¹ ST III 63.1, ‘Sed ad actus conveniences praesenti Ecclesiae deputantur quondam spirituali signaculo eis insignitur, quod character enunciator.’

² ST III 63.2, ‘Divinus autem cultus consistit vel in recipiendo aliqua divina, vel in tradendo aliis.’

³ ST III 63.3, ‘… deputatur unique fidelis ad recipient vel tradendum aliis ea quae pertinent ad cultum Dei.’

⁴ Ibid. The fundamentally Christological nature of sacraments is clear in the Summa Theologiae's structure, as well as in the detailed discussion of the sacraments.

⁵ There is a story to be told here about the pre-Vatican II Nouvelle Theologie, its appropriation into sacramental thinking and its contribution to contemporary versions of “sacramentality”. One clear account of this can be found in Osborne, K, Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World(Paulist Press 1999) chapter 1Google Scholar.

⁶ I have had here to condense drastically this assumption of a “bigger” notion of Christian worship, sourced from a variety of twentieth-century and contemporary thinkers in sacramental theology and ethics. So see C Watkins, ‘Mass, Mission and Eucharistic Living’, Heythrop Journal, October 2003 I have also been helped by Herwi Rikhof's treatment of sacramental character in Aquinas in relation to understanding of the sacrament of marriage: H Rikhof, ‘Marriage, a Question of Character?’ in Intams Review Autumn 1996. Here Professor Rikhof argues that a major factor which prevents Aquinas attributing ‘character’ to marriage is that marriage confers a potential for the handling of things which are not, of themselves, ‘spiritual’, for all that it nurtures the life of the church. A contemporary reading of ‘things handled in marriage’(!) would generally seek to give a different account of what is ‘spiritual’ and ‘corporeal’, allowing for a different reading of the activity of traditio in marriage, and its relation to the cultus Dei.

⁷ I am aware that, with reason, this appears an unfortunate term to many. Its clear identification in papal teaching with the “nuclear family” presents difficulties in our own context, where households are made up of a far more diverse range of relationships. There are risks here which, as David Matzko McCarthy points out, any attempt to speak of family today runs.: McCarthy, D Matzko, Sex and Love in the Home. A Theology of the household(SCM 2004)Google Scholar. Something like Matzko McCarthy's reading of ‘the open home’ which allows him to speak of the ‘core’ of marriage and the family, whilst attentive to and aware of the ‘irregular life cycle which is natural to the open home’(p. 198) is reflected in this paper.

⁸ This is not, we should be clear to say, that orders, liturgy, etc. are derived from baptism in some congregational way. Rather it draws attention to the understanding articulated at the Second Vatican council of those offices and rites as divinely given for and lived out in service of the life of holiness among Christ's faithful. For example, ‘He [Christ] continually provides in his body, that is, in the Church, for gifts and ministries through which, by his power, we serve each other unto salvation so that, carrying out the truth in love, we may in all things grow unto him who is our head.’Lumen Gentium 7

⁹ For example: the Archdiocese of Westminster's so-called Green Paper – soon to be a White Paper; the Diocese of East Anglia's Forward and Outward Together; the Diocese of Portsmouth's Go Out and Bear Fruit; et al. Details are available through the diocesan websites.

¹⁰ This is well described in Part I of the CES (Catholic Education Service) commissioned document On the Way to Life(2005) authored out of the Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life.

¹¹ A currently influential example of this would be RENEW International(http://www.renewintl.org), the basis of the Westminster Diocesan renewal programme At Your Word Lord.

¹² Augustine, On Christian Teaching(OUP 1999) in which the language of love is intertwined with the language of learning: e.g. p. 20ff. Thomas Aquinas's pedagogy is, perhaps, best summed up in De Veritate Question 11.

¹³ On the Way to Life, p. 62.

¹⁴ Congar, Y M J OP, La Tradition et les Traditions(Paris 1963)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See my argument in ‘Sacraments, Spirituality and Reality’, The Way(April 2004) pp. 91–103.

¹⁶ Not easy, but full of meaning’, Catholic Family Life in 2004. A Report on the Findings of Listening 2004: My Family, My Church(Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 2005), see paras. 90–104.

¹⁷ The insistent repetition in ecclesial documents that parents are ‘the first teachers’ of children is not simply wishful thinking but a rather chilling reminder (at least for those of us who are parents) that, whether we attend to it or not, children primarily learn whatever they learn from an intimate observation of parents and the home. No amount of even the most excellent catechesis can entirely overcome or take the place of this primary formation.

