Welcome to Part Two of an ongoing series of reflections on the Instrumentum Laboris for the 2024 session of the General Assembly of Synod. You can read Part One here. For our complete coverage of the ongoing synodal process, visit slmedia.org/synod. This past July, the Synod Secretariat released the much-anticipated Instrumentum Laboris (Working Document, IL) for the 2024 session of the General Assembly. In Part One of my reflections on the 2024 IL, I introduced the document by highlighting the way it summons the Synod and the Church to “reflect” the light of Christ rather than “proclaim itself” (#4), looking up to God as the source of that “light” and then looking out to the world in mission as the place illumined by that light. I also wrote a bit about what it might mean to “shine” or “reflect the light of Christ”: the IL  asserted that the Church “cannot…understand its mission self-referentially but receives the responsibility of being the sacrament of bonds, relationships, and communion in service to the unity of all humanity” (ibid.) In Part Two, I’ll explore that idea of “Church as Sacrament” more deeply. As the term implies, this “sacramental ecclesiology” explores the relationship between the Church: People of God, Body of Christ, and Hierarchical Institution, and the thing we normally call a Sacrament, specifically the Holy Eucharist. I’ll start by mentioning where the IL reflects on the Church’s identity as the people explicitly gathered in the Eucharistic Liturgy, something the IL for last year’s session also considered. I’ll then turn to the 2024 IL’s use of Vatican II quotations (especially Lumen Gentium), and explore at length one of the Council’s own theological forerunners, to describe what the IL might mean by “the responsibility of being the sacrament of bonds, relationships, and communion in service to the unity of all humanity.”  

Baptism and Eucharist

It's fitting that this Synod on Synodality has been rooted in the two Sacraments founded in the Gospels by Christ himself. The phrase “baptismal identity” formed a consistent refrain throughout 2023. The Working Document for the Continental Stage, the 2023 IL, and the texts of the Assembly in October focused on the identity of the People of God found in our rebirth in Water and the Spirit as the source of our common vocation to participate in the mission of the Gospel. The Instrumentum Laboris for the 2024 General Assembly now turns to the bond of unity that the Holy Spirit continually renews in us in the Holy Eucharist. In the Blessed Sacrament, the Holy Spirit sustains us with that common identity found in baptism by drawing us together to participate in mission and sending us out to proclaim the Gospel to the world. As an aside, the July release of the IL was great timing especially for North American Catholics, as it coincided with the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in late July and Eucharistic Revival happening throughout the United States. At two points, the 2024 IL makes this Eucharistic focus clear. In terms explicitly derived from Lumen Gentium’s own well-known saying (#11), it recalls that the unity of the Church, forged and fostered by Christ’s light and love,

has its source and culmination in the celebration of the Eucharist, that is, in communion with the Triune God and the unity among human persons that is realized in Christ through the Holy Spirit (IL #7, emphasis added).

Later on, it reminds us that regular participation at Mass and regular reception of the Sacrament is the primary practical way that we embark on our journey of encounter with God and unity with our neighbours:

The Eucharistic assembly manifests and nourishes the missionary synodal life of the Church. In the participation of all Christians, in the presence of different ministries and the presidency of the bishop or priest, the Christian community is made visible, in which a differentiated co-responsibility of all for the mission is realized (#25).

Highlighting the quality of our liturgical presence – not simply showing up to Mass, but looking to it as the most important way that we participate in a missionary, synodal Church (#12) – reminds me of Sacrosanctum Concilium's own famous expression of “the wish of the Church that all the faithful should be led to take that full, conscious, and active part in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy” (SC #14).  

Returning to the Sources

At this point, "Church as Sacrament" might still seem a bit abstract. Did we look at whatever is fruitful and loving in our ecclesial activity – whether it’s the Mass, or catechesis, good theological speculation, sound pastoral care, prudent episcopal leadership, sacrificial witnesses to human dignity, patient conflict management, loving friendships that emerge in parish life, or even wise and effective maintenance of “budgets, buildings, parking lots, and potluck dinners” – and throw on a fancy theological label to describe this activity as something like Eucharist, Baptism, Ordination, etc.? Is that what the Council Fathers did? Or does it come from something more robust, at once fitting with the lived experiences of their times (and ours) and from a deep excavation of Sacred Tradition? The IL quotations above remind us that the Council Fathers drafting Lumen Gentium discovered that the loving unity of the People of God isn’t merely like a Sacrament, but is part of, intimately connected to, the grace that flows from Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. 21st-century readers may intuitively grasp that by now, but it was something that had been forgotten by the mid-20th century. And even if we grasp it, the IL’s focus on it suggests that we’d do well to recall its implications. To begin their own great act of “ecclesial remembering,” the bishops at Vatican II turned to the theological experts invited to the Council by Pope John XXIII. Many of these were part of a renewal movement called ressourcement, which advocated for a "return to the sources" of Tradition to find new insights. A prime example of this movement was French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, whose groundbreaking 1947 edition Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme (“The Social Aspects of Dogma”) plunged full-bore into the Patristic world and mined the very theological insights the Council needed to blow fresh air into a set of institutions that many (Pope John included) felt had become self-referential and out of touch with the world at the time. While he isn’t referenced explicitly in the IL, his work to set the stage for the Council can help illumine the Vatican II quotations found in the 2024 document. One of de Lubac’s chief concerns was that modern Eucharistic teaching and practice had developed an overriding focus on the saving grace conferred by the Sacraments to the individual person, He believed that this focus had come at the expense of the Church Fathers' and Medieval theologians' attention to the unifying, communal dimension of the Blessed Sacrament and of salvation itself (Catholicism, English edition p. 82-83). In Catholicism, he asked the Church of his time about this communal dimension: "When a thought is given to it, don't we often tell ourselves that this is only a secondary and additional consideration without which the doctrine of the Eucharist would still be complete?" (p. 89).  

