Wednesday, V Easter
(Acts 15)
Many years ago Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote an instructive book titled Models of the Church. The work answers the question, what is the Church? Is it an institution with organizational offices and a clear line of authority? Or is it a vehicle of announcing the divine offer of salvation? Or perhaps it is servant to the world caring for the weak and instructing the powers regarding their responsibility? Maybe it is a sacrament, that is a sign of God’s ongoing presence among humans?
Although Cardinal Dulles indicates a preference for the sacrament model since it suggests a spiritual core, he concludes that the Church encompasses all the given models. It is not that the Church would not be all that it is without having an institutional structure, without preaching the Good News, without caring for the people, and without dispensing the grace of Christ. It is that without each of these identities it would lose its reason for being.
In the first reading today we see how from the beginning the Church has had an institutional face. Some people today sneer at Church bureaucracy hinting that it is not what Christ intended. But certainly during Apostolic times as well as today questions regarding Church order and doctrine were brought to the proper authorities – we see here the apostles and presbyters – for discernment. Peter may have the preeminent role as chief apostle although James, as chief elder of the Jerusalem flock, also has a significant voice. The institution has been modified through the centuries. Today’s structure of pope and curia with dioceses and religious institutions is not set in stone. But we can be assured that the Church will always be – out of need -- a visible institution.
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