ABSTRACT
This chapter is an initial attempt to address a growing tendency in ecclesiastical documents to use theological models as though they somehow necessarily had a reference to the experienced life of the Church, when in actual fact the reality is somewhat different. The models are not necessarily without value as they often have a rhetorical value, either reminding us of things forgotten or provoking us to move forwards to achieve what has not yet been realized. Nevertheless, considerable difficulties arise when the models are being used, however rhetorically, in very different and sometimes incompatible ways. This I feel is true of the model of Church in vogue at present, that of koinonia or communio. Koinonia/communio is what the Church essentially is, according to bishop
theologian Walter Kasper.1 He would go so far as to say it is the central theme of Vatican II’s ecclesiology and maybe of the Council. This is news to those of us who cut our theological teeth in the years after the Council and who studied with some of the scholars who drafted its documents. The great post-conciliar dictionary of theology Sacramentum mundi has no article on communio. The key images of the conciliar era were the people of God and the Church as Mystery or Sacrament. Yet, at the 1999 European Synod, Cardinal Martini of Milan made an intervention to the effect that working through a theology of koinonia/communio was one of the pressing needs of the Church. But what is this koinonia/communio? It is used in just about every ecumenical shared statement of the last ten years2 and in everything that is produced by my own Bishops’ Conference. Perhaps we need to reflect a little on the rhetoric and look again at the reality in which we find ourselves.
