Today's Task: To Experience God

1) "Jesus makes himself our travel companion in the Eucharist, and, in the Eucharist … effects a 'nuclear fission' in the depths of our being…Only this profound explosion of goodness that overcomes evil can give life to the other transformations necessary to change the world," the Pope said summarizing the message he left with the young people in Cologne.”[1]

“`Nuclear fission’ in the depths of our being” is a fitting metaphor for the Eucharist as the act of Christ’s self gift on the Cross. We are baptized into becoming Him as Body, and therefore empowered to make His self-gift ours.[2] The point is that when one enters the Church by the death event of Baptism, and is made one flesh with Him in the Eucharist, one becomes the “I” of Christ Himself. This is the “New Man” making up the Whole Christ, Head and Body. Therefore, in that we are “one” (not merely united) with Christ, we are to have the same act as Christ: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn. 15, 12). This act is the gift of oneself to the point of death.

2) The Major Crisis of Our Time: The Absence of God:

Benedict opened the homily with reference to the “presence of Christ.”

“The greatest `crisis’ facing the Church and the world is `the absence of God’ – a culture and way of life without any transcendent dimension, without any orientation toward eternity, toward the sacred, toward the divine. And that the `solution’ to this `crisis’ is quite simple to express in a phrase: the world needs `the presence of God.’
Benedict had long argued that the `absence of God’ in the modern world, the `secularization’ of modern `globalized’ society, has created a society in which the human person no longer has any sure protection against the depredations of power or, more importantly, any clear understanding of the meaning and ultimate destination of his life.
Yet his call to reorient human culture toward God has never meant an abandonment of the search for social justice. Rather, it has always been a challenge to place that search within the Christian context of repentance and belief in the Gospel….
Benedict was elected by his fellow cardinals, including many from very poor countries, because they agreed with him about the need for a Pope who could preach the priority of God, and in so doing, lay the only secure foundation for a just society.”[3]

2) The cause of this absence: We have lost the experience of God.

In sum: We have lost the experience of ourselves as images of God. When we experience self as imaging God, we experience God.
One experiences self in the act of self-transcendence. This is par excellence the act of Christian faith, and any action that is service to others approaching martyrdom asymptotically (or in fact).

John Paul II says:

“The surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence. This is how we should understand this `commitment’ which you mentioned in your question and which presents itself as the solution to the very problem of existence or to the personal drama of human existence. It is much more than a purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act of `accepting as true what God has revealed.’
“When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and person” (underline in original).[4]


Causes for the loss of the experience of the self:

1) Bourgeois mentality: Cardinal Francis George proposed the explanation of this thesis by the confrontation of God as all powerful and the greatest asset of man being his freedom. In order to affirm and bolster man’s freedom in this zero sum confrontation, Nietzsche declared God dead. We kill God and command freedom to flourish.
But there is a “soft” way of getting rid of God: trivialize Him by reducing Him to a hobby engaged in during leisure time (“If you go to Mass on Sunday [Saturday evening to leave Sunday free for the serious business of recreation and sports], good; and if you don’t go, that’s good too);

2) Relativize the epistemology. Instead of conversion from the bourgeois attitude and life-style, formulate a philosophy of “disengagement” from the harsh realities of an authentic life. Truth as conformity of the self to the created order of things is replaced by the disengaged self, creating certainty (truth) by the method of the clear and distinct idea.[5]

These two causes – “bourgeois life-style” (and therefore bourgeois mentality) and “epistemology restricted to sense perception” (and therefore, all is relative) - are reciprocal. To be bourgeois eliminates the experience of the self as intrinsically relational as self transcending, i.e., service to persons and conformity to “nature.” And if the human person is in reality intrinsically relational as imaging the divine Persons (who are intrinsically relational), then the bourgeois turn to self violates the deepest longings of the person to-be-for-other. The experience of acting on that longing never takes place. Once the experience of the self is dropped from the picture, we are left with only the experience of sensation and perception, which is experience on a different level than the self. Sensation is a noetic act of the person, but involves the mediation of sense organs, central nervous system and brain that transforms the “particles” and “waves” into our “world” of rainbows, red dresses, and smooth, solid surfaces. It is not an immediate access to being, but mediate. Only the immediate access to being that is the self made in the image and likeness of God gives us an experience of God. Knowledge through sensation can tell us about God. Experience of the “I” in the free determination of self to be gift (relation) gives us a direct experience of God. The recovery of Theism in the third millennium depends on the recovery of this experience.

The Task

Purify and Assimilate Modernity by rendering the Faith rationally


On the day after his election as Pope, Benedict XVI said in the homily of first papal Mass:

“With the Great Jubilee the Church was introduced into the new millennium carrying in her hands the Gospel, applied to the world through the authoritative re-reading of Vatican Council II. Pope John Paul II justly indicated the Council as a `compass’ with which to orient ourselves in the vast ocean of the third millennium. Also in his spiritual testament he noted, `I am convinced that for a very long time the new generations will draw upon the riches that this council of the 20th century gave us.
I too, as I start in the service that is proper to the Successor of Peter, wish to affirm with force my decided will to pursue the commitment to enact Vatican Council II, in the wake of my predecessors and in faithful continuity with the millennia-old tradition of the Church. Precisely this year is the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of this conciliar assembly (December 8, 1965).
With the passing of time, the conciliar documents have not lost their timeliness; their teachings have shown themselves to be especially pertinent to the new exigencies of the Church and the present globalized society.”[6]


Now: the Challenge and The Choice: The Meaning of the Second Vatican Council

Then- Cardinal Ratzinger sizes up the choice that confronts us:

“Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith?
“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.
“And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let s call it epochal, struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.”

Robert Moynihan says: “You use the phrase `epochal struggle…'”

“Yes.”

“Well, at the very least, that means it is a struggle of enormous historical importance…”

“Yes, certainly…”

Ratzinger continued:

“And it seems to me that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith (underline mine).
“Because it was the Council Fathers’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous.“That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith.”

Ratzinger then points to Augustine:

“Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.“On the other hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.” “This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.”

* * * * * * * *

My precis of the Method at stake: 1) To recover the subject as being by the experience of the self in the moral act. Then, to describe that ontological subject empirically (phenomenologically). This appears in Ratzinger’s (“Milestones…”): No believer, no revelation. Likewise in modern empirical thought: no seer, no rainbow; no hearer, no sound (see below). The being of the self is tranposed to the being supporting the perceptum. Hence, once we regain the experience of the self as real being – in fact, the privileged locus for the encounter with the act of existence and metaphysical enquiry (Fides et Ratio #83) – we regain the experience of God.

* * * * * * * *

The Negativities of Modern Philosophy:

John Paul II commented: “In fact, about 150 years after Descartes, all that was fundamentally Christian in the tradition of European thought had already been pushed aside. This was the time of the Enlightenment in France, when pure rationalism held sway. The French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, knocked down the altars dedicated to Christ, tossed crucifixes into the streets, introduced the cult of the goddess Reason. On the basis of this, there was a proclamation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The spiritual patrimony and in particular, the moral patrimony of Christianity were thus torn from their evangelical foundation. In order to restore Christianity to its full vitality, it is essential that these return to that foundation.
“Nevertheless, the process of turning away from the God of the Fathers, from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Gospel, and from the Eucharist did no bring about a rupture with a God who exists outside of the world. In fact, the God of the deists was always present; perhaps He was even present in the French Encyclopedists, in the work of Voltaire and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and even more so in Isaac Newton’s…modern physics.
“This God, however, is decidedly a God outside of the world… The rationalism of the Enlightenment put to one side the true God – in particular, God the Redeemer.
“The consequence was the man was supposed to live by his reason alone, as if God did not exist. Not only was if necessary to leave God out of the objective knowledge of the world… it as also necessary to act as if God did not exist, as if God were not interested in the world. The rationalism of the Enlightenment was able to accept a God outside of the world primarily because it was an unverifiable hypothesis. It was crucial, however, that such a God be expelled from the world.”[7]

This is the nub of modern philosophy known as “The Enlightenment.”

The Positivities of Modern Philosophy:

Subjectivity and the Empirical


(“To Go Beyond an Unfruitful and Overly Narrow Apologetic to a True Synthesis with the Positive Elements of Modernity:” Ratzinger below)

[Outline: 1) George Berkeley discovers the ontological value of sensible empiricism in the (undisclosed) experience of the perceiving subject. 2) Hegel potentially resolves the mind/body dualism by combining the autonomous rationalism of Kant with the empirical/sensible Romanticism of Herder. He does this by introducing Mind into Matter that develops into its true self by the dialectic process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that characterizes history. 3) Read back into both authors the work of Karol Wojtyla who combines phenomenology and metaphysics to explain the experience of the human “I” in the moral act which is Christian faith. 4) By so doing, the “true” intent of Vatican II is achieved. Cardinal Ratzinger: “It seems to me that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith. Because it was the Council Father’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous. That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith.”[8]]

The Great Discovery of Modern British Empiricism of the 17th and 18th centuries: Sensation is as much the act of the subject as well as the object. “The normal, unreflecting person thinks of color or sweetness as being in the dress or the candy; places the pain in the tooth, the tingling in the foot. The real ontological locus of all these, Descartes asserts, is in the mind. They are all ideas which are, indeed, brought about by certain properties of dress, candy, tooth, foot, but their place is in the mind.”[9] We don’t agree with Descartes’ radical subjectivism, but a great contribution to thought was made in directing full attention to the subject.
It’s true to say, and everyone knows it (“I’m forever chasing rainbows”), the rainbow is the outcome of the sun, the raindrops and your own vision. But so also is everything else we perceive through sensation. The following may be helpful:

“Perception takes place by means of sense-organs, though the ingredient in it of sensation, experienced as such, varies greatly as between the different senses. In touch I suppose we come nearest to sensation without perception; in sight to perception without sensation. But the two most important things to remember about perception are these: 1) that we must not confuse the percept with its cause. I do not hear undulating molecules of air; the name of what I hear is sound. I do not touch a moving system of waves or of atoms and electrons with relatively vast empty spaces between them; the name of what I touch is matter. 2) I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organ alone, but with a great part of my whole human being. Thus, I may say, loosely, that I `hear a thrush singing.’ But in strict truth all that I ever merely `hear’ – all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears – is sound.”[10]

Barfield’s conclusion on this point: “On almost any received theory of perception the familiar world – that is, the world which is apprehended, not through instruments and inference, but simply – is for the most part dependent upon the percipient.” And he goes on, “as the organs of sense are required to convert the unrepresentative particles into sensations for us, so something is required in us to convert sensations into `things’… On the assumption that the world whose existence is independent of our sensation and perception consists solely of `particles,’ two operations are necessary... in order to produce the familiar world we know. First, the sense-organs must be related to the particles in such a way as to give rise to sensations; and secondly, those mere sensations must be combined and constructed by the percipient mind into the recognizable and nameable objects we call `things.’”[11]


Berkeley and Hegel:

The contribution of Berkeley consists in affirming that what we perceive through sensation is really there, because we are really here perceiving it. It is the real and actual experience of the self perceiving through the senses that gives evidence that what we perceive is not merely a subjective activity of the mind but a real existent inferred from our real existence that we experience. We do not experience the being of the thing. We experience only the sensation. But we have a direct experience of ourselves as being acting in the perception.
The contribution of Hegel consisted in re-introducing the subject - that had been discovered but existentially “disengaged” by Descartes – into the existential, and therefore, objective - flow of history. The defect was that he conceptualized the solution in terms of an ideological creation, the“Geist” (World-Spirit) who emerged by the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, not in terms of the ultimately real individual person. He did not have what Karol Wojtyla was to disclose in his (our) time: the experience of the self as being (not consciousness). Wojtyla offered the acting person. Hegel glimpsed the solution in terms of a rationally fabricated absolute. But the makings of the solution were present. He opened modern thought to the possibility of discovering the experience of the self existentially in the material development of history while holding on to its spiritual autonomy as exemplified in Kant. Charles Taylor proposed: “I would like to claim that this ambition of combining the fullest rational autonomy with the greatest expressive unity was also central to Hegel’s philosophical endeavour. In this he was at one with his Romantic contemporaries. What separates them is that Hegel took a different path to reach this goal; and it is precisely this difference which makes his attempt to achieve this perhaps impossible synthesis the most impressive and continuingly fruitful of that time.
“What separates Hegel from his Romantic contemporaries is his insistence that the synthesis be achieved through reason. For many thinkers of the Romantic generation this seemed an impossible demand.”[12] In another place, he said: "It as a basic principle of Hegel’s thought that the subject and all his functions, however `spiritual,’ were inescapably embodied; and this in two related dimensions: as a `rational animal,’ that is, a living being who thinks; and as an expressive being, that is, a being whose thinking always and necessarily expresses itself in a medium.”[13]


The Contribution of John Paul II to the Healing of Modernity by the Faith Rendered Philosophically

Josef Ratzinger once remarked: “God in Karol Wojtyla is not only thought but also experienced. The pope expressly opposes the limitation of the concept of experience which occurred in Empiricism; he points out that the form of experience elaborated in the natural sciences is not the only kind, but that there are also other forms which are no less real and important: moral experience, human experience, religious experience. But this experience is, of course, also reflected upon and verified in its rational content.”[14]

1) An Anthropological Rendering of the Act of Faith: “To believe is to entrust this human I, in all its transcendence and all its transcendent greatness, but also with its limits, its fragility and its mortal condition, to Someone who announces himself as the beginning and the end, transcending all that is created and contingent, but who also reveals himself at the same time as a Person who invites us to companionship, participation and communion. An absolute person – or better, a personal Absolute.
“The surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence. This is how we should understand this `commitment’ which you mentioned in your question and which presents itself as the solution to the very problem of existence or to the personal drama of human existence. It is much more than a purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act of `accepting as true what God has revealed.’”[15]


2) A Phenomenological Rendering of that Act:

“In Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, we read that "the human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested gift of himself or herself" (24)….

"As I said earlier, in the experience of self-determination the human person stands revealed before us as a distinctive structure of self-possession and self-governance. Neither the one nor the other, however, implies being closed in on oneself. On the contrary, both self-possession and self-governance imply a special disposition to make a "gift of oneself," and this a "disinterested" gift. Only if one possesses oneself can one give oneself and do this in a disinterested way. And only if one governs oneself can one make a gift of oneself, and this again a disinterested gift. The problematic of disinterestedness certainly deserves a separate analysis, which it is not my intention to present here. An understanding of the person in categories of gift, which the teaching of Vatican II reemphasizes, seems to reach even more deeply into those dimensions brought to light by the foregoing analysis. Such an understanding seems to disclose even more fully the personal structure of self-determination.
"Only if one can determine oneself—as I attempted to show earlier—can one also become a gift for others. The Council's statement that "the human being...cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested gift of himself or herself" allows us to conclude that it is precisely when one becomes a gift for others that one most fully becomes oneself. This "law of the gift," if it may be so designated, is inscribed deep within the dynamic structure of the person. The text of Vatican II certainly draws its inspiration from revelation, in the light of which it paints this portrait of the human being as a person. One could say that this is a portrait in which the person is depicted as a being willed by God "for itself" and, at the same time, as a being turned "toward" others. This relational portrait of the person, however, necessarily presupposes the immanent (and indirectly "substantial") portrait that unfolds before us from an analysis of the personal structure of self-determination….
"I have attempted, however, even in this short presentation, to stress the very real need for a confrontation of the metaphysical view of the person that we find in St. Thomas and in the traditions of Thomistic philosophy with the comprehensive experience of the human being. Such a confrontation will throw more light on the cognitive sources from which the Angelic Doctor derived his metaphysical view. The full richness of those sources will then become visible. At the same time, perhaps we will better be able to perceive points of possible convergence with contemporary thought, as well as points of irrevocable divergence from it in the interests of the truth about reality.”[16]

In difficult but telling passage of his major philosophic work: The Acting Person, Karol Wojtyla states his achievement, glimpsed by Berkeley and fulfilling Hegel. Like Augustine in his relation to the pagan authors like Plato and Virgil, he purifies the modern achievements of empiricism and subjectivity by his philosophic rendering of the faith by using phenomenology and thomistic metaphysics. No less, he opens an access to being, not through conceptual knowing, but by the experience of the self in moral action – an access without the mediation of thought but registered in consciousness. He was able to say in Fides et Ratio #83 that the human person is privileged locus for the encounter with act of existing. With this, he is able to recover all the insights of subjectivist and empiricist modernity for a penetration into the believing person, while making the “I” as image of God – i.e., Jesus Christ - the ontological and defining center of anthropology and morality. Only with this achievement, can we come to experience the presence of God and communicate that present to our contemporaries.

