And that requires the wisdom to understand those with whom we would share it: The Church must preserve her inheritance, but it is never enough simply to possess the Good News. Pope Paul VI extends this point in Evangelii Nuntiandi. Paul says, competed well, finished the race, and kept the faith. The Body of Christ, the People of God, includes that great host of witnesses who have come before us those who have, as St. The faith itself, lived within the concrete circumstances of our own day, represents a very real and concrete guarantor of ecclesial unity across space and time. Unity with Christ manifests itself in charity. Remaining faithful to what we have received is more than a matter of intellectual assent. The unity of the Church is not extraneous to the revealed word of God as found in the Scriptures and Tradition but is utterly inseparable from it. This cannot be repeated often enough: The teaching office of the Church, exercised in the name of Jesus Christ, is not above the word of God, whether written or handed on – that is, as concerns both Scripture and Tradition! – but rather serves it. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed. He task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. The Second Vatican Council made this perfectly clear when it declared, in Dei Verbum: *īut we are not masters of the Word of God. Authentic doctrinal development is not a technique for manipulating Tradition, a means for bending Tradition to our purposes or to the world’s. Development of doctrine is a corollary to the profound unity of the faith across time and space. These days, the idea of the development of doctrine is often reduced to a species of casuistry, a means for justifying any manner of deviations from what has been handed down to us. The Spirit that hovered over the waters of creation is the same Holy Spirit that animates the Church today. As though the Gospel of today is a different Gospel than yesterday as though the Spirit animating the Church today were a different Spirit than the one animating her last century, or in the last millennium, or at Pentecost itself. The credibility of the Church’s witness is diminished when unity is lacking, not just across space – from one diocese to another – but across time. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you. It has always been this way, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews: Consider Paul’s admonitions to the Corinthians, in which he attributes rivalry among them to their “being of the flesh.” Sin and worldliness are not only occasions of personal guilt but are concrete causes of division within the Body of Christ. Separating ourselves from our bishops, from Peter, or from the faith received through the Tradition all damage our unity. But we can cooperate, or not, in strengthening and preserving that unity. We are not the primary agents of the Church’s unity God is. From this comes the urgent imperative for the work of genuine ecumenism, so emphasized at the Second Vatican Council and by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical, Ut unum sint (“That they may be one”), in which he insisted: “To believe in Christ means to desire unity to desire unity means to desire the Church to desire the Church means to desire the communion of grace which corresponds to the Father’s plan from all eternity.” For this reason, division in the Church is always a wound in the Body of Christ. Ultimately, the unity of the Church is the unity of Christ Himself. We profess one faith, in communion with the bishops in unbroken succession to the apostles, and these with and under the successor of Peter, the bishop of Rome. The simplest answer is that the Church is one by virtue of our one baptism, and the one Christ into whom we are baptized. Given the obvious divisions among Christian Churches and denominations, and even within the Catholic Church, it’s worth pondering: In what does this oneness consist? This is a truth we profess every time we recite the Creed. We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
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