The Church as a Community of Love

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - February 17, 2006

In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, after describing who God is and who we are, Pope Benedict turns to what the Church is.

The Church, he says, is "God family in the world." Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth to found a family, and, as he himself said in the Gospel, "Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" (Mk 3:35). Doing God's will, love and family all go together, Benedict teaches, because obedience is not indentured compliance to something imposed on us from the outside, but a simple response of love to God who loved us first. When we love God, we love what we loves. We begin to want what he wants and reject what he rejects. With great satisfaction, we begin to say, "thy will be done!"

This image of the Church as a family united in a communion of love all seeking to do God's will is one of the richest ecclesiological images that can be proposed. The Church is not a society of independent thinkers, all with equally valuable opinions. It is not a Sunday social club where strangers convene to listen to self-help lectures and sing uplifting musical solos in juxtaposed pews. It is a family with an almighty Father in Heaven, a Nazarene mother, a first-born son who is clearly the favorite, and brothers and sisters from every race, nation and tongue. The health and strength of this family depends on their union in doing the Father's will and their communion in love.

In the early Church, this union in will and communion of love were obvious. Pope Benedict references the passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which St. Luke provides a kind of "definition of the Church:" "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teachings and communion, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… All who believed were together and had all things in common" (Acts 2:44-45). The first Christians sought the will of the Father through prayer and through the teaching of the "father figures" God had given them in the apostles, and they grew in mutual love through the celebration of the Eucharist and the sharing of all their goods with those in need. Like a family, they knew that they were "in it together," and acted accordingly. And imitating their Father's love, their own was overflowing. They knew that God's family was meant to include all those their Father created, and so they turned their love toward others.

Pope Benedict said that this love manifested itself in three essential ways: the proclamation of the word of God, in speech (kerygma) and deeds (martyria); the public worship of God through the celebration of Mass and the sacraments (leitourgia); and the exercise of the ministry of charity (diakonia). The gift of the revelation of God's love is the first act of charity; helping others to reciprocate God's love by joint adoration is the second; and moving them to love and serve others as God has loved and served them is the third. For the Church to express her deepest nature, she must put all three into practice. "The Church cannot neglect the service of charity," Benedict writes, "any more than she can neglect the sacraments and the Word."

Pope Benedict says that this three-fold love of neighbor, grounded in the love of God, "is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful, but it is also a responsibility for the entire ecclesial community at every level: from the local community to the particular Church and to the Church universal in its entirety." In other words, each disciple, each parish, and each Diocese must focus on the love for others that is meant to animate each of these three areas. Just as the Church as a whole cannot neglect any of them, neither can a disciple, a parish or a diocese.

Pope Benedict, quoting St. Paul, gives us the motivation to redouble our personal and ecclesial efforts to the encounter with Christ in his word, in the sacraments, and in others: "The love of Christ urges us on." Christ loved us so much that he came to announce to us the Good News of the Kingdom, to institute the sacraments for our salvation and sanctification, and to serve others us in love rather than be served.

Now, through the words of his earthly vicar, he says to each of us, to our parishes, and to our diocese, "Love one another as I have loved you."

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.