“The consequence of the reflexive turn of consciousness is that this object – just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject – while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation `refexiveness’ is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment becomes apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences… This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience.
Indubitably, Man is, first of all, the subject of his being and his acting; he is the subject insofar as he is a being of determinate nature, which leads to consequences particularly in the acting. In traditional ontology that subject of existing and acting which man is was designated by the term suppositum – ontic support – which, we may say, serves as a thoroughly objective designation free of any experiential aspects, in particular of any relation to that experience of subjectivity in which the subject is given to itself as the self, as the ego. Hence suppositum abstracts from that aspect of consciousness owing to which the concrete man – the object being the subject – has the experience of himself as the subject and thus of his subjectivity. It is this experience that allows him to designate himself by means of the pronoun I. We know I to be a personal pronoun, always designating a concrete person. However, the denotation of this personal pronoun, thus….
Hence not only am I conscious of my ego (on the ground of self-knowledge) but owing to my consciousness in its reflexive function I also experience my ego. I have the experience of myself as the concrete subject of the ego’s very subjectiveness. Consciousness is not just an aspect but also an essential dimension or an actual moment of the reality of the being that I am, since it constitutes its subjectiveness in the experiential sense.”[17]

The above is a theological and philosophical rendering of how the “nuclear fission” that is the Eucharist as divine act, when lived and cognized as lived, can be made intelligible and communicated first experientially (the “New Evangelization”), and then rationally.

1] Benedict XVI’s Summary of Cologne, August, 2005: Zenit August 24, 2005
[2] Ratzinger shows the radical transformation of the believer into the very subjectivity of Christ. In Gal. 2, 20, he says, “I live, no not I; Christ lives in me.” Ratzinger goes to Paul’s 1 Cor. 12, 12 to drive home that there is an ontological radicality here, and not merely metaphorical. He quotes, “For as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, many as they are, form one body, so also is it with Christ;” and comments: “Paul does not say `as in an organism there are many members working in harmony, so too in the Church,’ as if he were proposing a purely sociological model of the Church, but at the very moment when he leaves behind the ancient simile, he shifts the idea to an entirely different level. He affirms, in fact, that, just as there is one body but many members, `so it is with Christ’ (1 Cor. 12, 12). The term of the comparisons is not the Church, since, according to Paul, the Church is in no wise a separate subject endowed with its own substance. The new subject is much rather `Christ’ himself and the Church is nothing but the space of this new unitary subject, which is, therefore much more than mere social interaction.” The point is that when one enters the Church by the death event of Baptism, one becomes the “I” of Christ Himself.
[3] “The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday (2005) 4-5.
[4] Be Not Afraid, Interview between John Paul II and Andre Frossard, St. Martin’s Press (1984) 67.
[5] "(T)his structure now replaces the concept of God and necessarily excludes it, since it takes its place. This systematic exclusion of the divine from the shaping of history and human life, referring to the definitiveness of scientific insight, is perhaps the genuinely new, and at the same time the truly threatening, element in that strange product of Europe that we call Marxism. I now assert that this same combination, in weaker forms, is active in the life of the Western world even outside Marxist thinking (he is talking of Western/American capitalism here). If it were to succeed in establishing itself definitively, this would ... be the end of what could make Europe a positive force in the world" (bold mine). (Turning Point For Europe? Ignatius, 1994, p. 125).
[6] Benedict XVI, “You Are Peter,” Inside the Vatican May 2005 p. 28.
[7] John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Knopf (1994) 52-53.
[8] Robert Moynihan, The Spriital Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, “Let God’s Light Shine Forth” Doubleday (2005) 35.
[9] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Harvard University Press (1989) 162.
[10] Owen Barfield, Saving Appearances, Wesleyan (1988) 20
[11] Ibid 24.
[12] Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge University Press (1979) 12.
[13] Ibid.18.
[14] Communio 22 (Spring, 1995) 110.
[15] Andre Frossard, Be Not Afraid, St. Martin’s Press (1982) 66-67.
[16] Karol Wojtyla, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination “ in Person and Community Lang (1993) 193-195.This paper was presented by then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla at an international conference on St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and Naples, 17-24 April 1974.
[17] The Acting Person, D. Reidel Publishing Co. (1979) 42-46.

Rev. Robert A. Connor

Feast of St. Bartholomew, August 24, 2005

“Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, `we have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, the one about whom the prophets wrote: he is Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.’ Nathaniel said to him, `can anything good come out of Nazareth?’… When Jesus saw Nathaniel coming, he said of him, `Behold, a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile!’ `How did you know me?’ said Nathaniel. `Before Philip called you… I saw you under the fig tree.’ Nathaniel answered, `Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’” [1]

Nathaniel speaks his mind concerning Nazareth. Jesus praises his forthright sincerity and proves that he is privy to that sincerity from within by revealing the detail, “Before Philip came to call you, I saw you under the fig tree.” Amazed, Nathaniel confesses, “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”[2]

* * * * * * *

The import of the above exchange is the core of the mind of Benedict XVI. That core is the following: The revelation of the truth of Christ is imparted only to those who speak the truth about themselves. Said differently, the catechumenate is the core of catechesis, or perhaps, better: Revelation is not a book, in the sense of being identical with Sacred Scripture. In the same vein, then-Cardinal Ratzinger remarked, “I have my doubts as to whether the quintessentially Catholic, as living structure, can be captured in a formula. One can try to indicate the essential elements, but it requires more than just knowing something about it, as I can, for example know something about a party program. It is an entrance into a living structure, and it comprises the totality of one’s life plan. For this reason, it can never, I think, be expressed in words alone. It has to be a way of living, of lived identification, a merging with a way of thinking and understanding. The two things enrich each other.”[3]

Christian faith must be a living experience and this because Revelation is the exposure to the lived experience of the Person of Jesus Christ. “The faith does not have permanence in and of itself. One can never simply presuppose it as something already concluded in itself. It must be continually re-lived. And as it is an act, an act that embraces every dimension of our existence, it must always be thought through anew and always borne witness to anew.”[4]

The question of sincerity as self-disclosure is a fundamental component of faith as as-similation of revelation. Both revelation and faith are corresponding and reciprocal acts of self-disclosure. On the part of God, it is becoming one of us. On our part, it is becoming Him. If revelation is the very Person of Jesus Christ as act of Self-gift, then faith must be the mirror-image of that act as receptivity. Failing that, knowledge about Christ is equivalent to practical atheism as “absence of God.” To know about is not to experience. A propos of the regnant European bourgeois life and rationalism in the 17th and 18th centuries, John Paul II wrote: “about 150 years after Descartes, all that was fundamentally Christian in the tradition of European thought had already been pushed aside. This was the time of the Enlightenment in France, when pure rationalism held sway. The French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, knocked down the altars dedicated to Christ, tossed crucifixes into the streets, introduced the cult of the goddess Reason. On the basis of this, there was a proclamation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The spiritual patrimony and in particular, the moral patrimony of Christianity were thus torn from their evangelical foundation. In order to restore Christianity to its full vitality, it is essential that these return to that foundation.
“Nevertheless, the process of turning away from the God of the Fathers, from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Gospel, and from the Eucharist did no bring about a rupture with a God who exists outside of the world. In fact, the God of the deists was always present; perhaps He was even present in the French Encyclopedists, in the work of Voltaire and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and even more so in Isaac Newton’s…modern physics.
“This God, however, is decidedly a God outside of the world… The rationalism of the Enlightenment put to one side the true God – in particular, God the Redeemer.
“The consequence was the man was supposed to live by his reason alone, as if God did not exist. Not only was if necessary to leave God out of the objective knowledge of the world… it as also necessary to act as if God did not exist, as if God were not interested in the world. The rationalism of the Enlightenment was able to accept a God outside of the world primarily because it was an unverifiable hypothesis. It was crucial, however, that such a God be expelled from the world.”[5]

To know about God is not to experience Him. Faith involves the dynamic of sincerity as a conversion away from self yielding an experience of self, and hence self-knowledge. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger formulated apodictically; “One must know oneself as one really is if one is to know God,”[6] and then presented the scene of the encounter of Christ with the Samaritan woman as concrete illustration.

I offer the following at length because a) it reveals the mind of Benedict XVI in the point that he considers the supreme crisis of the present day, the absence of God; and b) it is vintage Ratzinger in its depth, clarity and simplicity as portrayal of the transition from the objectified “horizon” of “thing” (water) to the “horizon” of “I” as disclosed by the act of sincerity. This revealing of God’s presence among us, “I who speak with thee am he,” is compelling.

