Tuesday, March 1, 2022 (12:32)

What is the mission of the Church? The Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research suggests in a draft document (December 2021):

“[T]he Church’s mission, grounded in the Gospel, is to proclaim and show forth Jesus’ Good News of how to live a fully human life as images of God in individual and communal justice and love”. The entire Church is responsible for the fulfilment of that mission.

This is based on the ARCC Constitution, Mt 28:16-10 and parallels and on CIC, can. 781: “Since the whole Church is by its nature missionary and the work of evangelization must be held as a fundamental duty of the people of God, all the Christian faithful, conscious of their responsibility, are to assume their part in missionary work.”

Nobody (except Christians) asks whether the mission is “grounded in the Gospel”. For a lawyer this is useless gibberish. Remove. Also the remaining formulations are

In my draft I suggest a much more mundane approach: we simply create a new institution from scratch.

announce the Gospel to the visible world and to reconcile, unite and guide all Christian communities