Communio Circle of the Diocese of Hamilton

You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, October 9th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.

We will be discussing “Confirmation: The Generative Sacrament” by José Granados by from the Winter 2025 issue entitled “Confirmation” (Volume 53.1). The article can be downloaded from here:
https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/confirmation-the-generative-sacrament

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Confirmation: The Generative Sacrament,” José Granados takes up the question that lies at the heart of any theology of Confirmation: what distinguishes it from Baptism? What does Confirmation “add”? The Reformers denied that Confirmation is properly a sacrament, regarding it instead as a kind of catechetical profession of the faith already received in Baptism. Another solution distinguished the two sacraments by assigning them different spiritual gifts. But, as Aquinas saw, this answer divides the work of the Spirit himself. Granados therefore seeks another way of understanding the “addition” of Confirmation. Confirmation does not give “more” of the Spirit, as though Baptism were deficient. Rather, it gives the Spirit in a new mode: as the strengthening and maturing of baptismal life into a generative capacity. In Baptism, the Christian is received into the filial and fraternal communion of Christ’s body. In Confirmation, this same life is brought to maturity, so that the Christian becomes capable of communicating what he has received. This understanding of Confirmation as a “strengthening,” rather than an addition, is rooted in the temporal form of creaturely life. Human life is first received, and only later matures into the capacity to hand on this life. This temporal structure is not bypassed by grace, but assumed and sanctified in Christ, who takes up the fullness of human nature. So too in the life of grace: the believer who has truly received life in Baptism is strengthened in Confirmation to become fruitful for others. Confirmation reveals, then, that true strength is a fruitful and generous capacity. Therefore a deeper understanding of Confirmation can serve as a corrective to the technocratic paradigm operative today. For the generative power bestowed in Confirmation is not domination, but responsibility. The kind of “power” bestowed by the grace of Confirmation is, in other words, the power to serve the other in his deepest need, the need for God.

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, September 11th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.

We will be discussing “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Aquinas on the Discovery of Being” by Nicholas J. Healy Jr. from the Winter 2025 issue entitled “800 Years of Thomas Aquinas” (Volume 52.4).

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Aquinas on the Discovery of Being,” Nicholas J. Healy reflects on the manner in which the mystery of being presents itself within human experience and thought. Building on Balthasar’s reading of Aquinas, Healy argues that metaphysics begins not from speculative construction but from the lived discovery of esse as the act that grounds and sustains every existing thing. Within this discovery is the recognition that created being, in the simultaneity of its goodness
and contingency, always points beyond itself to its infinitely good and necessarily self-subsisting origin—which is to say, the discovery of being is the discovery that it is gift. Philosophy reflects on being’s intelligibility and goodness only insofar as these are first encountered and received within experience. In particular, the experiences of gratitude and wonder are central to Thomistic metaphysics, on Balthasar’s reading.

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, August 14th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.

We will be discussing “Beauty as the Wellspring of Human Action in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas” by D.C. Schindler from the Winter 2025 issue entitled “800 Years of Thomas Aquinas” (Volume 52.4).

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Beauty as the Wellspring of Human Action in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas,” D.C. Schindler proposes a reconsideration of the role of beauty in the account of human action. For Aquinas, every action—not only of rational creatures but of all beings without exception—proceeds from love. Within this context, moral acts are specified by the fact that the love that governs them expresses the particular faculties of intellect and will, which direct the agent from within toward being in its intelligibility and goodness. It is the rational faculties of the human person, within the unity of body and soul, that render him receptively open to an encounter with reality that awakens love and directs him toward the good. Yet it is precisely with regard to the role of the good in human action that Schindler believes many proponents of Thomistic moral thought do not go far enough. Although Aquinas states that the good alone is the cause of love, he also holds that the good moves the appetite only insofar as it is apprehended, which is in fact the very definition of the beautiful. On this basis, Schindler argues that beauty should be understood as the origin of love and, in this sense, the source of action. Human action therefore begins not first in willing but in contemplation, and the freedom of the will presupposes a prior reception of reality that first moves man to love.

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, July 10th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “On the Thomistic Problem of the Beatific Vision” by Étienne Gilson from the Winter 2025 issue entitled “800 Years of Thomas Aquinas” (Volume 52.4). The article can be downloaded from here.

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
… in “Retrieving the Tradition,” the English-language edition of Communio is pleased to present for the first time the work of Étienne Gilson, with a 1964 essay entitled “On the Thomistic Problem of the Beatific Vision.” In this study the great historian of philosophy seeks to recover the question of the “natural desire” to see God as Aquinas himself poses this question, prior to the later theological disputes that have so often shaped its interpretation. Returning to the Thomistic context in which the problem first arises, Gilson recalls that for Thomas the whole order of creation is directed toward the divine likeness and that intellectual creatures attain this end most properly through the knowledge of God. The beatific vision thus appears not as an extrinsic addition to the creature’s destiny but as the fulfillment, by grace, of the intellect’s deepest orientation toward the first cause of all being. It is precisely this point that has again become the focus of intense debate in contemporary theology, especially in disputes concerning the relation between nature and grace and the question of whether man possesses a natural desire for the supernatural. Without attempting to resolve these controversies directly, Gilson offers something more fundamental: a recovery of the Thomistic problematic itself prior to many of the conceptual oppositions that later came to dominate the discussion.