“It [Jn 4] opens with the meeting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the context of a normal, human, everyday experience – the experience of thirst, which is surely one of man’s most primordial experiences. In the course of the conversation, the subject shifts to that thirst that is a thirst for life, and the point is made that one must drink again and again, must come again and again to the source. In this way, the woman is made aware of what in actuality she, like every human being, has always known but to which she has not always adverted: that she thirsts for life itself and that all the assuaging that she seeks and finds cannot slake this living, elemental thirst. The superficial `empirical’ experience has been transcended.
“But what has been revealed is still of this world. It is succeeded, therefore, by one of those conversations on two levels that are so characteristic of John’s technique of recording dialogue, the Johannine `misunderstanding,’ as it is called by the exegetes. From the fact that Jesus and the Samaritan woman, though they use the same words, have in mind two very different levels of meaning and, separated thus by the ambiguity of human speech, are speaking at cross-purposes, there is manifested the lasting incommensurability of faith and human experience however extensive that experience may be. For the woman understands by `water’ that of which the fairy tales speak: the elixir of life by virtue of which man will not die and his thirst for life will be entirely satisfied. She remains in the sphere of bios[7], of the empirical life that is familiar to her, whereas Jesus wants to reveal to her the true life, the Zoë[8].
“In the next stage, the woman’s full attention has been attracted to the subject of a thirst for life. She no longer asks for something, for water or for any other single thing, but for life, for herself. This explains the apparently totally unmotivated interpolation by Jesus: `Go and call your husband!’ (Jn. 4, 16). It is both intentional and necessary, for her life as a whole, with all its thirst, is the true subject here. As a result, there comes to light the real dilemma, the deep-seated waywardness, of her existence: she is brought face to face with herself. In general, we can reduce what is happening to the formula: one must know oneself as one really is if one is to know God. The real medium the primordial experience of all experiences, is that man himself is the place in which and through which he experiences God (underline mine). Admittedly, the circle could also be closed in the opposite direction: it could be said that it is only by first knowing God that one can properly know oneself.
But we anticipate. As we have said, the woman must come first to the knowledge of herself, to the acknowledgement of herself. For what she makes now is a kind of confession: a confession in which, at last, she reveals herself unsparingly [emphasis mine]. Thus a new transition has occurred – to preserve our earlier terminology, a transition from empirical and experimental to `experiential’ experience, to `existential experience.’ The woman stands face to face with herself. It is not longer a question now of something but of the depths of the I itself and, consequently, of the radical poverty that is man’s I-myself, the place where this I is ultimately revealed behind the superficiality of the something. From this perspective, we might regard the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman as the prototype of catechesis (underline mine) It must lead from the something to the I. Beyond every something it must ensure the involvement of man himself, of this particular man. It must produce self-knowledge, and self-acknowledgment so that the indigence and need of man’s being will be evident.
“But let us return to the biblical text! The Samaritan woman has achieved this radical confrontation with her own self. In the moment in which this occurs, the question of all questions arises always and of necessity; the question about oneself becomes a question about God. It is only apparently without motivation but in reality inevitable that the woman should ask now: How do things stand with regard to adoration, that is, with regard to God and my relationship to him? (cf. Jn. 4, 20). The question about foundation and goal makes itself heard. Only at this point does the offering of Jesus’ true gift become possible. (underline mine). For the `gift of God’ is God himself, God precisely as gift – that is, the Holy Spirit (cf. verses 10 and 24). At the beginning of the conversation, there seemed no likelihood that this woman, with her obviously superficial way of life, would have any interest in the Holy Spirit. But once she was led to the depths of her own being [underline mine], the question arose that must always arise if one is to ask the question that barns in one’s soul. Now the woman is aware of the real thirst by which she is driven. Hence she can at last learn what it is for which this thirst thirsts.
“It is the purpose and meaning of all catechesis to lead to this thirst. For one who knows neither that there is a Holy Spirit nor that one can thirst for him, it cannot begin otherwise than with sensory perception. Catechesis must lead to self-knowledge, to the exposing of the I, so that it lets the masks fall and moves out of the realm of something into that of being. Its goal is conversio, that conversion of man that results in his standing face to face with himself. Conversio (`conversion,’ metanoia) is identical with self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is the nucleus of all knowledge. Conversio is the way in which man finds himself and thus knows the question of all questions: How can I worship God? It is the question that means his salvation; it is the raison d’etre of catechesis" ( J. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, Ignatius (1987)353-355).

[1] Jn. 1, 46.
[2] Jn. 1, 49.
[3] J. Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius (1997) 19.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “What Does the Church Believe?” The Catholic World Report, March 1993. 26.
[5] John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Knopf (1994) 52-53.
[6] J. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, Ignatius (1987) 354.
[7] Biological life that is self-contained.
[8] Trinitarian Life that is self-transcending.

The Import of August 23, 1971-1982 in the History of Opus Dei:

1) Historical text: “Only rarely did the Father [St. Josemaria Escriva] mention these supernatural events; he would not do it unless he considered it necessary for the good of the Work and of his children. So we know little about the extraordinary graces that he received. But we do know some of them: for instance, that of August 23, 1971. He was spending a few days in Caglio, a little village near the town of Como, in northern Italy. That morning, after celebrating Mass, he was reading the newspaper, and suddenly, with great clarity and irresistible force, there was imparted to his soul a divine locution: `Adeamus cum fiducia ad thronum gloriae, ut misericordiam consequamur’ (`Let us confidently approach the throne of glory, to obtain mercy’).
Then, the footnote: “This is Hebrews 4, 16, with one difference: `throne of glory,’ instead of `throne of grace.’ The founder explained that our Lady is the throne of glory, in virtue of her constant and unalloyed intimacy with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is good that by means of her intercession we betake ourselves to God, appealing humbly to his mercy… The founder was in the habit of doing that, and so this locution `confirmed him in his need to always go to her’… He directed Don Alvaro to communicate this locution, in writing, to those on the General Council; this was, Ernesto Julia testifies, the only occasion on which he proceeded in this way…
Archbishop [now Cardinal] Julian Herranz tells us something interesting. He heard about this supernatural incident from the founder himself, shortly after the return from Caglio. At this time the work on Cavabianca (the definitive seat of the Roman College of the Holy Cross) had already begun, and the Father asked that they put there a stone bas-relief which would show our Lady seated on a throne and being crowned oby the Blessed Trinity. AT its base would be engraved the words of the locution. The Father suggested that while they awaited the juridical solution to the institutional problem of the Work, those words should be prayed as an aspiration, to obtain from our Lady the desired solution. That was a suggestion that his children acted on for years. `And so,’ concludes Archbishop Herrance, `very great were our joy and our gratitude to the Blessed Virgin when the Pope (who knew nothing about this) made public his decision to establish Opus Dei as a personal prelature on August 23, 1982 – the anniversary of the special divine light received by the founder eleven years earlier.’”[1]

2) The communication of the locution by St. Josemaria himself.

“I am going to tell you something that God Our Lord wants you to know. The sons of God in Opus Dei adeamus cum fiducia - we must go with much faith – ad thronum gloriae, to the throne of glory, the Most Holy Virgin, the Mother of God and our Mother, whom we invoke so many times as Sedes Sapientiae, ut misericordiam consequamur, to get mercy…
“Keep it in mind in these moments and also afterwards. I would say that it is a desire of God: that we place our personal interior life within these words that I have just said. At times you will hear them without the noise of words, in the intimacy of your soul, when you least expect it. Adeamus cum fiducia: go – I repeat – with trust to the most Sweet Heart of Mary, who is our Mother and Mother of Jesus. And with Her, who is Mediatrix of all grace, to the Most Sacred and Merciful Heart of Jesus Christ.”


3) Historical Account of the Erection of the Prelature:

On August 23 of 1982, the Holy Father, John Paul II, made the official announcement of his decision to erect Opus Dei as personal Prelature after having approved – on the 5th of August of 1982, feast of our Lady of the Snows – a Declaration of the Sacred Congregation for Bishop in which the fundamental characteristics of the new Prelature are explained. Finally, the Holy Father ordered the Prelature to be erected on the 28th of November of 1982, the first Sunday of Advent. He ordered the pontifical act be published on that Sunday’s vigil, that is, the afternoon of Saturday November 27th which coincided with a date beloved by St. Josemaria, the feast of the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal, which was also the anniversary of the death of his Father.
[1] Andres Vazquez de Prada, The Founder of Opus Dei Scepter (2004) 426-427.

