The Church a community of learners

In line with all of the developments of the current global synod on synodality, including the recent release of the “Instrumentum Laboris,” or working document, for the first session of the October 2023 gathering, I am currently in Rome teaching a graduate course titled “The Teaching and Learning Church.”

Of course, the readings and conversation take seriously the role of the universal Church in expressing its mission, ideas and doctrines to a world in dire need of light and truth. But we are also exploring the concomitant need for the Church to be a community of learners, as every good teacher is first and foremost a good student. And so, we are each and every one called to be both apostles (ambassadors and witnesses sent forth to enlighten the world) and disciples (pupils sitting at the feet of the Master, and choosing along with Mary of Bethany “the better part” – Lk 10:42). The Church, too, is not a community where some teach and others learn, but rather one where the whole body is called to do both.

The Oxford-trained Hungarian canon lawyer Ladislas Orsy puts it well: “The whole Church, no one excepted, is a learning Church. There is no person who does not have the invitation (and duty!) to learn more and more about the Word of God. Who could ever claim that he or she does not need to progress toward the whole truth? Moreover, who could ever claim that Christians of past or present could not teach him new insights or greater wisdom? We all belong to the learning Church.”

In Rome, there are countless examples of “Christians of [the] past” teaching us what it means to live the faith in difficult times, from San Sebastiano through San Giovanni Paolo II. But there are also “Christians of [the] present” continuing to shed light on what it means to be a learning Church in our specific moment.

That is why I brought the class to meet with Brother Guy Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican’s Astronomical Observatory in Castel Gandolfo; a sacred place if ever there was one to me personally, since I proposed to my wife there in 2017. Brother Guy spent an afternoon with us in this stunning mountaintop town in the Castelli Romani, where the emperor Domitian once had his expansive villa, and which today houses both the pope’s summer residence (which Francis rarely uses) and the historical center of the Observatory (whose more modern telescopes are actually in Mount Graham, Arizona, to better function with less light pollution).

We dialogued about the role of science in understanding creation and the cosmos, and how its methodologies, so different from those of theological disciplines, need not be framed as antagonistic to one another. He shared with us his deeply spiritual journey, from MIT to meeting all of the recent popes in his current role, with incredible and inspiring stops in-between.

There are many heuristic tools used to describe what we can call deep cosmological time. My favorite is to imagine a 30-volume set of encyclopedias on a shelf. Each thick volume has 450 pages, and each page represents a million years. Science tells us that if the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago and is situated on page one, then humanity arrives in the last paragraph on the last page of the last volume. With such information, the learning Church can ponder anew the Heavens that proclaim the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), even if it does slightly dislodge us from the “center” of the narrative and raise fascinating thought experiments about the Incarnation, original sin, providence and chance, and a whole host of other ways to meditate upon the Church’s complex situation as both erudite instructor and awed schoolchild. But such mysterious and rational exploration brings us not further away from God, but ever closer to the Ground of all love and knowledge, and the font of all truth. 

Science is always connected to the transmission of faith and catechesis. You can thank anyone from ancient Sumerian engravers to Johannes Gutenberg to Steve Jobs for how you have come to read even this humble reflection, depending on your means of doing so. And yet, science will never “prove” God’s existence, or creation ex nihilo, or other elements of Revelation. As we learned from Brother Guy, Father Lemaître begged Pope Pius XII not to imply that his theories about the Big Bang did. But learning as a Church does help us to live out our vocation of pondering the divine in and as creation, both as homo sapiens (wise beings) and as those fully alive, as Saint Irenaeus explains: “For the glory of God is a human being alive, and the life of the human being consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God which is made by the means of creation affords life to all those living on the earth, so much more does that revelation of the Father which comes though the [rational] Logos give life to those who see God.”

Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.