Editorial DOI: 10.1177/1744136607080882 7 © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

Editorial Sacrament of Charity

aul VI was crowned as Pope in 1963. The triple tiara used on that occasion can still be seen in the Crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the PImmaculate Conception in Washington DC. Pope John Paul I was not crowned in 1978. Rather, his pastoral ministry was solemnly inaugurated, as was that of John Paul II soon afterwards, yet the triple tiara still appeared on their coats of arms. Significantly, in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI replaced that heraldic tiara with a bishop’s mitre. One index of major and ongoing development in the understanding and exercise of the Petrine office in recent decades. What catalysed that development was the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). After Vatican I (1869–70), with its definitions of papal primacy and infallibility, many thought that the era of councils was over and that papal teaching and rule would now suffice. There was surprise and even shock, therefore, when Pope John XXIII announced another council in 1959. The primary importance of Vatican II lies in the fact that it took place at all. As one of those who most pioneered its teaching in his work from the 1930s onwards, Yves Congar, later said, it ‘reopened the chapter in the Church’s book of conciliar life’.1 Appropriately, at the heart of its teaching was the doctrine of episcopal collegiality: ‘The order of bishops is the successor to the college of the apostles in their role as teachers and pastors, and in it the apostolic college is perpetuated. Together with their head, the Supreme Pontiff, and never apart from him, they have supreme and full authority over the universal Church’ (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, hereafter LG, 22). On 3 March 2007, Pope Benedict, who as Joseph Ratzinger was a young peritus at the Council, said he could still hear the voice of Pope Paul opening the Second Session of the Council on 29 September 1963 and affirming: ‘Christ, our principle. Christ, our Way and our Guide! Christ, our hope and our destination . . . No other light shines out at this meeting except for Christ’s, Light of the world’. Lumen gentium. As yet, the Second Vatican Council had not promulgated any documents.

1 Yves Congar, ‘A Last Look at the Council’, in Alberic Stacpoole (ed.), Vatican II by those who were there (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), pp. 337–58 (341). 8 Ecclesiology Editorial 9

It was Paul VI who took the helm at that crucial moment, and, as Pope Benedict said, brought the Council to completion ‘with an expert, delicate and firm hand’. One of his early achievements was steering the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church through very rough waters at times to its final promulgation on 21 November 1964. Its opening words, which gave it its title, reaffirmed what Paul VI had said a year earlier: ‘Christ is the light of humanity [Lumen gentium cum sit Christus]’ – the light of the nations being referred to was, therefore, not the Church as such but Christ, and it was immediately afterwards that the text introduced the idea of the Church as sacrament, called to transmit that light. Church as sacrament is, in fact, one of the overarching themes of the Council. The first text of the Council, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,Sacrosanctum Concilium, quoting Cyprian, already referred to the Church as ‘the sacrament of unity’ (n. 26). Lumen Gentium used the idea no less than three times (LG 1, 9, 48), and then the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (GS), used it to give a remarkably comprehensive statement of the nature and purpose of the Church, which, it said, has ‘one sole purpose – that the kingdom of God may come and the salvation of the human race may be accomplished’. ‘Every benefit the people of God can confer on mankind during its earthly pilgrimage is rooted in the Church’s being the “universal sacrament of salvation”, at once manifesting and actualising the mystery of God’s love for men’ (GS 45; cf. also 42). For Vatican II, the Church is the great sacrament of God’s love in the world and for the world, the sacrament of charity. The papers and contributions to this issue of Ecclesiology relate in various ways to the Council, its teaching and its legacy, with a particular focus upon Lumen Gentium. One legacy is a strong appreciation of the local church in Catholic theology, intimately linked with the development of a eucharistic ecclesiology. LG 26 teaches that the bishop is the primary president of the Eucharist ‘from which the Church ever derives its life and on which it thrives’. Both Ignatius of Antioch and Thomas Aquinas are invoked when it goes on to say: ‘In each altar community, under the sacred ministry of the bishop, a manifest symbol is to be seen of that charity and “unity of the mystical body, without which there can be no salvation”.’ Pope John Paul II’s final encyclical letter, on the Eucharist, started from this very point, by affirming: ‘The Church draws its life from the Eucharist’,2 and Pope Benedict’s recent apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis, likewise starts here, highlighting the Eucharist as the ‘sacrament of charity’.3

2 Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2004), n. 1. 3 Pope Benedict XVI, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis (2007), n. 1. The phrase bears a footnote reference to the same passage of Aquinas footnoted in LG 26, namely, Summa Theol., III, q.73, a.3.