Review article

Sentire cum Ecclesia - To Feel with the Church. Contemporary Highlights

Anton Tamarut ; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

In this work, the author starts from the internal being and mysterious features of the Church attempting to show the contemporary meaning of the expression Sentire cum Ecclesia.
Stressing the trilateral origins of the Church as well as its Christological-Pneumatological nature, the author goes above pure spiritual and immediate social-hierarchical application of the expression Sentire cum Ecclesia. Observed from a theological-sacramental perspective, feeling with the Church primarily means to participate in those duties that Christ commissioned his Church, to continue in the strength of the Holy Spirit in the light of Christ's life and mission. This then serves as the foundation for personal mutual responsibility for the Church, for the quality of the Church's life and mission. Mutual responsibility is made real primarily in personal witness of a new life in Christ. The rediscovery of the mysteries and trinatural dimension of the Church is narrowly tied to discovering holiness as the foundation of the gift and mission of the Church as a whole and individually for each one of its members.
How can we feel with the Church, Christ's betrothed and his historical Body primarily in regard to our co-responsibility for the mission that the Son received from the Father in which he includes his Church, encompasses the unity of the Head with its limbs and all generations from the beginning to the end (Christus totus). This means that the Church in all its later generations must feel with the First Church, primarily with her. The life of the First Church, namely, remains the measure for the Church in all the following generations. This is particular so when it comes to the Gospel as the founding duty of the Church, brotherly unity and love in the First Church is valid for our generation too as the only true and correct path.
The heart of the Church community however, is the Eucharist. In the mystery of the Eucharist, Christ builds his Church in unity, according to the highest ideal featured in the great priestly prayer, »that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me« (Jn 17:21). To enter into unity with Christ in the Passover means at the same time to feel the duty to become a missionary of events that the ritual portrays.
This paper is based on the ecclesiastic vision of the Second Vatican Council and it finds the fruitful and useful motivators in post-Council theological thought, particularly in the thoughts of John Paul II & Tomislav Janko Šagi-Bunić.

Keywords

to feel with the Church; mystery of the Church; Christ's Body; sacrament; Christus totus; co-responsibility; mission; unity

Hrčak ID:

24202

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/24202

Publication date:

1.8.2006.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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