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, June 12th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “Episcopal Authority and Communio Ecclesiology: Some Lessons from History” by Nicholas J. Healy Jr. from the Fall 2025 issue entitled “Authority” (Volume 52.3).

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Episcopal Authority and Communio Ecclesiology: Some Lessons from History,” Nicholas J. Healy considers the contemporary call for greater shared responsibility in the life of the Church, today commonly gathered under the heading of “synodality,” within a longer theological and ecclesiological history that goes back at least to the early Church, and which took concrete historical form institutionally in regional and diocesan synods, as well as spiritually in moments when the faith was preserved through the consensus fidelium. These precedents indicate that authority in the Church has never been exercised in isolation from communion, but always within the living faith of the whole body. Healy therefore seeks to clarify episcopal authority in light of the ecclesiology of communion articulated by Vatican II. He notes that the Council was not convened to resolve a doctrinal crisis, but to address the modern situation pastorally, with Christ and the human person revealed in Christ as the hermeneutical key to the Council. From this perspective, the Church is understood first as a sacrament, or “real symbol,” of God’s plan to recapitulate all things in Christ. In this light, the Church is understood as a mystery of love and communion grounded in the Eucharist, which establishes the Church’s “vertical” communion with the Trinity and gives rise to the “horizontal” communion of the human race gathered into Christ’s body. This Eucharistic ecclesiology makes it possible to see episcopal authority as much more than juridical or administrative power. Rather, the episcopacy is a sacramental reality ordered to communion and mission. While the bishop’s authority is exercised collegially with and under the pope, it is not given to him by the Successor of Peter, but directly by Christ through the plenitude of the sacrament of Holy Orders. The episcopacy, therefore, is not a delegated function, but a participation in apostolic responsibility for the Church. The implications for this communio ecclesiology extend to the laity, as well: genuine co-responsibility, Healy argues, does not consist in extending governance to all, but in honoring the distinct vocations of clergy and laity within the Church’s mission. Synodality, if it is to renew the Church, must therefore not be reduced to the extension of bureaucratic processes, but lived as Eucharistic communion and holiness, through which authority truly “causes to grow” the life of the Church.

It is recommended that you read LUMEN GENTIUM: DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH, CHAPTER III: ON THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF THE CHURCH AND IN PARTICULAR ON THE EPISCOPATE, in preparation for the meeting.

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, May 8th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “The Church as Political Authority in Dignitatis humanae and Centesimus Annus” by Michael Joseph Higgins from the Fall 2025 issue entitled “Authority” (Volume 52.3).

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “The Church as Political Authority in Dignitatis humanae and Centesimus annus,” Michael Joseph Higgins examines the Church’s role in the political order by attending closely to the internal logic of Vatican II’s “Declaration on Religious Freedom” and its subsequent development in John Paul II’s social teaching. Against liberal readings, which restrict the Church’s role to the purely private sphere or that of civil society, and integralist proposals, which collapse ecclesial authority into political governance, Higgins argues that the Church exercises a genuine political authority precisely by proclaiming the truth according to which political life is to be ordered, without directly managing or administering the political order itself.

Higgins begins with Dignitatis humanae, emphasizing that while the document affirms a real right to religious freedom, it also insists that this right is not absolute. The state may regulate external expressions of religion when required by just public order, which includes not only peace and the settlement of competing rights, but also public morality. Crucially, Dignitatis humanae teaches that such regulation must conform to the “objective moral order,” the principles of which the Church is divinely tasked to “declare and confirm with her authority.” Although these principles flow from human nature and are in principle accessible to reason, Higgins argues that the document implies that only the Church can guarantee full and certain access to the moral order as a whole.

This implication becomes explicit when Dignitatis humanae is read in light of Gaudium et spes, which teaches that the truth of human nature is fully revealed only in Christ. Since the Church is the authoritative teacher of the truth that is Christ, the Church alone can disclose the fullness of the moral order by which political authority must be guided. The state, therefore, can fulfill its responsibility to regulate religious freedom justly only insofar as it receives this truth from the Church.

Higgins then turns to Centesimus annus, where John Paul II extends this logic to democracy and the economy. Authentic democracy, the pope argues, is possible only when political life is guided by a true conception of the human person, a conception revealed in the mystery of the Incarnate Word and entrusted to the Church. The Church thus contributes not merely to civil society, but to the political order itself, by offering the truth that makes freedom, justice, and authentic political forms possible. In this way, Higgins concludes, both conciliar and post-conciliar teaching point toward an understanding of the Church as a political authority: not one that governs by force, but one that governs by truth.

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.