Queenship of Mary, August 22, 2005:

Taking from Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium #36, John Paul II pinpoints the anthropology of kingship by the act of self-mastery in order to serve. In the case of Christ, the self-mastery took the form of “the Logos adopt(ing) the being of the man Jesus into his own being and speak(ing) of it in terms of his own I: `For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’ (Jn. 6, 38). In the son’s obedience, where both wills become one in a single Yes to the will of the Father, communion takes place between human and divine being.”[1] Jesus Christ is King because he took the human will of Jesus of Nazareth as his own, and, having been made sin(2 Cor. 5, 21), subdued it. That act of the divine Person mastering his own human will is the establishment of kingship. It is also the supreme manifestation of freedom. John Paul II remarked: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom.” (Veritatis Splendor #85). To be king is to be master of oneself. Again, John Paul II said, “This dignity is expressed in readiness to serve, in keeping with the example of Christ, who `came not to be served but serve.’ If, in the light of this attitude of Christ’s, `being a king’ is truly possible only by `being a servant,’ then `being a servant’ also demands so much spiritual maturity that it must really be described as `being a king.’ In order to be able to serve others worthily and effectively we must be able to master ourselves, possess the virtues that make this mastery possible. Our sharing in Christ’s kingly mission – His `kingly function’ (munus) – is closely lined with every sphere of both Christian and human morality.”[2]

In the case of our Lady, “the Mother of Christ is glorified as `Queen of the Universe.” [3] She is so because she too mastered and subdued her own will. “She who at the Annunciation called herself the `handmaid of the Lord’ remained throughout her earthly life faithful to what this name expresses. In this she confirmed that she was a true `disciple’ of Christ, who strongly emphasized that his mission was one of service: the Son of Man `came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mt. 20, 28). In this way Mary became the first of those who, `serving Christ also in others with humility and patience lead their brothers and sisters to that King whom to serve is to reign,’ and she fully obtained that `state of royal freedom’ proper to Christ’s disciples: to serve means to reign!”[4]

Also, now, Mary continues to exercise her Queenship insofar as she continues to make the gift of herself in engendering the Body of Christ (us): “A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And being with child, she cried out in her travail and was in the anguish of delivery…And she brought forth a male child, who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up to God and to his throne” (Apocalypse 12, 2, 5). John Paul continues, “The glory of serving does not cease to be her royal exaltation: assumed into heaven, she does not cease her saving service, which expresses her maternal mediation `until the eternal fulfillment of all the elect.”[5]


[1] Josef Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 92.
[2] John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, #21.
[3] John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater #41.
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid

The Crisis of Our Time: The Loss of the Experience of God.

1) The crisis our time: The Absence of God.

“The greatest `crisis’ facing the Church and the world is `the absence of God’ – a culture and way of life without any transcendent dimension, without any orientation toward eternity, toward the sacred, toward the divine. And that the `solution’ to this `crisis’ is quite simple to express in a phrase: the world needs `the presence of God.’
Benedict had long argued that the `absence of God’ in the modern world, the `secularization’ of modern `globalized’ society, has created a society in which the human person no longer has any sure protection against the depredations of power or, more importantly, any clear understanding of the meaning and ultimate destination of his life.
Yet his call to reorient human culture toward God has never meant an abandonment of the search for social justice. Rather, it has always been a challenge to place that search within the Christian context of repentance and belief in the Gospel….
Benedict was elected by his fellow cardinals, including many from very poor countries, because they agreed with him about the need for a Pope who could preach the priority of God, and in so doing, lay the only secure foundation for a just society.”[1]

2) The cause of this absence: we have lost the experience of God.

Up front, the in-depth answer: We have lost the experience of ourselves as images of God. When we experience self as imaging God, we experience God.
. One experiences self in the act of self-transcendence. This is par excellence the act of Christian faith, and any action that is service to others approaching martyrdom asymptotically (or in fact). John Paul II says:
“The surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence. This is how we should understand this `commitment’ which you mentioned in your question and which presents itself as the solution to the very problem of existence or to the personal drama of human existence. It is much more than a purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act of `accepting as true what God has revealed.’
“When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and person” (underline in original).[2]


Causes for the loss of the experience of the self:

1) Bourgeois mentality: Cardinal Francis George proposed the explanation of this thesis by the confrontation of God as all powerful and the greatest asset of man being his freedom. In order to affirm and bolster man’s freedom in this zero sum confrontation, Nietzsche declared God dead. We kill God and command freedom to flourish.
But there is a “soft” way of getting rid of God: trivialize Him by reducing Him to a hobby engaged in during leisure time (“If you go to Mass on Sunday [Saturday evening to leave Sunday free for the serious business of recreation and sports], good; and if you don’t go, that’s good too);
2) Relativize the epistemology. Instead of conversion from the bourgeois attitude and life-style, formulate a philosophy of “disengagement” from the harsh realities of an authentic life. Truth as conformity of the self to the created order of things is replaced by the disengaged self creating certainty (truth) by the method of the clear and distinct idea.[3]

Obviously, 1) and 2) are reciprocal causes. To be bourgeois eliminates the experience of the self as intrinsically relational as conforming to Being as Other Person/persons and “nature.” Once the experience of the self is dropped from consideration, we are left with only the experience of sensation and perception, but not with things. With the supreme criterion that “ideas” had to be clear and distinct as the criterion of truth, sensation and perception are acts of the self’s subjectivity, not of the receptivity and objectivity of things. The most perceptive of the modern philosophers, particularly the British (Locke and Hume), insisted in precisely this, that sensation in itself does not yield the real thing-in-itself. The self becomes reduced to consciousness and a bundle of sensations. Hence, from the side of ideas, or from the side of sensation, the self as a reality able to be experience drops out of existence. God may be thought, but, as the self, He cannot be experienced.
John Paul II commented: “In fact, about 150 years after Descartes, all that was fundamentally Christian in the tradition of European thought had already been pushed aside. This was the time of the Enlightenment in France, when pure rationalism held sway. The French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, knocked down the altars dedicated to Christ, tossed crucifixes into the streets, introduced the cult of the goddess Reason. On the basis of this, there was a proclamation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The spiritual patrimony and in particular, the moral patrimony of Christianity were thus torn from their evangelical foundation. In order to restore Christianity to its full vitality, it is essential that these return to that foundation.
“Nevertheless, the process of turning away from the God of the Fathers, from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Gospel, and from the Eucharist did no bring about a rupture with a God who exists outside of the world. In fact, the God of the deists was always present; perhaps He was even present in the French Encyclopedists, in the work of Voltaire and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and even more so in Isaac Newton’s…modern physics.
“This God, however, is decidedly a God outside of the world… The rationalism of the Enlightenment put to one side the true God – in particular, God the Redeemer.
“The consequence was the man was supposed to live by his reason alone, as if God did not exist. Not only was if necessary to leave God out of the objective knowledge of the world… it as also necessary to act as if God did not exist, as if God were not interested in the world. The rationalism of the Enlightenment was able to accept a God outside of the world primarily because it was an unverifiable hypothesis. It was crucial, however, that such a God be expelled from the world.”[4]

This is the nub of modern philosophy known as “The Enlightenment.”

The Choice: The Meaning of the Second Vatican Council:

Then- Cardinal Ratzinger sizes up the choice that confronts us:

“Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith?
“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.
“And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let s call it epochal, struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.”
Robert Moynihan says: “You use the phrase `epochal struggle…”

“Yes.”

“Well, at the very least, that means it is a struggle of enormous historical importance…”

“Yes, certainly…”

Ratzinger continued:

“And it seems to me that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith (underline mine).
“Because it was the Council Fathers’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous.“That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith.”

Ratzinger then points to Augustine:

“Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.“On the other hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.” “This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.”

What is modernity, otherwise known as “the Enlightenment”?

"Disengagement" from the world as a spectator outside of the existential flow of history. Criterion of truth: the clear and distinct idea (which can mean sensation).

The acute examination of external sensation discovering that it only gives me perceptions that are really in me and from me. Common sense says that there are real beings outside of my thought and sensation, but if I attend only to the five senses, I don’t perceive substance (being), causality, the soul or God. A tree crashing in a forest may give off vibrations, but not sounds. There must be a receiver for there to be “sound” or “sight.”
That being so, Kant concluded that being, substance, cause, God, soul, etc. must be part of the structure of the human mind. They are not “out there” but “in here” as organizing demands of thought in the theoretical realm. In the practical, obligation does not derive from the order of reality, but from an internal imperative of my practical mind. Therefore, the authentic life – the “autonomous” - is one lived only in accord with the “categorical imperative” and not from any personal selfishness or vanity. The latter, Kant calls the “heteronymous.”
Hegel saw the truths of both sides of the duality of thought and things (body/mind) and wanted to re-instate modern man into the real historical world from which he had disengaged himself. He embraced both Kant’s autonomous self (freedom means determination of the self by the self, not being moved by inclination from without or from below) and the “heteronymous” inclination from without and from below of the expressivism of the Romantics (above all Herder, Goethe). It is not far from combining a Woodstock and a contemplative session of Buddhist monks. He did this by proposing the “philosophoumenon” of the Geist (the World Spirit). This, of course, did not exist. Hegel’s initiative awaited Wojtyla’s arrival on the scene.

