My title, “Dissent and Communion,” joins two terms that often crop up in church speak but don't usually live together, much less marry. As will appear, I think that's regrettable (the marriage part, that is). On the other hand, it’s also understandable. Consider these terms as they are usually understood. “Communion” gets kindly treatment in the dictionary. There it speaks of a sharing of thought or feelings, of participation, spiritual fellowship; it can also denote "a body of Christians with a common religious faith who practice the same rites." Roget's Thesaurus gets even warmer and fuzzier; "communion" calls up images or ideas of concord, rapport, involvement, communal effort, cooperation, even democracy (!).

Tum next to "dissent." The dictionary speaks of disagree- ment, difference of opinion, nonconformity; it's "a refusal to conform to the authority or doctrine of an established church." Roget’s "disses" the word by relating it to other words with negative resonance, both nouns (discord, disagreement, trouble, mischief, annoyance, nuisance, hassle, strife) and verbs (con- test, contradict, oppose). Obviously, it's not only the Vatican that takes a dim view of dissent.

Now let me get technical. Both “dissent” and “communion” have specialized meanings in formal Catholic discourse. In my use here, the word “dissent” means explicit theological expression of views that question or challenge some established Catholic teaching. The position held by many of us Catholics, that Humanae vitae and the present pope are tragically mistaken in considering every act of contraceptive sex by married people inherently evil, is dissent. Griping about your pastor's sermon, or refusing to give to Peter's Pence, or not helping the poor may be wrong (indeed, the latter may be a sin!), but none of them is an example of dissent, at least not unless it derives from some doctrinal position about the nature of the church or the Christian's obligations in charity.

"Communion" also takes on different meanings in the theological context. Since Vatican II, there has been a flowering of something called communion ecclesiology, an effort to de- fine and understand the church as communion. It has many formulations: the church as community (koinonia); as the mystical body of Christ and the people of God; it is a notion that struggles to grapple with the church as both a visible institution and an invisible reality, as a hierarchical body and the totality of Catholic believers.

Lumen gentium speaks of the church as a sacrament—”a sign and instrument...of communion with God and [a sign] of unity among all men [and women]" (chapter 1). Avery Dulles, in Models of the Church, describes one of those models as “Mystical Communion.” He links Saint Paul's understanding of Christ's mystical body with Vatican lI's understanding of the people of God. And though Dulles carefully distinguishes the model's strengths and weaknesses, he recognizes that “while the church promises communion, it does not always provide it in very evident form.”

The 1985 extraordinary synod and a 1992 instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also grappled with communion ecclesiology, in particular underlining the need to maintain a place for and a consciousness of what is often derisively referred to as "the institutional church." The synod put it this way: "The ecclesiology of communion can- not be reduced to purely organizational questions or to problems which simply relate to powers." Thus they concede a point, but then they go on: "Still, the ecclesiology of communion is also the foundation for order in the church and especially for a correct relationship between unity and pluriformity in the church" (Origins, December 19, 1985).

Before I began tracking down this idea of communion, I was inclined to regard it as a front for control, for restorationism, for conformity and uniformity, not for sharing and participa- tion. Yet, I found in my reading that the idea of communion ecclesiology provides a remarkably useful framework, or a kind of superglue, for grappling with some important and difficult issues.

In a very useful article analyzing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's understanding of communion ecclesi- ology, Dennis Doyle argues in America magazine (September 12, 1992), that the CDF tries to do for doctrine about the church what the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon did for doctrine about Christ. And it does so with negative admonitions which Doyle formulates in the following way:

1. Do not speak of the church as though it were simply a human means of organization that is not intrinsically bound up with God and revelation.

2. Do not speak of the church as though it concerns only people currently living and does not provide real links with those who have died before us.

3. Do not speak of the church as though it were simply a federation made up of local churches without recognizing the sense in which the church universal, born at Pentecost, precedes all local churches.

4. Do not speak of the church as though the Eucharist were not intrinsic to it.

5. Do not speak of the church as though the episcopacy were not intrinsic to it.

6. Do not speak of the church as though its unity and diversity are mutually opposed rather than complementary.

7. Do not speak of the church as though the Petrine ministry were imposed from without rather than representing a constitutive principle of each particular church as such.

