Book Review Church: Living Community (continued)

Rather than drawing on traditional deductive models of the Church (see, for instance, Avery Dulles’s classic Models of the Church) Lakeland begins with concrete examples of what the Church is like in the United States today.

His working description of the Church, which he repeats often in the first section of the book is: “that community of faith distinguished by the experience that the loving care of God for us is supremely available in our intimacy with the story of Jesus Christ.”

This first section draws on the marks of the Church from Tradition, which he enhances by references to the documents of Vatican II, especially Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The four traditional marks, he suggests, answer the traditional questions: what? (Holiness), who? (Unity), where? (Catholicity), and why? (Apostolicity), to which he adds a fifth: when? (Eternity).

In the second section he addresses 10 experiential questions currently alive in the Church in the U.S., if not in the worldwide Church. These are all issues with which members of Voice of the Faithful are familiar and which we are addressing. Some of these questions—to which he provides processes for answering in addition to suggestions of some solutions—are identity and commitment; ministry: ordained and lay; the roles of women in the Church; Church teaching and individual conscience; religious formation of the young; and the scandal of sexual abuse. VOTF members will find helpful hints on dealing with these issues.

The final section describes what Lakeland means by an inductive theology of the Church, based on the insights of Bernard Lonergan. He refers frequently to the empirical studies of people like William D’Antonio.

Drawing on a quote from Lonergan, Lakeland describes the approach to understanding the Church as responding to five criteria: 1) Be Attentive or Read the Signs of the Times; 2) Be Intelligent, or Practice Discernment; 3) Be Reasonable; 4) Be Loving; and 5) If Necessary, Change. This small work (181 pages) will provide much food for thought for 21st Century Catholics.