1 Pope Paul VI, Ecclesiam suam, §56. English trans. available from http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p‐vi_enc_06081964_ecclesiam_en.html

2 Pope Paul VI,

3 See Alberigo, Giuseppe and Komonchak, Joseph A. (eds.), History of Vatican II, Maryknoll, Orbis and Leuven, Peeters, vol. IV, 270Google Scholar. And this encyclical continued to inspire many throughout the official church. Here cf., also, Gregory Baum, referring to Dialogue and Mission, a document released by the Vatican's Secretariat for Non‐Christian Missions, in 1984, ‘Dialogue and Mission presents the Church as the living sign of God's love revealed in Christ, with a mission to love humanity as Christ has loved us, towards the full manifestation of God's reign which has begun in him. (#9) The Church is called to dialogue because of its very faith: God is love, and in the trinitarian mystery Christian faith glimpses in God a life of communion and interchange. (#22) This was a theme dear to Pope Paul VI more fully explored in his encyclical Ecclesiam suam (1964), which proposes dialogue as norm and ideal for the Church of Christ on every level’, Baum, Gregory, Amazing Church: A Catholic Theologian Remembers a Half Century of Change, Maryknoll, Orbis, 2005, 114Google Scholar.

4 Released in January 2006. English translation available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben_xvi_enc_20051225_deus_caritus_est_en.html

5 §19, c.f. Augustine, De Trinitatae, VIII, 8, 12: CCL, 50, 287.

6 Cf., here, also, Tracy, David, ‘Caritas in the Catholic Tradition’, in On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics and the Church, Maryknoll, NY, Books Orbis, 1994Google Scholar.

7 E.g., c.f. Aquinas, Saint Thomas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 23 (1a 2ae. 55‐67), London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969, 65Google Scholar.

8 Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue, 1990, 205. Here I draw upon an earlier discussion of the concept in my ‘A Virtuous Community: The Self‐identity, Vision and Future of the Diocesan Church’, chapter in Timms, Noel (ed.): Diocesan Dispositions and Parish Voices, Matthew James, 2001, pp 79‐130Google Scholar.

9 Notwithstanding its use of language that today would be deemed non‐inclusive!

10 Gaudium et Spes, §92 (my italics), transl. Flannery, Austin (ed.), Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, New revised edn., 1992, Dublin, Dominican Publications, 999‐1000Google Scholar.

11 For example, the manner in which certain theologians were ‘investigated’ and ‘disciplined’. Indeed many commentators have also remarked how uncharitable the censure of Jon Sobrino was in March 2007, almost two years into Benedict's pontificate.

12 E.g., §19, ‘The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an undertaking that is often heroic in the way it is acted out through history …’. Cf., also, §§20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35.

13 §14, which is perhaps the most overtly ecclesiological paragraph of the document. Yet here, as elsewhere in the document (e.g. §15), it is not clear whether the ‘we’ and ‘us all’ mentioned refers to the entire human family or just to Christians (and, even then, only certain Christians). The passage is pregnant with many statements of profound ecclesial and ecclesiological implication (and yet of ambivalent meaning here). Nonetheless, given the numerous other writings of Pope Benedict prior to his election, one might best assume a neo‐exclusivistic interpretation of passages that are ambivalent would be the most accurate. See, also, §25, (b), 30 (esp. (b)). On neo‐exclusivism, see chapter 3 of Mannion, Gerard, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in our Times, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2007Google Scholar.

14 Examples would include the procrastination, secrecy and duplicity over the handling of instances of clerical child abuse; again the treatment of theologians deemed guilty of dissent; the tone of documents on other churches and religions, such as Dominus Iesus; and the very recent release of the CDF's ‘Responses to some Questions regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church’ (July 2007). This raises questions about the caritas being extended to other Christians or, indeed, to Roman Catholics who offer a differing ecclesiological understanding of the church to that ‘official’ ecclesiology currently in vogue. Further examples are afforded by the general shift back towards a more authoritarian and centralised form of ecclesial governance and, indeed, even, in many ways, the renewed hierarchical organisation and understanding of diocesan, national and curial bodies.

15 A very ‘Milbankian’ passage in the encyclical.

16 Again cf. Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity, especially Part I.

17 Allen, John, Pope Benedict XVI, London, Continuum, revd edn., 2005, 90Google Scholar. Here, as a particularl;y ood example, c.f. Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Introductory Thoughts on the State of the Church’, in Two Say Why: Balthasar and Ratzinger ‘Why I am Still in the Church’, trans. Griffiths, John, London, Search Press, 1973Google Scholar.