8. Do not speak of the Catholic church as though it were incomplete in its very essence as are other churches.

Apophatic admonitions do not provide a positive program; but they suggest outer limits on how we speak of communion, how we understand the church. And Doyle’s formulations are a sobering corrective to careless and often unthinking ways in which we do speak about communion, about the church.

What I like particularly about the idea of communion ecclesiology is that it tries to unite, sometimes in tension, an understanding of the church that is inclusive yet has designated boundaries, that is structured yet interpersonal, that is human yet mystical, that is visible sign and invisible transformation. In this sense it conveys the both/and spirit of Catholicism, rather than the either/or spirit of partisan views, of liberal and conservative, church contemplative and church active, church in dialogue and church in opposition, people’s church and hierarchical church.

If this definition of terms has been clear, my first major point has already been implied. It may seem paradoxical, even perverse, but in my view a true understand- ing of communion implies dissent, and real dissent demands communion. They go together the way Ben and Jerry used to; when properly blended they produce a rich concoction, though sometimes sprinkled with a few nuts.

To understand this, we need to think about the ways in which dissent commonly arises. It is very seldom an exercise in pure speculation, or the self-aggrandizing acts of disobedience, rebellion, or disloyalty commonly portrayed. More frequently, dissent's origins are found in painful disjunctures between pastoral experience and existing teaching.

Think of the traditional missionary going off in the early decades of this century to a land where he finds good people, who are devotees of a religion that in Catholic teaching was considered heretical or idolatrous, even satanic. Coming to know these people, might he be heartbroken by the obstacles that such a teaching erected to any sort of communion with the church? Might he not even feel a deep rift in communion in his own heart? Torn between the teachings of the church and the truth that he has learned about these people he had come to serve and love, he might well have found himself "feeling apart." The rethinking of established teachings that he might have been led to was born out of his sense of communion and his search for a way to restore it. It was in fact just such missionaries, or the theologians to whom they reported their experiences, whose dissent contributed to the decision of Vatican Council II to revise church teachings on ecumenism and non-Christian religions.

The same story could be told of many others. In most cases, they are not called missionaries or are not ordained. But they have tried to take Christ's message and the church's teach- ings into the lands of family life, of broken marriages, of modern science and culture, of political and economic oppression, of racial minorities, of excluded women, of sexual outcasts. They have found dissonances between the formulations of doc- trine they were taught and what they have seen and experienced.

I am not, of course, arguing that every expression of dissent arising from pastoral problems or obstacles to evangelization is legitimate or helpful. I am saying that a church understanding herself as communion—not, then, as a massive, unmoving, take-it-or-leave-it repository of answers and remedies, but as a gift of love and worship that wants to destroy barriers and offer reconciliation—that church as communion will naturally be a church semper reformanda. It will naturally give rise to self-examination, self-criticism, self-extension, and in the process, to dissent. Indeed, it is often the warmth of feeling that communion involves, active participation and not passive subservience, that stirs the passion, the outspokenness, the commitment the stubbornness in which dissent sometimes cloaks itself.

If one doubts whether real communion implies dissent, imagine a church where dissent had been rendered unthinkable, impermissible, or inexpressible. Would such a church be likely to resemble the interpersonal, vital, ever-deepening, always out- stretching encounter of hearts and minds that is communion? Or would it be more likely to resemble the bureaucracy of a government, the conformity of a corporation, the discipline of an army, or even the ideological unanimity of a totalitarian political movement?

But if real communion implies dissent, then real dissent demands communion. I mean nothing  more than this: disagreement can only be meaningful when it takes place within a framework of agreement. One cannot really feel apart unless at some level one still feels joined. One can feel estranged from a family member, but not from a casual vacation acquaintance made twenty years ago.

To the extent that communion is attenuated, dissent becomes less significant. When advocates of women's ordination insist that the witness of historical Christianity is irredeemably distoned by patriarchy, or when they reconceive the role of the priest so as to resemble that of the imam, then their dissent over ordination becomes a good deal less compelling. Dissent is possible only when it acknowledges accountability to something outside itself—to a teaching, an authority, a tradition, a history, a people, a revelation.