* * * * * * *

The Key to the Recovery of Modern Philosophy by the Faith: The Discovery of the “I” as Real Being by the Use of Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of St. Thomas

What was missing was Wojtyla’s master work – The Acting Person - where he discovers the “I” in the act of self-determination in moral action. In his conversation with Frossard, he commented:

“And if God is not `dead’ in my intelligence, that is due in particular to my conscious refusal to accept the familiar methodological and epistemological mechanisms that have led to his `death’ in the mind of contemporary man. This does not mean that I do not admire the progress and conquests of science – far from it. I appreciate all that has been gained in the realm of research and experiment by the positive sciences. But I do not accept the positivist rule. I do not agree with it because it has a narrow and hence erroneous notion of experience, which deprives man of realities accessible to his capacity for knowledge. I am afraid that the next stage in this epistemology will, after the `death of God,’ the death of man, which one can see looming up over the horizon of our culture and civilization (underline mine).”[5]

For John Paul II, the subject as real, and by real, he means Being. His key to reaching the subject as Being is experience. His claim is that the category of experience is wider than being limited to the external or internal senses. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he says, “It is therefore possible to speak from a solid foundation about human experience, moral experience, or religious experience. And if it is possible to speak of such experiences, it is difficult to deny that, in the realm of human experience, one also finds good and evil, truth and beauty, and God. God Himself certainly is not an object of human empiricism; the Sacred Scripture, in its own way, emphasizes this: `No one has ever seen God’ (cf. Jn. 1, 18). If God is a knowable object – as both the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Romans teach – He is such on the basis of man’s experience both of the visible world and of his interior world” (34).
He emphasizes that man can and does experience himself when he acts freely.

“Today more than ever before we feel the need – and also see a greater possibility – of objectifying the problem of the subjectivity of the human being…. The antinomy of Subjectivism vs. Objectivism, along with the underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism, created conditions that discouraged dealing with human subjectivity – for fear that this would lead inevitably to subjectivism. These fears, which existed among thinkers who subscribed to realism and epistemological objectivism, were in some sense warranted by the subjectivistic and idealistic character – or at least overtones - analyses conducted within the realm of `pure consciousness.’ This only served to strengthen the line of demarcation in philosophy and the opposition between the `objective’ view of the human being, which was also an ontological view (the human being as a being), and the `subjective’ view, which seemed inevitably to sever the human being from this reality.
Today we are seeing a breakdown of that line of demarcation… I am convinced that the line of demarcation between the subjectivistic (idealistic) and objectivistic (realistic) views in anthropology and ethics must break down and is in fact breaking down on the basis of the experience of the human being. This experience automatically frees us from pure consciousness as the subject conceived and assumed a priori and leads us to the full concrete existence of the human being, to the reality of the conscious subject."[6]

[1] “The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday (2005) 4-5.
[2] "Be Not Afraid," Interview between John Paul II and Andre Frossard, St. Martin’s Press (1984) 67.
[3] "(T)his structure now replaces the concept of God and necessarily excludes it, since it takes its place. This systematic exclusion of the divine from the shaping of history and human life, referring to the definitiveness of scientific insight, is perhaps the genuinely new, and at the same time the truly threatening, element in that strange product of Europe that we call Marxism. I now assert that this same combination, in weaker forms, is active in the life of the Western world even outside Marxist thinking (he is talking of Western/American capitalism here). If it were to succeed in establishing itself definitively, this would ... be the end of what could make Europe a positive force in the world" (bold mine). ("Turning Point For Europe?" Ignatius, 1994, p. 125).
[4] John Paul II, "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," Knopf (1994) 52-53.
[5] Be Not Afraid, op. cit. 53.
[6] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Community Lang (1993) 209-210.

Rev. Robert A. Connor

The Feast of Maximillian Kolbe, August 14, 2005

1) The canonization of Maximilian Maria Kolbe on October 10, 1982 as martyr is a precedent-setting event marking the paradigm shift from dying for the faith as a set of propositions and dying for the dignity of the human person as revealed in Jesus Christ.

2) The larger context in which this can be appreciated is contained in the words of then- Josef Ratzinger:

“Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith?
“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.
“And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let s call it epochal, struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.”
Robert Moynihan says: “You use the phrase `epochal struggle…” “Yes.”

“Well, at the very least, that means it is a struggle of enormous historical importance…”“Yes, certainly…”

Ratzinger continued:

“And it seems to me that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith.
“Because it was the Council Fathers’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous.
“That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith.”
Ratzinger then points to Augustine:

“Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.
“On the other hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.
“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.”
“This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.”
3) To dramatize the paradigm shift in the canonization of Kolbe as martyr, the historical event of October 10, 1982 tells the story:

“Father Kolbe was widely regarded as a martyr, but was he a `martyr’ in the technical sense of the term –someone who had died because of odium fidei, `hatred of the faith’? He had not been arrested because of odium fidei, and witnesses to his self-sacrifice had testified that the Auschwitz commandant, Fritsch, had simply accepted Kolbe’s self-substitution for the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek without evincing any particular satisfaction that he was killing a priest. The theologians and experts of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (the Vatican office that considers beatifications and canonizations) had argued that Kolbe, while undoubtedly a saint, was not a martyr in the traditional sense of the term. At Kolbe’s beatification in 1971, Pope Paul VI had said that Kolbe could be considered a `martyr of charity,’ but this was a personal gesture and the category lacked standing in theology or canon law. Since the, though, the Polish and German bishops had petitioned the Holy See that Kolbe be canonized as a martyr, rather than as a saintly confessor who happened to have died under extraordinary circumstances.
“John Paul II appointed two special judges to consider the question from the theological and historical points of view. Their reports were then submitted to a special advisory commission. The majority of the commission concluded that Blessed Maximilian Kolbe’s self-sacrifice did not satisfy the traditional criteria for martyrdom, heroic as it undoubtedly was. On the day of his canonization, it was unclear whether Kolbe would be given the accolade of a martyr, as many Poles, Germans, and others wished.
“October 10, 1982, a magnificent autumn morning, found a quarter of a million people in St. Peter’s Square, where they saw a great banner, a portrait of Father Kolbe, draped from the central loggia. Still, the question hung in the air: Would Kolbe be recognized as a martyr? The answer came when John Paul II processed out of the basilica and into the square wearing red vestments, the liturgical color of martyrs. He had overridden the counsel of his advisory commission, and in his homily he declared that `in virtue of my apostolic authority, I have decreed that Maximillian Mary Kolbe, who following his beatification was venerated as a confessor, will henceforth be venerated also as a martyr’!
“John Paul II was making an important theological point in deciding that St. Maximilian Kolbe was indeed a martyr – systematic hatred for the human person (systematic odium hominis, so to speak) was a contemporary equivalent of the traditional criterion for martyrdom, odium fidei. Because Christian faith affirmed the truth about the inalienable dignity of the human person, anyone who hated that truth hated, implicitly, the Christian faith. Modern totalitarianism was an implicit form of odium fidei, because it reduced person to things.”
The significance of the shift from confessor only to martyr first and also confessor involves the purification of modern epistemology and anthropology by Christian faith as a “lived experience” before it is a “set of propositions.” John Paul asserted:

“It is urgent to rediscover and to set forth once more the authentic reality of the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out. A word, in any event, is not truly received until It passes into action, until it is put into practice. Faith is a decision involving one’s whole existence. It is an encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and Jesus Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (cf. J. 14, 6). It entails an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived (cf. Ga. 2, 20), in profound love of God and of our brothers and sisters.”

It must be remembered in the same Veritatis Splendor that “(t)hrough the moral life, faith becomes `confession,’ not only before God but also before men: it becomes witness…. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven’ (Mt. 5, 14-16). These works are above all those of charity (cf. Mt. 25, 31-46) and of the authentic freedom which is manifested and lived in the gift of self, even to the total gift of self, like that of Jesus, who on the Cross `loved the Church and gave himself up for her’ (Eph. 5, 25)…. Charity, in conformity with the radical demands of the Gospel, can lead the believer to the supreme witness of martyrdom” (#89).
This too is the example par excellence of the “New Evangelization.”

