SHAPING THE IDEAL CHURCH

Every year since 1985 I look forward to the annual Madeleva Lecture published by Paulist Press. The lecture is named in honor of Holy Cross Sister Madeleva Wolf, an extraordinary American Catholic educator, scholar, mystical poet, and writer. This year the Center for Spirituality at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana invited Denise Lardner Carmody, a leading Catholic woman intellectual, to present her thought. She called it An Ideal Church: A Meditation.

Carmody wants to step back from the historical and imagine the ideal church. She calls such imagining a thought experiment, i.e., "a free zone where we let ourselves prescind from the lets and hindrances that can stifle our creativity. Certainly, we ought never to lose sight of the constraints under which any plan will labor when we try to put it into practice. But, by declaring a free zone we can inoculate ourselves against the cynicism and discouragement that too-close attention to such constraints can engender....(U)sually we will be the better for having raised our sights, having let our fancy run free....(T)he Spirit can use our imaginative work to remind us that nothing is impossible with God (p.11)." Carmody muses about what the community of Christ could be.

She develops her meditation by re-imagining what it might mean to say that the church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

ONE. Have you thought about what makes the community of Christ one? In John 17 Jesus prays that his disciples would be one as he and his Father are one. The unity of the church depends on the will and action of God. Oneness is an ideal that "springs directly from what God has made the church to be and how God has guided the development of the church historically

(p. 21)." Unity is not the result of political alliance or blood relations. "Because God gives the church its crucial unity, the church can never fail to be one....Beneath our divisions....we Christians share a more significant unity. Inasmuch as we confess the same Lord and enjoy the same Spirit, we are far more alike than different. Our tendency...is to forget this greater likeness and concentrate on our lesser differences (p.17)."

Unity is embodied. We belong to the communion of saints. We can re-imagine this communion "if we locate sanctity in the gifts of God rather than the achievements of human beings (p.18)." We share the Lord's table with "exemplary forebears who kept the torch burning (p.18)." Forebears and contemporaries share mystical bread and cup.

We are tempted to say that only those who come to table belong. Carmody says that more people may belong to the community of Christ than show up for overt church activities. The Spirit may knit together a diverse communion of saints "that escapes the labels and confines that we....tend to impose (p19)." The great mysteries of life, such as church membership, salvation, and eternal life, are God's works more than our own. "We cannot define the boundaries of those works. We cannot say with certitude who hears the gospel successfully, who is a member of the community of Christ, who is saved, what the population of heaven is and is not (p.19). We are one. This can make it easier for us to overcome differences.