Developing our love for the Church

WE need to exert some deliberate effort to develop the
proper love for the Church. Nowadays, with love itself being distorted
by detaching it from its true source, pattern and end, this duty to
love the Church is getting urgent.

            We should love the Church by knowing more about its nature
and purpose, and the implications and consequences that such knowledge
naturally brings about. We should try our best to have the very mind
of the Church and to learn how to engage it with our worldly and
temporal affairs.

            The Church is nothing other than the people of the God,
gathered together at the cost of his own life on the cross by Christ.
This is because we from the beginning are meant to be God’s people,
members of his family, partakers of his divine life.

            We have to understand that this gathering of the people of
God is not achieved merely by some political, social or economic
maneuverings. It is a gathering that is described as “communion,”
where our heart and mind work in sync with the mind and will of God.

            It is a communion where the love of God for us is
corresponded to by our love for him. And this is done not only
individually by each one of us, but also collectively, all of us
together in an organic way. Thus, we need to need to help one another
in this common, universal concern.

            As members of the Church, living members of Christ’s
mystical body and God’s people, we need to enter the mind of the
Church to be vitally connected with the mind of Christ.

            The mind of the Church is none other than the mind of
Christ, the mind of God himself, as it is lived out in minds of each
one of us. The mind of the Church therefore is dynamically lived in
history, with the full complement of our human condition.

            The mind of the Church has to contend with the different
factors that condition our human existence and our effort to live with
God. There’s our culture, our physical, emotional, geographical,
social and political conditions that can be as varied as can be, etc.

            To acquire the mind of the Church has endless ways and
possibilities, since it never means doing it in a uniform way,
identical, rigid, monolithic. It simply flows and streams, open to
anything, adapting to the lay of the land, yet tending toward its
proper destination.

            We need to look at Christ for the proper way to do the
Church-world engagement. While it is a divine institution, the Church
is also human, subject to all other human factors—social, historical,
cultural, political, etc.

            The Church leaders who are supposed to orchestrate
Church-world engagement should have a good understanding of how to do
things in this regard. The organic link between these two aspects of
Christian life should be lived and clearly expressed in all the
pertinent public pronouncements and actuations. We should avoid giving
the impression, no matter how slight, of interventions by Church
leaders in temporal affairs as being purely social or economic or
political in nature only.