18 See §31. As opposed to ecclesial factions and parties, as well as ‘ideologies’.

19 Karl Rahner, as so often, pre‐empts our concerns here, warning that charity can often be all the more difficult to display the closer to home one encounters its need, ‘the world of intellectual pluralism is present within the Church herself. And because of this a dialogue within the Church is inevitable and necessary even if it makes things far more difficult and toilsome for us than formerly, especially since this dialogue is in many respects more difficult than a dialogue with the world outside the Church. This is because however lovingly we may try to behave in a family dispute it still has a special sharpness and bitterness of its own. It is also because this dialogue within the Church is conducted among complex and heterogeneous schools of thought within a single body governed by the same Christian faith and by the one social organisation of the Church. Thus these ‘limits’ offer less possibility of avoiding the dispute than in the case of the dialogue carried on outside the Church’, ‘Dialogue in the Church’, in vol. 10 of Theological Investigations, 1973, 109. Cf., also, Lonergan, Bernard, ‘Unity and Plurality: the Coherence of Christian Truth’, in his A Third Collection, ed. Crowe, Frederick E., London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1985, 239‐50Google Scholar. See, also, the discussion by Guarino, Thomas, ‘Fides et Ratio and Contemporary Pluralism’, Theological Studies 62 (2005), 675–700CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Note, of course, that Pope Benedict has privileged both John Paul II's and, indirectly and directly, his own interpretation of the documents of Vatican II.

21 Pope Benedict himself, states that ‘in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself and in Jesus we find God’, §15.

22 McLoughlin, David, ‘Authority in the Service of Communion’ in Timms, Noel and Wilson, Kenneth (eds.), Governance and Authority in the Roman Catholic Church: Beginning a Conversation, London, SPCK, 2000, 135Google Scholar. Cf., also, David Tracy, ‘The Christian focus on the event of Jesus Christ discloses the always‐already, not‐yet reality of grace. That grace, when reflected upon, unfolds its fuller meaning into the ordered relationships of the God who is love, the world that is beloved and a self gifted and commanded to become loving. With the self‐respect of that self‐identity, the Christian should be released to the self‐transcendence of genuine other‐regard by a willing self‐exposure to and in the contemporary situation’, David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 446. Cf., also, Moltmann‐Wendel, Elisabeth, A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, London, SCM, 1986Google Scholar, ‘From God's Love to Love of God’, 172‐74.

23 §18.

24 §18.

25 §15.

26 §6.

27 §28. Although I have reservations about the ‘two cities’ picture that many passages seem to imply here – even along Lutheran – perhaps even Erastian lines in one or two parts. Here the ambivalence of Pope John Paul II on the church's activity vis‐à‐vis the ‘political realm’ is further continued. My own position here is to affirm the ‘monistic’ view of history and therefore the church's and every Christian's duty to be as politically and socially informed and active as possible. If ‘A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church’ (§28) what, then is the task of the church in building the kingdom of Heaven/God? The ambivalence here continues in §29 and 30. Yet the encyclical might enjoy more consistency and coherence if its jettisoned this apparent ‘two cities’ mentality and the inevitable qualification of statements and hence, in effect, tempering of the radicality of the gospel, that such demands. More worrying still are some of those parts concerning welfare that might conceivably lend themselves to minimalist conceptions of the state in general and of welfare provision in particular.

28 §28 (b).

29 Did not Joseph Ratzinger speak of the church as ‘A Company in Constant Renewal’, the final chapter of his Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996Google Scholar?

30 §22. Cf., also §18, ‘But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It become merely “proper” but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well’.

31 §31 (c). Here cf., Juan Luis Segundo, who ended his own ‘response to cardinal Ratzinger's assessment of liberation theology with the following words, ‘In case of doubt, it will always be better to wager on what Cardinal Henri de Lubac expressed in a prayer, “If I lack love and justice, I separate myself completely from you, God, and my adoration is nothing more than idolatry. To believe in you, I must believe in love and in justice, and to believe in these things is worth a thousand times more than saying your name”’, Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 156Google Scholar.

32 Deus caritas est,§31.

33 §29.

34 §31 (a).

35 §34.

36 §39.

37 Watson, Natalie, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology, London, Sheffield Academic Press, 2002, 118Google Scholar (my italics). C.f., also, ibid., 120 and Watson, ‘Feminist Ecclesiologies’ in Mannion, Gerard and Mudge, Lewis (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, forthcoming, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where Watson, in discussing Letty Russell's work, states that ‘The life of the Church is the continuation of the liberating praxis of Jesus and of the life of God's Trinitarian activity’.

38 Indeed, note that one finds a somewhat different employment of trinitarian theology in the ecclesiological writings of Joseph Ratzinger (as private theologian), which, as one key study illustrates well, lends itself to a reaffirmation of a distinctly hierarchical understanding of the church today, see, Volf, Miroslav, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, Grand Rapids, Eerdmanns, 1998Google Scholar.

39 I discuss the promise of trinitarian ecclesiology for these times in greater detail in the final chapters Ecclesiology and Postmodernity.