The Church, then, receives this Trinitarian life not to reduce it to a jealous possession, but to diffuse it by communicating it to humanity and to the entire cosmos. The ecclesiology of communion, about which so much has been said ever since Vatican II, is not, then a new strategy or a concession to a more widespread democratic sensibility, but is a constitutive element of the eucharistic community itself, molded into an image of the Trinitarian communion. This awareness permits us to gather the theological and revelatory intention with which John Paul II, after having invited the entire Church in the years preceding the Jubilee of 2000 to a wide-ranging reflection on the three Persons of the Trinity, as his Tertio millennio adveniente suggested, asked then in Novo millennio ineunte to “make the Church the home and school of communion”: the intimate and inseparable tie between Trinitarian life and Christian discipleship here merges with a rare concision and efficacy. Thus, in the words of that apostolic letter, we can reassume the Trinitarian mystery in its manifestation to men through the “great sign” of fraternal love. “Communion (koinonía) incarnates and manifests the very essence of the Church’s mystery. Communion is the fruit and the manifestation of the love that, flowing out from the heart of the eternal Father, pours itself out on us through the Spirit that Jesus gives us, to make of us all ‘one heart and one soul’. It is in carrying out this communion of love that the Church is shown as ‘sacrament’, that is, ‘a sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of the entire human race’” (NMI 42). Yes, the ineffable mystery of the Tri-unity of God is entrusted to the “body of Christ” that is the Church, delation in history of Jesus’ salvific mission: to free the human being and the entire creation from death. This final liberation we receive as the Father’s gift, a gift made flesh in Jesus and which we strive to live day after day, letting ourselves be guided by the Spirit.

Enzo Bianchi
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