1)The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, “Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday (2005) 35-36.
“Men saw what happened in the camp at Auschwitz. And even if to their eyes it must have seemed that a companion of their torment `dies,’ even if humanly speaking they could consider `his departure’ as `a disaster,’ nevertheless in their minds this was not simply `death.’ Maximilian did not die but `gave his life… for his brother.’ In that death… there was the whole definitive greatness of the human act and of the human choice. He spontaneously offered himself up to death out of love. And in this human death of his there was the clear witness borne too Christ: the witness borne in Christ to the dignity of man, to the sanctity of his life, and to the saving power of death in which the power of love is made manifest….
“Does not this death – faced spontaneously, for love of man – constitute a particular fulfillment of the words of Christ? Does hot this death make Maximilian particularly like unto Christ – the Model of Martyrs – who gives his own life on the Cross for his brethren? Does not this death posses a particular and penetrating eloquence for our age? Does not this death constitute a particularly authentic witness of the Church in the modern world?” Homily of His Holiness John Paul II at the Canonization of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe. St. Peter’s Square, Rome October 10, 1982.
2) George Weigel, Witness to Hope, Cliff Street Books (Harper Collins) (1999) 447-448.
3)Veritatis Splendor #88.

You are right. Kolbe's death is what JPII and Benedict XVI mean by the "New Evangelization." We all stand there marvelling at the gift of self to death. Thank you for your insight.

Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul

1) Both underwent a name change from Simon and Saul to Peter and Paul.
2) The change of names took place by entering into prayer: Simon entered into the prayer of Christ to the Father as in Luke 9, 18: “as He was praying in private, His disciples also were with Him;” Saul was recognized by Ananias in Acts 9, 12 “For behold, he is praying.” (Paul later remarked, "The time came when he who had set me apart before I was born and called my by his favor chose to reveal his Son to me, that I might spread among the Gentiles the good tidings concerning him" [Gal 1, 15]). As an act of self-gift, prayer produces an ontological change in the individual that actualizes him as person. Hence, as the ontology changes, the name changes.3) The Person of Christ as the Logos of the Father cannot be known by external sensation because "No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone now the Father except the Son and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Mt 11, 27). Therefore, only those drawn by the Spirit of the Father in prayer can know the Person of the Son (Jn 6, 44). Since the Person of Christ is revealed to be prayer (see Luke 6, 12; 9, 18; 9, 28), when one begins to truly pray, one becomes “like” Christ and begins to experience being Christ from within. Cognizing (experiencing) the self as “like” Christ, one is then able to re-cognize the face of Christ outside of the self, and is enabled to say from within, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 15). On this feast in 1991, John Paul II remarked, “a new bond between the human consciousness and the mystery of the living God” takes place. [For the development of this, see J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One” Ignatius (1986) 15-27].
4) Both Peter and Paul die as martyrs. John Paul also said, “The Church lives constantly through the inheritance of Peter which is the `ministry” (ministerium petrinum). She lives constantly through the inheritance of Paul which is the special charism of the proclamation of the Gospel. The Lord… stood by me and gave me strength to proclaim the word fully that all the Gentiles might hear it (2 Tm 4, 17). The double inheritance – ministerium petrinum and Pauline charism – leads us on today’s feast to Rome, to the place of both apostles’ birth into heaven, to fullness of life in God. This is the day on which the meaning of the keys of the kingdom of God is revealed n a special way. Whatever has been bound here on earth is bound in heaven – and whatever has been loosed on earth remains loosed in heaven (cf. Mt 16, 19): it has been sealed in the glory of the kingdom which never ends” (L’Osservatore Romano N. 27 (1198) – 8 July 1991, 1).

Appositely, St. Augustine comments, "Both apostles share the same feast day, for these two were one; and even though they suffered on different days, they were as one. Peter went first, and Paul followed. And so we celebrate this day made holy for us by the apostles' blood. Let us embrace what they believed, their life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching and their confession of faith" (Sermon 295. 7-8).

St. Irenaeus and the Knowledge of God

St. Irenaeus (130 -200 a.d.) is important for his works defending the Catholic faith against the errors of the Gnostics. He is also epistemologically important for our consideration today because he introduces us into an experiential knowledge of God. In the reading of today’s breviary, he says, “The glory of God gives life; those who see God receive life. For this reason God, who cannot be grasped, comprehended or seen allows himself to be seen, comprehended and grasped by men, that he may give life to those who see and receive him. It is impossible to live without life, and the actualization of life comes from participation in God, while participation in God is to see God and enjoy his goodness.
“Men will therefore see God if they are to live; through the vision of God they become immortal and attain to God himself. As I have said, this was shown in symbols by the prophets: God will be seen by men who bear his Spirit and are always waiting for him coming….
“The Word… revealed God to men and presented men to God. He safeguarded the invisibility of the Father to prevent man from treating God with contempt and to set before him a constant goal toward which to make progress. On the other hand, he revealed God to men and made him visible in many ways to prevent man from being totally separated from God and so cease to be. Life in man is the glory of God; the life of man is the vision of God.”
With the “dictatorship of relativism” that obtains today because of the hegemony of only one level of experience – sensation - , God cannot be known intellectually because he cannot be sensed. Or, if we can know Him, the knowledge is trivial and irrelevant as in "abstract." John Paul II had affirmed that God can be known on another level of experience - i.e. on the level of the being of the “I” in the moral moment of self-determination. This moral act is the act of faith or any act in which the self is given to another in love. Importantly, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger commented: “God in Karol Wojtyla is not only thought but also experienced. The pope expressly opposes the limitation of the concept of experience which occurred in Empiricism; he points out that the form of experience elaborated in the natural sciences are no less real and important: moral experience, human experience, religious experience (34). But this experience is, of course, also reflected upon and verified in its rational content…. The central core of Wojtyla’s philosophy lies in the fact that he does not accept the separation of thought and existence which typifies the modern era. Descartes, says the pope, severed thinking from existing and identified this isolated thought with reason itself: I think, therefore I am. But is not thought which determines existence, but existence which determines thought (38).”
To experience being on this level of the subject is to experience being as imaging God as a triple self-transcendence, i.e., being like God. Hence, the remarks of Irenaeus connecting life and knowledge. Self-transcendence is to live, and self-transcendence is to know.

June 26 – Benedict XVI - "Communio" - Opus Dei

1) Benedict XVI: The Church as Communio

“The only institutional element the Church needs is the one given to it by the Lord: the sacramental structure of the people of God, centered on the Eucharist.” The image that Benedict uses is “the armor of Saul making it difficult for the young David to walk” (Idem.). This means that Church needs to fix its attention on the dynamism of persons-in-relation, above all laymen and priests living the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the street, rather than “the committee” as a thing-in-itself. At a previous moment, then-Cardinal Ratzinger remarked, “It is widely held today, even among the higher ecclesiastical ranks, that the more committed to Church activities a person is the more Christian he is. People are engaged in a kind of ecclesiastical activity therapy, keeping busy. The aim is to assign a committee to everyone or, in any case, some sort of commitment within the Church. It is thought that the Church must always be talked about somehow or something must be done within it or for it. But a mirror which only reflects itself is no longer a mirror… It could be that a person is engaged in unceasing associative activities within the Church and is not a Christian at all for all that. But it could also be that another could simply live by the Word and the sacraments, and practice the love that comes form faith without ever appearing on an ecclesiastical committee, without ever concerning himself with the novelty of ecclesiastical politics, without ever participating in synods or voting at them and yet, he is a true Christian” (30 Days, No. 1 – 1992, 4).
This remark squares with the mind of then-Cardinal Razinger as well as the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 on the truer denomination of the Church as “Communio” subsuming within it (without suppressing) the conciliar nomenclature of People of God.” As he suggests above, the absolute ontological structure of the Church is the sacramental structure activated by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is meant, as it were, for “the street” (2) (remark of St. Josemaria Escriva). The Church is “in the nature of a sacrament” to the world (Lumen Gentium #1). It lives out this sacramentality by the priestly action of the persons of the laity making the gift of themselves to the world on the occasion of ordinary work. Hence, “secularity” is “dimension” of the entire Church and “characteristic” of the laity insofar as they exercise this priesthood of mediating self-gift “on the occasion” of work and family in the world.
On June 24, Benedict was reported discoursing with Italy’s President Carlo Ciampi on a “healthy secularity:” “The Church and the political community in their own fields are autonomous and independent from each other. Yet both, under different titles, are devoted to the personal and social vocation of the same men.” It was Leo XIII who saw that the key to the separation of Chruch and State as institutions (object) was the fact that the same person who is a believer (subject), and as such becomes conscious of his/her inherent dignity of freedom of self-determination (i.e., as “I”), is also citizen (subject). Hence, the very sameness of person as believer capacitates him/her to be citizen and ensures the institutional separation of the two orders.
The one action of the Christ, his self-gift to death on the Cross, is the one action of the entire Church in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Hence, the Church’s divinely instituted aboriginal structure is a communio of sacramentally constituted subjects of laymen and ministerial priests exercising themselves as gift in ordinary work by living out the Mass.

