by

Prof. Bruno Forte, Roma

"Allow us, Oh Lord, to love Your Church, the beloved. Allow us to remain faithful to her as to a loving, caring and good mother, so that with her and through her we may deserve to be at home with You, our God and our Father. Amen!" These words spoken by Saint Quodvultdeus of Carthage (On the profession of faith for those aspiring to baptism, III,12. 13), are the best way for introducing this meditation on the Church of love ad her evangelising mission, which one can really only discuss starting from a loving and humble faith. "Ubi amor, ibi oculus", those in the Middle Ages used to say: it is love that provides us with vision and offers us the key for opening the door of the mystery, in particular that of the Church’s being and acting, the Church Jesus came to found on earth. The fact that the Church is the community of the children who have remained this in the Son, those loved by He who is Beloved, is proved intensely by a word used above all the John’s Gospel: the comparative conjunction "kathós", "as". It is repeated by the Lord Jesus to indicate the kind of relationship existing between Himself and his disciples as well as between them and the unity He has always experienced with the Father: "Love one another, as I love you" (John 15,12; see 13,34) - "so that they may be one, as we are one" (John 17,21. 22). These words show us the richness in meaning of the word: "kathós" indicating a random, exemplary and final relation with time, showing the Trinity as the source, the model and the destination of the communion of Jesus’ disciples, the Church.

The Church, coming from the love of the Three ("Ecclesia de Trinitate"), is the image of Trinitarian communion ("communio sanctorum") and tends towards the Trinity in the course of time ("Ecclesia viatorum"). Everything in the Church comes from the love of the three times Saintly God: The Church’s beating heart is the "agápe", the love that comes from above and tends to return above. The "agápe" is the rule of life adopted by Jesus’ disciples, who believe in the power of His revelation in the Father’s infinite love: the "agápe" is the inexhaustible source of the Church’s missionary impetus at the service of the world’s evangelisation to the furthest corners of the earth and of the heart. The "kathós" allows us to understand that the Church lives of the fundamental dynamism of allowing oneself to be loved by the Father for Christ in the Spirit, to love the Father for Christ in the same Spirit and the whole world in Them. Loved by the Loved One, we are loved to love: this is why the "kathós" is in John joined to another expression, the reciprocal pronoun "allélon - allélous" - "the one- the other". The love bestowed upon us by the Three is made manifest in reciprocal love: loving on another is the other side of the only love that is the Church. If the "as" indicates the relation between the Trinity, and us "allélon - allélous" indicates the relationship of reciprocity between us and at the service of others: God’s mercy creates fraternal mercy and the ecclesial mission!

One can therefore state that from the beginning the Church has included herself in the divine missions, as a sign and an instrument of their fulfilment in time, totally immersed in God’s Trinitarian history with the world. "De unitate Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti plebs adunata" - "People assembled by the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" (St. Cyprian, De Oratione Dominica 23: PL 4,553; see Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 4). Originating in the Trinity and organised in the Trinity’s image, the Church - "icon of the Trinity" – has no other objective except the glorification of the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Striving towards this destination, ignoring herself and her own glory, the Church achieves her evangelising mission – a real missio de Trinitate – above all as a "kènosis" of divine glory: the Trinity places its tents in time through the Church which bears the burden of the limitations that derive from this historical and mundane dimension. The Spirit is the main author of this "kènosis", that historicizes the divine mission making it the Church’s mission: "The holy Spirit - writes Vladimir Lossky – announces Himself to people, marking each member of the Church with the seal of a personal and unique relationship with the Trinity, becoming present in each person. How? The mystery remains: the mystery of divesting oneself, of the ‘kènosis’ of the Holy Spirit coming to the world. If in the ‘kènosis’ of the Son the person appeared to us while the divinity remained hidden beneath the likeness of the servant, the Holy Spirit, in his advent, makes manifest the Trinity’s common nature, but leaves the person hidden beneath the divinity. It remains non-revealed, hidden so to speak by the gift, that the gift He bestows may be fully ours, made our own by ourselves" (V. Lossky, The mystical theology of the Eastern Church, Bologna 1967, 160s). The Spirit is therefore the mystery’s historical dimension, it is the Spirit who allows the Church to be the image – always historically defined, and in continuous development – of the only divine life that comes from above.

The mission is therefore the intrinsic dynamism of the Church as the "icon of the Trinity", fulfilled by the Spirit, that unifies the Catholica in all the expressions of its being and acting: one can then speak of this triple aspect of the mission, defined in three inseparable forms, the catholicity of the missionary subject, the one contained in the announcement and the of the receiver of the mission. The Catholicity of the missionary subject, in the likeness of God, one in the Trinity of the Persons, means that the whole Church is invited to announce the entire Gospel to all humankind, to each person: thanks to the gift of the Spirit, there is no one in the Church who can consider himself extraneous to the missionary task. Not withstanding the specificity of the ordained ministry, responsible for discerning and coordinating charismas in view of evangelising effects, all those baptised and every local community must use the gifts received at the service of the ecclesial mission. If this implies the need to acknowledge and valorise each person’s charisma, it also requires the effort of growing in communion with everyone, so that communion itself becomes the first form of mission. "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13,35). The mission is not the work of lone sailors, but must be experienced in Peter’s boat, which is the Catholica in all her expressions, in a communion of life and actions with all the baptised, each according to the gift received.

The mission’s catholicity however, does not only invest its subject, but also its object: the intrinsic "splendour" of the redeeming truth requires the Church to be the bearer of the Trinity’s Gospel in its entirety in all history’s different situations. The whole Church announces the whole Gospel! The fundamental reason for which the Good News must be announced integrally, is that it is not precisely a doctrine, but a person, Christ. It is He, the Father’s Son living in the Spirit, who is the object of faith and the content of the announcement, and He is also the agent operating within those evangelising. The mission requires an integral testimony of Christ; this is the catholicity of the message; a fullness without which it is changed and debased. This integral testimony embraces the communion of faith in time and in space, it is therefore the voice of the Spirit’s communion, that through the apostolic tradition makes the Church identical to herself in the foundations of her catholicity, because it identifies her in the mystery of her ever-present beginnings, the reconciling Christ announced by the Apostles. The messages catholicity also involves the catholicity of those receiving evangelisation: the Good News echoes for everyone and must reach everyone. The "splendour" of the truth is mediated through the "kènosis" of the most varied languages and cultures. "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Mt 28,19s). It is precisely in the missionary impetus, impressed up the Church by her arising from the Trinity, addressed at reaching all that is human in each man. So, the mission’s catholicity is not totally fulfilled if it does not follow the Trinitarian plan for redemption in the Gospel’s universal destination. It is here that we find the unavoidable requirement for all those who are baptised, as for every particular Church and for the universal Church, to be committed that this announcement should reach every human being and leaving no historical space or dimension untouched by this message. If the Lord does not make His disciple accountable for the redeemed, because redemption is a mystery of grace and freedom that no one can dispose of externally, He will consider them accountable for those evangelised; in this sense a Church without urgency and missionary passion would betray her own catholicity, and would be a death camp rather than the community of the risen of the Risen One, the beautiful "icon" of the Trinity in time.