Catholicism

Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man by Henri de Lubac, SJ, translated by Lancelot C Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund, OCD, 369 pages

By the middle of the twentieth century it had become commonplace for Christianity to be criticized, especially by those who sought to force the world into a utopia of their own imagining, as an excessively otherworldly belief system which disdained earthly communities.  Indeed, Christianity, with its emphasis on individual salvation, was alleged to be corrosive to the well-being of society.  This criticism was given added plausibility by the weight of centuries of bourgeois individualism shaping Christian practice.

Jesuit theologian de Lubac responds by reaching back to before the modern era to demonstrate the importance of solidarity in the Catholic understanding of redemption.  Drawing upon an impressive range of patristic texts, he explicates the Church's understanding of itself as the means by which Christ draws all men to Himself in an ongoing saga of salvation.  This social dimension of the Church not only responds to modern criticism, it also illuminates the Church's understanding of other religions and the historical economy of salvation.

A triumphant exposition of the saying of St Gregory the Great, "In Holy Church each bears the other and is borne by him."

(I read a personal copy of the Ignatius Press edition.  St Louis Public Library does not own this, but does have a 1958 Sheed and Ward edition with the alternate title Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind)