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October 2024 Vol 63 No 4
Ecclesial Creativity

St Ignatius’ Rules for Thinking with the Church: Spiritual Direction for a Synodal Church

Spiritual directors are invited to help their directees feel their way forward as part of a community so that they recognise that the Church consists of the whole people of God on a shared journey throughout history. Ignatius’ Rules for Thinking with the Church can help them to do this in the context of today’s synodal Church.

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Mission of the Spirit

A theology that reflects on spiritual practice must find words for what happens in our interiority, tempering our visible mission with the invisible keenness of the Spirit.

Global Godliness?

How does a universal Church that aspites towards unity also embrace diversity in a world of increasing globalisation?

The Rules for Thinking, Judging, Feeling in the Post-Conciliar Church

This classic discourse sets out how St Ignatius’ ‘Rules for Thinking with the Church’ are relevant to the ministry of reconciliation that is given to every contemporary disciple of Jesus.

Catholics, Anabaptists and the Bruderhof: New Spiritual Patterns

New ecumenical patterns of belief and practice are growing in an Austrian Christian community that has been bearing continuous witness to the Gospel over the course of the past century.

Phenomenology and Spirituality: Insight, Intuition and Introspection

The intersection of processes in the mind can help us to understand how body and mind work together in the world as we discern a way forward, as individuals and as Church, with integrity.

The Deep Breath of Prayer with the Word

Two members of the Verbum Dei community use the image of prayer as a deep breath to introduce their institute’s adaption of the Spiritual Exercises to the needs of their members.

Seminary Formation and the Second Week

The dynamic of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises offers a template for the process of priestly formation in seminaries, helping those involved become true disciples of Jesus.

What Does It Mean to Say that Mary Is Mother?

The place of Mary in the Church has been the subject of considerable debate; this article clarifies her precise role in relation to the mediation of grace and the redemption of humanity acknowledging the vital affective influence she has on our prayer.

Sent on Mission: The Rules for Thinking with the Church

At the end of the Spiritual Exercises, the heart-felt identity that has been growing throughout the process is given a final encouragement to find a home in the mission of the Church.

From the Foreword

At the conference of the bishops of Latin America in Aparecida in 2007, the then archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, revealed a deep-seated intuition about ‘this holy faithful people of God … enjoying the infallibilitas in credendo’, which has determined the course of his papacy. Later, as Pope Francis, he would explain: '… all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together.' He has challenged us to recognise that the faith was never left in the hands of a select few, but given as a gift to many. As he explains: ‘when you want to know what Holy Mother Church believes, go to the Magisterium … but when you want to know how the Church believes, go to the faithful people’. Each of the articles in this issue touches upon the creativity that is necessary to reconcile the tensions between what the Church teaches and how it is believed, so that all Christians can, in Pope Francis’s words, ‘walk united with our differences’.

Philip Harrison SJ

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