2) The Meaning of Communio: Prototypically in the Trinity:

“The First Person does not beget the Son in the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving… In this idea of relativity in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the `accidents,’ Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the `individual’… Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today `objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view.”

2) Consequent Christology:

If Person in the Trinity is self-gift, then when the Second Person becomes Incarnate, being becomes identified with doing. The Person becomes the office, or, in the words of St. Josemaria Escriva, “You cannot separate the fact that Christ is God from his role as redeemer.” Then-Josef Ratzinger fleshed out the Christological anthropology: “For what faith really states is precisely that with Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, this differentiation simply becomes inapplicable. The person is the office, the office is the person. The two are no longer divisible. Here there is no private area reserved for an `I’ which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions and thus at some time or other can be `off duty;’ here there is no `I’ separate from the work; the `I’ is the work and the work is the `I’… Jesus did not perform a work that could be distinguished from his `I’ and depicted separately. On the contrary, to understand him as the Christ means to be convinced that he has put himself into his word. Here there is no `I’ (as there is with all of us) which utters words; he has identified himself so closely with his word that `I’ and word are indistinguishable: he is word. In the same way, to faith, his work is nothing else than the unreserved way in which he merges himself into this very work; he performs himself and gives himself; and his work is the giving of himself.”

3) St. Josemaria Escriva: “Ipse Christus”

Locution, October 16, 1931: “I felt our Lord’s action, bringing to my heart and my lips, with irresistible force, the tender invocation `Abba! Pater!’ I was on the street, in a streetcar…. I probably made that prayer out loud. I wandered through the streets of Madrid for an hour, or perhaps two. I can’t say. I didn’t feel time go by. People must have taken me for a madman. I was contemplating, with lights that were not my own, this astounding truth that would remain in my soul like a burning coal and never go out.”Years later (late 60’s) in a meditation given in Rome, he said, “When God sent me those blows back in 1931, I didn’t understand them… Then all at once, in the midst of such great bitterness, cam the words: `You are my son (Ps. 2, 7), you are Christ.’ And I could only stammer: `Abba, Pater! Abba, Pater! Abba! Abba! Abba!’ Now I see it with a new light, like a new discovery, just as one sees, after years have passed, the hand of God, of divine Wisdom, of the All-Powerful. You’ve led me, Lord, to understand that to find the Cross is to find happiness, joy. And I see the reason with greater clarity than ever: to find the Cross is to identify oneself with Christ, to be Christ, and therefore to be a son of God.”

4) Josemaria Escriva: Ipse Christus Because the Person Is the Office:

In the 1992 testimony on the holiness, and therefore the identification with Christ, of Josemaria Escriva, Alvaro del Portillo – his collaborator and confessor for 40 years – wrote: “What constitutes the nucleus of Mons. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer’s message is the consciousness of the radical transformation that occurs in man through the working of baptismal grace: made a participant in the divine nature, man becomes a son of God and because of this he is called to sanctity. This boldness appears admirably synthesized in the point of Furrow: `Look – we have to love God not only with our heart but with his’ (n. 809)… All those who knew Josemaria Escriva perceived that his person was inseparable from the mission for which God had chosen him. Having been able to form a particularly close and profound relationship with him for 40 years reinforces in my memory this characteristic dimension of his human and spiritual physiognomy. I have seen him, so to speak, in his `first act’ as founder, that is to say, in the daily and continuous building of Opus Dei, and as a consequence, of the Church… The identification of his very self with his foundational activity implied that Mons. Escriva perfected himself as a subject – up to the point of living the virtues to a heroic degree – in the measure in which he carried out Opus Dei, feeling the need to second God’s plans daily.”

5) Opus Dei: A Communio: “David Without the Armor of Saul:”

Opus Dei is this identification of person and work (work as self-gift) engendered in St. Josemaria’s sons and daughters (he was always “the Father”) forming the communio of laity and ministerial priests. The “action” of the communio is the living out of the Sacrifice of the Mass in secular work. The laity need the priest to activate the priestly soul of self-giving, and the priests need the laity to need them. (As John Paul II said, “the person I need most is the person who needs me”). In this imaging of the Trinity where person engenders person, there is the communio of Opus Dei formed by laity and priests, as secular as the Church herself. “Opus Dei, my children is not `a thing; nor even, primarily, an institution. Like the Church, of which it forms part, it is a communion of persons, the kind of communion proper to a family.” Theologian Pedro Rodriguez comments: “Opus Dei’s social arrangement as a `Christian community’ stems from what we have called the `internal dimension of the Church’s structure.’ That is, it is born of mutual relations of `Christifideles’ and `sacred minister,’ or, if you prefer, it derives from the two forms of participating in Christ’s priesthood. That is also why Opus Dei as a social reality in the Church is organic and undivided. Its lay faithful (men and women) and the priests who act as its clergy complement each other in exemplary adherence to the basic aboriginal relationship obtaining in the Church between `Christifideles’ – called to live out the requirements and implications of their baptism – and sacred ministers, who bring in, besides, the `ministerial’ consequences of the sacrament of Order…
“Thus to the question, What is the ecclesiological nature of Opus Dei one could reply: `It is an institution whose internal structure replicates the basic ecclesial articulation between the common priesthood of the faithful possessed by virtue of baptism, and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood, possessed by the clerics incardinated in it.’
“So, what we find in Opus Dei, different yet complementing one another, are the two ecclesial forms of participating in Christ’s priesthood. We find both the `substantial’ priority of Opus Dei’s lay faithful, at whose service is the priestly ministry, and the `functional’ priority of the sacred ministry, in whose head (the prelate) resides the `sacra potestas’ that governs the prelature. The clergy’s `functional’ priority was described by the founder when he said that the ministerial priesthood `impregnates with its spirit our personal life and all our apostolic work.’ Opus Dei’s Statutes put it more technically: `Under the prelate’s authority, the clergy, by means of their priestly ministry, enliven and inform all of Opus Dei.’ But these terms – inform, enliven – point to t a `functional priority,’ they also clearly manifest the `substantial priority’ of Opus Dei’s lay faithful. Graphically, the founder told the Work’s priests that their task is to be a `carpet’ for others. He wrote: `In Opus Dei we’re all equal. There’s only a practical difference: priests are more bound to place their hearts on the floor like a carpet, so that their brothers and sisters may tread softly.’”
John Paul II expatiated on this notion of Opus Dei as communio by remarking: “The organic convergence of priests and laity is one of the privileged areas which will give life and pastoral solidity to that `new energy” whereby we all feel invigorated after the Great Jubilee. In this context I wish to draw attention to the importance of that `spirituality of communion’ emphasized in the Apostolic Letter [Novo Millennio Ineunte 42-43].
“The Christian laity are charged with carrying out an apostolic mission. Their specific competence in various human activities is, in the first place, a God-given instrument to `enable the proclamation of Christ to reach people, mould communities, and have a deep and incisive influence in bringing Gospel values to bear in society and culture. They are thereby spurred on tp place their skills effectively at the service of the `new frontiers,’ which are seen as challenges to the Church’s saving presence in the world….
“The priests, for their part, have a primary and irreplaceable role: to help souls, one by one, through the sacraments, preaching and spiritual direction. To open themselves to the gift of grace. A spirituality of communion will best strengthen the role of each ecclesial element.”

6) Conclusion: Opus Dei is not a particular Church or diocese. But it has the same “theological substance,” i.e., that constitutive relationship between laymen and priests, engendered and directed by a bishop/prelate, that makes it a communio and analogous to (but not the same as) a non-geographical diocese. Hence, it is not a religious order, an association or a movement. In the words of St. Josemaria Escriva, “Opus Dei is a little bit of the Church” itself. Therefore, a deeper understanding of what Opus Dei is will reward one with a deeper understanding of what the Church is, and a deeper understanding of what Benedict XVI is and will be about, and vice versa.