Now I take it for granted that somewhere a line must be drawn between the dissent that is an inevitable and healthy aspect of communion and the dissent that is no longer compatible with communion. I do not question the efforts of bishops and theologians (it is important to include both) to resolve where, exactly, that line should be drawn in principle. But I do want to argue--and this is my second major point--that in the practical, everyday life of the church, the question of distinguishing between responsible and irresponsible dissent, between dissent in the service of communion and dissent destructive of it, is less than we often suppose a matter of intellectual propositions, and more often a matter of conduct, of attitude, of affection, and of heart.

When liberation theology was flying very high, I often heard the expression "orthopraxis" (right conduct) contrasted to "or- thodoxy" (right teaching). I would like to yank orthopraxis from that context and apply it here. Is there an orthopraxis of dissent? An orthopraxis of dissent and communion? An orthopraxis, if you will, of maintaining a dynamic orthodoxy?

I am not suggesting that the church can do without the conceptual apparatus of magisterium and ordinary and extraordinary magisterium and papal ordinary magisterium and solemn definition and infallible and irreformable doctrine and probabilism and equiprobabilism and all the other categories developed over the centuries and used to identify the settled or unsettled state of the church's mind on important issues.

But frankly all this paraphernalia has always mattered (and I believe will continue to matter) far more in the relatively small, closed, and institutionally accessible world of the clergy than in the world of the laity--a laity whose role in the church, I remind you, has been reasserted by the Second Vatican Council and is assured at least in the United States by the demography of the priesthood and women's religious communities, a laity who can be reached only by voluntary compliance and not by ecclesial penalties.

What is needed is at least as much attention to the manner of dissent as to the matter. Is it articulated with respect or with derision? Does it acknowledge its accountability to the tradition? Does it root itself in the sources of the faith? Is it expressed with both humility and rigor, including rigorous faithfulness in representing, not caricaturing, the existing teaching? Does it admit qualifications or does it traffic in slogans? Does it consciously exploit and ride piggyback on the cultural fashions of the day, or does it deliberately strive to guard against such exploitation? Is it sensitive to pastoral problems, to the cost of conflict and the temptations of partisanship and factionalism?

There is a danger today of a kind of established dissent, dis- sent as a way of life, dissent as the primary stance some take toward the church. Beyond diversity, beyond clashes of ideas, beyond differences in pastoral practice, beyond the disarray that simply comes with life in such a large and human church, there is something we might want to call dissent of the heart—a state in which one's own spirit stands pridefully apart from community.

Concern about the manner as well as the matter of dissent is in fact already part of our tradition. "Dissent, in the form of carefully orchestrated protests and polemics carried on in the media, is opposed to ecclesial communion and to a correct understanding of the hierarchical constitution of the people of God."

So writes the John Paul II in Veritatis splendor.

So far I seem to have suggested that the orthopraxis of dissent and communion is entirely the responsibility of the dissenter. In fact, I think communion demands a certain kind of conduct on the part of the authorities who represent established teachings as well.

Unfortunately there is a version of communion ecclesiology sometimes articulated in the Vatican that comes close to reasserting the pre-Vatican II understanding of the church as institution, as "perfect society," but now garbed with the rhetoric of mystical communion. Communion becomes the rhetorical armor of an essentially juridical, clerical, and centralized understanding of the church, rather than a richer balance and a corrective to such an understanding.

Veritatis splendor, for example, makes frequent reference to a 1990 "Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian" issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It is at least my amateur impression that that instruction prescribes a kind of strictly behind-closed-doors expression of dissent, one that all but muzzles theologians and that effectively eliminates most of the laity from making important contributions to the development and growth of Catholic teaching, a result inconsistent with a concern for communion.

