Prior to the Second Vatican Council, Western Christendom has been largely divided in the way the Church was understood. For the Catholic part, the hierarchical-institutional aspect of the Church was extremely highlighted. Thus, in the words of Robert Bellarmine, the Church is “a society of men as tangible and as visible as the city of Rome or the kingdom of France or the republic of Venice”. In such a conception of the Church, the Holy Spirit’s task within the community of believers would be somewhat blurred and reduced in its intensity.
On the other hand, our Protestant brethren were so much preoccupied in accentuating and promoting the invisible and spiritual reality of the Church, that they lost track of her institutional dimension. Hence, what the Catholics got was a Church without the Holy Spirit, whereas what the Protestants were left with was the Holy Spirit without the Church.
The rediscovery of the immense ecclesial, historical, dogmatic and moral heritage of the Fathers of the Church, helped a great deal in striking an essential balance within the ecclesiological field. In fact, the great Saint Irenaeus, has managed nowadays through his writings to convince both Catholics and Protestants that the Church and the Holy Spirit are inseparable and indispensable for one another. His remarkable ecclesiological formula runs as follows: “Where the Church is, there too, is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there too, is the Church” (Against the Heresies, III.24.1).
The great Roman Pontiff Pope Paul VI also made it a point to stress this harmonious and indissoluble relationship between the Spirit and the Church. The whole scope of the coming pericope, taken from his teachings, is to illustrate with persuasion the reality that the Church is fundamentally dependent on the Holy Spirit. Without the latter, the Church ceases to be what Christ intended her to be.
“On several occasions we have asked about the greatest needs of the Church … What do we feel is the first and last need of this blessed and beloved Church of ours? We must say it, almost trembling and praying, because as you know well, this is the Church’s mystery and life: the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.
He is who animates and sanctifies the Church. He is her divine breath, the wind in her sails, the principle of her unity, the inner source of her light and strength. He is her support and consoler, her source of charisms and songs, her peace and her joy, her pledge and prelude to blessed and eternal life. The Church needs her perennial Pentecost; she needs fire in her heart, words on her lips, prophecy in her outlook…. The Church needs to rediscover the eagerness, the taste and the certainty of the truth that is hers…. And then the Church needs to feel flowing through all her human faculties a wave of love, of that love which is called forth and poured into our hearts “by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5,5)”.
If the Holy Spirit is love, the Church, which according to Cardinal Walter Kasper is the “sacrament of the Spirit”, becomes the community of that love which emanates from the Spirit of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit who moulds, builds, strengthens and preserves the Church, precisely via the humble yet courageous exercise of hierarchical ministry. When the latter is imbued with the Holy Spirit, the Most Holy Trinity is rendered its due glory whereas the common good of Christ’s flock is effectively brought about.
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap