging church, the church before and after the Council of Trent, and the church since Vatican Council II. For him the position of the bishop is crucial and was brought back into that central position by Vatican II. The tasks of the bishop include knowing and pastoring the people of his diocese, participating in collegial activity with the other bishops of the church and maintaining communion with the universal church, and sometimes having the courage to test initiatives to meet the particular needs of his particular diocese. Bishops are also charged, Gaillardetz asserts, with maintaining the “apostolicity” of the church. Apostolic succession has involved the passing of authority via Holy Orders from the original apostles; Gaillardetz says, however, that the concept also dates from the earliest Christian churches having apostolic teaching—and while different communities might have heard the gospel from different apostles, they recognized each other’s authenticity in the light of their teaching having come from authentic sources. He refers to that apostolicity and the church’s tradition as being now a matter of sacred, communal memory that the bishop is responsible to transmit and maintain through the media of “rituals, symbols, and narratives.” There is much more to this book: material on the restoration of the diaconate as a distinct order, on ecumenism and interfaith dialogues and their role in the church’s self-knowledge, on regional bishops’ conferences, on the difficulties posed by the centralization of power. The volume is fully footnoted and has a bibliography and index as well as questions for discussion and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter. Each element is built upon material that has preceded it. It could be a useful book for an adult study group willing to work with it. In his conclusion, Gaillardetz writes of challenges yet to be faced: questions of the makeup and significance of the local church, of ministerial structures, of difficulties in dialogue with other faith traditions; yet he remains hopeful. “Indeed, we might have reason to despair were it not for the enduring Christian conviction that if the church is indeed being born anew in our time, the Holy Spirit stands ready as its midwife.” |
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Richard Gaillardetz is fond of a quote from the Venerable Bede, “every day the church gives birth to the church.” This work recounts a history of the church’s development of its understanding of itself even as it proposes that in our globalizing world the universal church might do well to learn from the recent practices of churches in developing countries, and to apply more fully the principle of subsidiarity.