¹⁸ This is reflected in the diocesan plans already referred to, but also in contemporary ecclesiological concerns. I would reference here, in the British context, the recent Authority and Governance project in which this seems to be the prevalent culture. Examples of the research can be found in Hoose, B (ed.), Authority in the Roman Catholic Church(Ashgate 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Such identification of Christian teaching with “official church teaching” is properly set out and regretted by Nicholas Lash in Easter in Ordinary(SCM 1988) esp. p. 258ff. Professor Lash does not, here, develop the ecclesiological implications of these observations; though see his essay in B Hoose (ed.)op.cit.

²⁰ These are very much the frames of reference for the influential and important work of Sullivan, Francis, Magisterium. Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church(Gill and Macmillan 1983)Google Scholar responding, of course, to the ecclesiological emphases of Hans Küng in Infallible? An Enquiry(Collins 1971).

²¹ Notably, Paul VI refers his own use of the term in Evangelii Nintendo (1975) to a homily of John Chrysostom: EN 70.

²² In speaking of marriage as (notably) the last in the list of sacraments, the Council Fathers specifically relate the idea of the household as domestic church to the proclamation of the Gospel to children: ‘In what might be regarded as the domestic church, the parents are to be the first preachers of the faith for their children by word and example.’

²³ ‘The mission of being the primary vital cell of society has been given to the family by God. This mission will be accomplished if the family, by the mutual affection of its members and by family prayer, presents itself as a domestic sanctuary of the church.’

²⁴ So see, for example, Benedict XVI's Address to the Ecclesial diocesan Council of Rome, 6 June 2005, where there is a certain constructive tension and mutual dependence described between ‘the small domestic church’ and ‘the larger family of the Church’. Of course, the positing of these as two distinctive entities, capable of some kind of inter-relation, is itself a questionable starting place as the thrust of this paper's argument will make clear. Rather, ‘domestic church’ is presented here as an ecclesiological orientation, from which the larger reality of Church (much bigger than structures and polities) can be seen afresh.

²⁵ Most influential in this are has been the work of Jack Dominian. For example, see his most recent book Living Love. Restoring Faith in the Church(Darton, Longman and Todd 2004)Google Scholar, which includes two chapters on domestic church: chapters 21 & 28.

²⁶ It is not always clear that this necessarily refers to the couple with children still at home. The childless marriage, or the pre- or post- full-time parenting couple, or indeed the single parent living in separation or widowhood – all these seem, of necessity, to have some real relation to what is being spoken of in “domestic church”.

²⁷ On this, see also footnote 7 above.

²⁸ A central text in understanding the complex relations between the hierarchy and lay movements in the “secular” consciousness of the early twentieth-century is Pius X's Il Fermo Proposito(1905).The urgency with which lay men and women are called to the task of instaurare omnia in Christo is clearly related to the organisational church's anxiety about its place in the modern, secularised societies of the West.

²⁹ Civardi, L, A Manual of Catholic Action(London 1935)Google Scholar gives an informative taste of this.

³⁰ Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus(1939) 90, 91.

³¹ AA 11, See also LG 11, where marriage is spoken of as, firstly, the place where ‘new citizens of the human society are born’.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Dei Verbum 8.

³⁵ EN 70.

³⁶ EN 71. We note here that one of the consistent tendencies in the papal texts we examine in this paper is their juxtaposition of “Church” and “family” or “domestic church”, as if they were separate entities to be compared, implying in some way that domestic church is not Church. This presents some of the complications of an ecclesiological perspective which takes the ecclesia domestica as its starting place – at least within the Catholic tradition. These tensions and complications are repeatedly felt in this argument, although space does not allow for any fuller or more explicit consideration of them here.

³⁷ Ecclesia in Africa(1995) 80. See 80–85.

³⁸ Ecclesia in Asia(1999) 46.

³⁹ Ecclesia in America(1999) 76.

⁴⁰ Ecclesia in Europe (2003)

⁴¹ Ibid. 40.

⁴² Ibid. 90–93.

⁴³ This idea of the family as domestic church prophetically witnessing to life is especially clear in the Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Gregis(2003) 52.

⁴⁴ FC 51.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Christifideles Laici(1988) 57–63, on the formation of the laity, with reference to the domestic church coming in para.62.

⁴⁷ Op.cit. Emphases are mine.

⁴⁸ Paul VI, Marialis Cultus(1974) 52–54. Here formal prayer in common, especially the rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours, are seen as essential to family life ‘in full measure the vocation and spirituality proper’ to them.

⁴⁹ For examples not quoted see Pastores Gregis, 52; Ecclesia in Asia, 46.

⁵⁰ FC 21, as quoted above.

⁵¹ FC 53.

⁵² In saying this I am also aware of the growing number of effective and pastorally helpful groups that are springing up, especially in relation to the transmission of faith in the domestic church, as is testified to by a few of the respondents to Listening 2004– e.g. para. 85.