Communio Circle of the Diocese of Hamilton

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, March 13th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “The Form of Power” by Andrew Willard Jones from the Fall 2025 issue entitled “Authority” (Volume 52.3). The article can be downloaded from here.

This is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
If Schindler diagnoses the modern reduction of authority to power, Andrew Willard Jones, in “The Form of Power,” turns his attention to the concept of power itself, arguing that much contemporary political reflection proceeds with an impoverished and ultimately misleading account of what power is. Against the assumption that power is a single, neutral force, varying only in degree and therefore in need of external constraints, Jones retrieves the classical insight that power takes distinct forms according to the kind of political order in which it is exercised. Power ordered to the common good, he insists, is not simply a better-regulated version of tyrannical power, but a fundamentally different reality altogether. It works through free obedience rooted in shared virtue, friendship, and a genuinely common happiness, rather than through fear or compulsion.

This distinction allows Jones to recover the classical understanding of royal power, which arises not from domination but from a paternal relation oriented toward the flourishing of those who are ruled. Law, on this view, functions not primarily as an instrument of enforcement, but as a form of rational instruction ordered to the formation of virtue and the coordination of common life. A justly ordered society, then, is a society of “kings all the way down—or, in what amounts to the same thing, fathers all the way up.” The coercive power of the state has a role, but only to the extent that justice has not yet permeated the relational “gaps” that remain.

Coercion is therefore, in Jones’s view, not the essence of power, but a sign of its failure. For this reason, it is of the essence of tyrannical rule to expand the gaps between human beings, and to rely increasingly on bureaucracy, surveillance, and force, in order to undermine the very social bonds upon which authentic political order depends. In a parody of royal power, then, a corrupt society is one of “tyrants all the way down, which, in the end, is identical to a society of slaves all the way down.”

Seen in this light, the modern identification of freedom with the limitation of power paradoxically undermines the freedom it seeks while further entrenching the tyranny it opposes. Genuine power is ordered to the common good, and operates through free obedience and shared virtue, while coercive power marks the breakdown of political community. By recovering a classical account of power as intrinsically ordered to truth, virtue, and the common good, Jones shows that political power need not be opposed to freedom, but is in fact one of its necessary conditions.

We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, February 13th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “Truly Defective Words: Teaching and the Sacramental Imagination” by Daniel R. Gibbons from the Summer 2025 issue entitled “Education” (Volume 52.2).

Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
If words cannot fully capture the realities they signify, is truth communicated by them? In “Truly Defective Words: Teaching and the Sacramental Imagination,” Daniel Gibbons asks what it means to teach through signs that are always, in some sense, inadequate. Beginning from Augustine’s conviction that no one can truly teach without grace, and extending through Aquinas’s account of the natural efficacy of signs, Gibbons explores what it would mean for both literature and pedagogy to be “sacramental.” If sacraments are “visible signs of invisible grace,” then the literary word operates in an analogous sense: not primarily conveying ideas, but, as he writes, forming “habits of love—good or bad habits, depending on what we are reading and how carefully we shield our hearts while performing it.” Words, in this view, are “signs . . . that draw people’s attention to something other than themselves,” pointing beyond their own meaning toward the invisible reality they signify. Gibbons challenges the didactic impulse common to classrooms both in secular and religiously affiliated institutions, that is, the desire to translate poems and stories into moral or theological propositions. Through figures such as Chaucer and Sidney, he shows that Christian literature resists such reduction. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales leaves readers not with certainty but with contradiction and repentance, while Sidney argues paradoxically that poetry may be “the least lyer” because it never claims to assert literal truth. In both, language teaches by shaping affections rather than delivering doctrine, moving readers to love the good through beauty and signification. At the heart of Gibbons’s argument is the Eucharist, which he calls the supreme “sign of contradiction.” In the Consecration, the substance of bread and wine is wholly changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, even as their appearances remain. This paradox of the Real Presence, where the sensible signs conceal what they reveal, offers the pattern for all truly Christian poetics. Such signs, he writes, “un-mean as much as they mean,” disclosing truth through the humility of form rather than clarity of concept. The liturgy itself forms the imagination not by conveying information but by shaping dispositions of faith, repentance, and gratitude through embodied speech. Teaching literature, then, must follow the same logic. To read well is not to master a work’s meaning but to dwell with it, allowing its signs to work upon the imagination. The teacher’s task is not to solve mystery but to cultivate docility before it, to help students become, in the phrase from the Gospel of John, “docible of God.” In that humility of attention, words may again become sacramental: “defective” in themselves, but made efficacious through the grace that empowers them to disclose the realities they signify.

We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, January 9th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “Of Cicadas and Mayflies: Literary Education” by James Matthew Wilson from the Summer 2025 issue entitled “Education” (Volume 52.2).

Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Of Cicadas and Mayflies: Literary Education,” James Matthew Wilson asks how literature forms the soul. How can a work of fiction lead one into truth? Is it a mere aid for those not yet ready to face reality directly, or does it remain essential even at the highest stages of contemplation? Wilson answers that the literary—poiesis and mythos broadly understood—marks the full arc of education, beginning in an exitus and culminating in a reditus. Literature initiates the movement of the soul toward reality and fulfills it in the vision of form. Drawing on Plato, he shows that Socrates understood poetry as the opposite of sophistry: the latter “beneath reason,” using speech to obscure truth; the former “above reason,” revealing truth through image and symbol. Poetry presents to the soul what reason can reach only by slow ascent. It sends the soul forth toward truth, yet also remains the ground to which thought returns in rest—the beginning and the end of contemplation. For Wilson, this rhythm defines all genuine education. Works of art are not diversions from reality but encounters with it. They begin as responses to the world and become explorations of it, calling us not to abstraction but to dwell with the concrete form in its fullness, where the particular and the universal, the made and the real, meet. The work of art, he continues, is itself a mode of knowing. The act of making expresses a bodily, incarnate intelligence, and the finished work embodies a truth that can be contemplated. “The made work of fine art participates in an essential manner in the act of knowing,” he writes, “in the intellectual response that rational animals make to reality, to being as it gives itself.” Following Maritain, Wilson joins poetic and metaphysical knowledge: one seeks essences, the other encounters existence. From Augustine, he draws the insight that our patterns of making mirror the creative patterns of reality itself. Against Etienne Gilson, who sought to divide artistic fact from aesthetic reflection, Wilson insists that both belong to one movement of knowledge—the soul’s going forth and return within the order of being. Education, in its final sense, is therefore an act of contemplation, a “kind of aesthetic dwelling.” We should avoid dissolving form into abstractions; rather, we must see “into” it, until its unity discloses itself as the form of reality. Wilson ends with Richard Wilbur’s “Mayflies,” which captures for our author the experience of being wounded by the beautiful form contemplated to the one who has consented to receive being through that form’s fullness.

We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, December 12th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.

We will be discussing “The Symbolic Formation of the Heart: On the Art of Conversion” by D.C. Schindler from the Summer 2025 issue entitled “Education” (Volume 52.2). The article can be downloaded from here.

Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
Education, Plato tells us, is the “art of turning around the whole soul.” In “The Symbolic Formation of the Heart: On the Art of Conversion,” D.C. Schindler takes up this claim and asks what it means for a human being to be reoriented toward reality in that comprehensive sense. Schindler interprets this reorientation not as a merely intellectual alteration, but as a transformation of the whole person: per se unum, body and soul. In this conversion, the soul, notes Schindler, can turn only around its own “center,” which Schindler locates in the heart. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he describes the heart not as a mere metaphor for emotion but as the first mover of the living organism, the visible principle through which the soul gives life to the body. The heart is the meeting point between interior and exterior life, between knowing and loving. Against modern viewpoints that divide spirit from matter, Schindler insists that the heart is not simply a symbol of unity but a symbol that is itself unity: the joining together (sym-ballein) of body and soul, of the physical and the spiritual. If education, therefore, is to move the person as a whole, it must be directed toward this center. The heart, being symbolic by nature, is moved not by abstract information but by symbols, that is, by embodied forms that make meaning present. True pedagogy is not simply techniques, then, but formation, which takes places through ritual, imagination, and memory. These are habits that dispose the heart to recognize truth, goodness, and beauty as realities that are always-already given. Imagination, for Schindler, is the place where meaning becomes incarnate, where the soul learns to dwell with what it knows. Memory likewise belongs to the heart’s life: to “learn by heart” is to receive form into oneself, to interiorize the whole of something. All genuine teaching is thus symbolic: it communicates life through the embodied presence of the teacher, who becomes “a signpost, in his very person, that points to the truth, beauty, and goodness of reality.” The teacher, however, does not “produce” the conversion of the student, but enables him to receive it, as a “soul-shaking discovery of what was always-already there, always-already given—which is precisely what it means to receive the real as a gift.”

We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, November 14th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.

We will be discussing “Being Born into the Body of Christ: Baptism and the Fruitful Form of the Church” by José Granados from the Spring 2025 issue entitled “Baptism” (Volume 52.1).

Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Being Born into the Body of Christ: Baptism and the Fruitful Form of the Church,” José Granados responds to the claim that the “centrality of baptism requires a new reading of Lumen gentium,” put forth by Christoph Theobald. In Theobald’s assessment, Lumen gentium maintains too great of a distinction between the clergy and the laity, and in so doing, implies that the clergy have a greater degree of sanctity than the laity. Granados responds to Theobald’s concern by turning to the Biblical foundations of the sacrament of baptism. In particular he looks at the accounts of baptism in the eighth, ninth, and tenth chapters of the Book of Acts. Granados argues that the character bestowed in baptism bears within itself the entire hierarchical order of the Church, whether one is a layperson or a member of the clergy. In other words, the relationship between the laity and the clergy is not an addition brought in subsequent to a generic baptism, but is already entailed in and given by each person’s baptism, which makes us members of the Eucharistic Body of Christ. The dignity that it bestows is not neutral, nor does it affect us merely as individuals. Rather, it fits us for life in Christ and the Church. To this end baptism gives us “a new capacity to judge,” which is crucial for correctly understanding what is meant by the “sense of the faithful.”

We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, October 10th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “The Senses of Scripture and the Church’s Life: Reading 2 Timothy with Henri de Lubac” by William M. Wright, IV from the Spring 2025 issue entitled “Baptism” (Volume 52.1).

Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
What is the meaning of Scripture, and how does one understand this meaning? Traditionally, the doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture provided the essential context for understanding God’s word rightly. In this doctrine, the literal sense and the spiritual senses interpenetrate one another, and each sheds light on the others. In “The Senses of Scripture and the Church’s Life: Reading 2 Timothy with Henri De Lubac,” William M. Wright IV examines and clarifies the meaning of each sense of Scripture and its place in the traditional method of read the Bible. Through the insights of de Lubac and an exegesis of the second letter of Paul to Timothy, Wright defends the use of the fourfold sense of Scripture, clarifying the terminology of this doctrine for those who wish to rediscover it today. If Sacred Scripture is the revelation of God, which is perfectly given in the person of Christ, then the meaning of Scripture only becomes truly accessible within the life of the Body of Christ, the Church. And becuase it is God’s disclosure of himself to those whom he has called into communion with him, this word becomes genuine Christian paideia: formation, and transformation, for those who read it as members of Christ’s Body.

We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.