The Church as communion

9. In creating man and woman in his own image and likeness, God created them for communion. God the Creator, who revealed himself as Love, as Trinity, as communion, called them to enter into intimate relationship with himself and into interpersonal communion, in the universal fraternity of all men and women.(²¹)

This is our highest vocation: to enter into communion with God and with our brothers and sisters.

God's plan was compromised through sin, which sundered every kind of relationship: between the human race and God, between man and woman, among brothers and sisters, between peoples, between humanity and the rest of creation.

In his great love, the Father sent his Son, the new Adam, to reconstitute all creation and bring it to full unity. When he came among us, he established the beginning of the new People of God, calling to himself apostles and disciples, men and women -- a living parable of the human family gathered together in unity. He announced to them universal fraternity in the Father, who made us his intimates, his children, and brothers and sisters among ourselves. In this way he taught equality in fraternity and reconciliation in forgiveness. He overturned the relationships of power and domination, himself giving the example of how to serve and choose the last place. During the Last Supper, he entrusted to them the new commandment of mutual love: "a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another" (Jn. 13:34; cf. 15:12); he instituted the Eucharist, which, making us share in the one bread and one cup, nourishes mutual love. Then he turned to the Father asking, as a synthesis of his desires, for the unity of all, modelled on the Trinitarian unity: "that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us" (cf. Jn. 17:21).

Entrusting himself then to the Father's will, he achieved in the paschal mystery that unity which he had taught his disciples to live and which he had asked of the Father. By his death on the cross, he destroyed the barrier that separated peoples, reconciling us all in unity (cf. Eph. 2:14-16). By this, he taught us that communion and unity are the fruit of sharing in the mystery of His death.

The coming of the Holy Spirit, first gift to believers, brought about the unity willed by Christ. Poured out on the disciples gathered in the Upper Room with Mary, the Spirit gave visibility to the Church, which, from the very first moment, is characterised as fraternity and communion in the unity of one heart and one soul (cf. Acts 4:32).

This communion is the bond of charity which joins among themselves all the members of the same Body of Christ, and the Body with its Head. The same life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit(²²) builds in Christ organic cohesion: he unifies the Church in communion and ministry, co-ordinates and directs it with various hierarchic and charismatic gifts which complement each other, and makes the Church beautiful by his fruits.(²³)

In her pilgrimage through this world, the Church, one and holy, has constantly been characterised by a tension, often painful, towards effective unity. Along her path through history, she has become increasingly conscious of being the People and family of God, the Body of Christ, Temple of the Spirit, Sacrament of the intimate union of the human race, communion, icon of the Trinity. The Second Vatican Council has brought out, perhaps as never before, this mysterious and "communional" dimension of the Church.