Real Presence, Mystical Body

De Lubac charts the shift from a communal to an individual focus in the Eucharist as a change in our sense of the term “mystical” in the phrase “Mystical Body of Christ.” Somewhere in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, modern minds picked up the idea that “mystical” somehow meant “less real,” because it was less tangible or understandable. That shift in mindset and imagination is too complex for me to explain here: de Lubac devoted an entire book to it, 1944’s Corpus Mysticum. He “reverse engineered” that semantic switch to discover that for Patristic and Medieval commentators, the phrase “Mystical Body” or Corpus Mysticum initially referred to the Eucharist rather than the Church. Specifically, it referred to the way that God, in the Blessed Sacrament, unites people to become the Church. Indeed, theologians used the term “True Body” or Corpus Verum, to chiefly refer to the Church (Catholicism, 99-100). It’s important to note that by recalling the description of the Eucharist as the “Mystical Body” rather than the “True Body,” de Lubac never denied the doctrine of the Real Presence or Thomas Aquinas' formula of Transubstantiation. He never needed to: the idea that something “mystical” is less real is a modern development, and one we might question. De Lubac merely pointed out what Scripture and Tradition claim about the purpose of the Eucharist, what we believe God is doing by coming to us. Remember, that’s what a Sacrament (sacramentum in Latin, mysterion in Greek) is: a sign that shows us something, but more importantly involves God doing something, showing us his love, and therefore shows us himself, in the sacramental act. The act in question here is what St. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 10:17: “We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” A highly important change that helped people grasp this had already begun at the beginning of the 20th century. It might surprise readers to know that for much of the second millennium, lay people only partook of the Sacrament at most three times a year, at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. For the rest of the time, their primary contact with the Sacrament, and therefore much of the activity of the everyday parish, involved Eucharistic devotions such as the Anima Christi prayer, Holy Hours, perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and other silent, individual reflections. These devotions were surely beneficial and much beloved, and still are. However, many were beginning to see them as secondary to reception. Popes Leo XIII and Pius X started to encourage lay people to “partake of the one bread” more regularly, and weekly reception became the norm over the next few decades. Still, more work was needed to appreciate the importance of weekly reception by the whole community. Even when lay people regularly receive the Sacrament, the overriding focus could still be on me receiving the Body and Blood. After all, de Lubac was responding to this focus as it had emerged over centuries of clergy and religious receiving daily. De Lubac in the 1940s, and then Vatican II in the 1960s, discerned the need to recall the belief, asserted in 1 Corinthians 10:17, that Christ’s True Body of the Eucharist gathers and binds together the True Body of the People of God. Individual Christians on their own can’t be the True Body: we can only find ourselves as part of the True Body. Put another way, when we call the Church the “Body of Christ,” we can’t be content with thinking that it’s simply a turn of phrase or a metaphor for a gathering of multiple individual Christians. The IL asserts that

The People of God is never simply the sum of the baptised; rather, it is the ‘we’ of the Church, the communitarian and historical subject of synodality and mission, so that all  may receive the salvation prepared by God (#3, emphasis added).

We’re invited to see the People of God as the mystery, a real work and gift of God’s own saving presence in the world, at least insofar as Christians faithfully show the charity and truth of God. De Lubac puts it this way:

Grace which is produced and maintained by the sacraments does not set up a purely individual relationship between the soul and God or Christ; rather does each individual receive such grace in proportion as he is joined, socially, to that one body whence flows this saving life-stream….All the sacraments are essentially sacraments of the Church; in her alone do they produce their full effect, for in her alone, ‘the society of the Spirit’ is there…participation in the gift of the Spirit” (Catholicism, p. 82-83)

The True Body of the Church, which bears and is bound together by the Sacrament of the Real Presence of Christ (the Eucharist), can therefore be the Sacrament of the True Body in the world, the means of “the salvific unity willed by God,” visible to the world (IL #9). Here is the sacramental basis for the IL’s vision of a missional Church.  

Turning to the present

I think the IL’s references to Lumen Gentium’s ressourcement-inspired communal, sacramental vision of the Church is more of a reminder than rediscovery. Six decades on, Vatican II’s reform seems to have largely taken root: we seem well aware that the Eucharist is the source of our ability to show God’s loving presence with each other and with “the people of our time” (Gaudium et Spes #1). In fact, those accusing the synod process of “self-referentiality” might claim that we’ve gone too far in another direction, focusing on the Church as a “social club” rather than the True, Mystical Body of Christ. I explored the 2024 IL’s response to that in Part One. Here in Part Two, I specifically honed in on the IL’s use of the theology of “Church as Sacrament.” I began with the ways it roots the identity of the Church, following Lumen Gentium and Sacrosanctum Concilium, in the gathered liturgical assembly at Mass. I then deepened this notion of “liturgical identity” into a reflection on the IL’s resonances, via Lumen Gentium, with 20th-century theologian Henri de Lubac’s discovery of the intimate connection between the mystery of grace in the Eucharist and the reality of communal love in the Body of Christ. Hopefully, de Lubac’s insights can help us understand what the IL means when it summons the Synod and the Church to “receive the responsibility of being the sacrament of bonds, relationships, and communion in service to the unity of all humanity” (#4) The next important questions are: Why does the IL root itself so explicitly in a 1964 Conciliar Document on sacramental ecclesiology now? What does it hope this communal, sacramental vision has to say to a Church and world in 2024 and beyond? And what does all this have to do with the way parishes, dioceses, and the whole Catholic Church itself make decisions that foster participation and motivate mission? Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, as we prepare for the curtain to drop on the second session of the Synodal Assembly. And be sure to catch Salt + Light TV’s coverage of the Assembly throughout October.