Now for another paradox. So far I have been giving a lot of attention to the phenomenon of dissent. Yet it is another part of my thesis that our contemporary focus on dissent not only magnifies its importance but distracts at least some of us from seeing and working on other problems that are far more serious and threatening to the good health, even the survival, of communion. Here is a prime example. Perceptive Catholics have good reason to be worried about how well we are handing on the faith to coming generations. In their anxiety some Catholics have taken to scouring religious education textbooks, finding there all sorts of real or imagined heresies. Their anxiety is at least partially rooted in the fact that in the years after Vatican II, religious education overreacted to the rote indoctrination and implicit Counter-Reformation polemicizing of the Baltimore Catechism. Instead of question-and-answer catechism classes, religious education swung sharply in the direction of stressing attitude over content, social justice over sacramental life.

In fact, religious education has undergone many alterations of course since then, and although Catholics may continue to differ about the contents or pedagogy of this or that program, it would be a delusion to imagine that tracking down and elim- inating dissent is the key to restoring the effectiveness of religious education.

Consider: In 1965, over 50 percent of school-age Catholics were in Catholic schools. Today the figure is about 25 percent. The other 75 percent, instead of being immersed in an envi- ronment of prayers before class, religious imagery, and daily religion classes, are getting at best twenty hours a year of discontinuous religious education, often taught by volunteers with varying degrees of training who face formidable obstacles in placing intellectual demands on their students.

I am not saying that Catholics educated outside of Catholic schools were not historically well-educated in their faith. Many certainly were. But the whole enterprise was easier when a standard was set by a critical mass of young Catholics getting extensive exposure in Catholic grammar schools and high schools.

Today, even within Catholic schools, where lay teachers now predominate, many report being hesitant in their teaching of religion, not because they are less devout or knowledgeable than the sisters they have replaced but simply because it is an unfamiliar role for which they were not prepared by the intense formation of religious life. In some cases, a growing number of non-Catholic students in Catholic schools, reflecting the church's commitment to those in need, also complicates the task of education and formation. So, as many college teachers testify, the current problem is not dissent but ignorance, religious illiteracy.

Behind this shift of the last three decades are both socio-economic and cultural forces: the movement of Catholics to suburbs, the rising cost of parochial education, the breakdown of ethnic neighborhoods and immigrant subcultures, the fading of antagonism, hostility, and defensiveness between Catholics and Protestants, the changing role of women, the decline in the number of teaching sisters.

The censorious mind could condemn these developments as assimilationism and attribute them to supposed departures from orthodoxy; I think that would be wrong. Many, for example, spring from recovery of the church's full teaching on the sanctity of marriage and the vocation of the laity.

Let me take this question of religious education—which I believe is crucial—to another level. Currently the American bishops and college and university presidents are struggling to write ordinances that would put into terms of concrete obligations the conditions for preserving the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities, in keeping with the papal document Ex corde ecclesiae.

This whole effort has run aground on the question of whether members of Catholic theology departments must seek a mandate to teach from local bishops, a measure that Vatican officials consider essential to quelling what they see as dissent, but which many Catholic educators see as an outside intervention in the affairs of the university incompatible with academic freedom and autonomy. The possibility of confrontation and alienation between bishops and educators is very real. In this way, a very serious concern about the religious identity of Catholic higher education and the danger of a drift toward secularization may end, in counter productive fashion, by actually encouraging that drift.

This impasse, I believe, reflects a misplaced focus on dissent. Imagine Catholic colleges and universities with theology departments where no one ever said or wrote a word that raised an eyebrow in Rome. Students might dutifully take two semesters of required courses from those teachers, but otherwise encounter little or nothing of the Catholic tradition—and of the questions that have preoccupied it—in their history, philosophy, literature, social or natural science courses, in their extracurricular activities, and in conversations between faculty members and students. The little dissent-free enclave of a theology department is surely not going to communicate Catholic identity, indeed it may strangle it, especially if it is established and maintained in ways that convince most academics that the church and its teachings are hostile to genuinely free inquiry.

So to sum up: Beware the notion that dissent is the single most important factor in the American church's many current difficulties, and the companion idea that by quelling dissent we will be home free.

It remains to examine the context. The questions at hand cannot be usefully pursued very far in the abstract, so I would like to explore some of the ways in which this complex relationship between dissent and communion is affected by the realities of contemporary America.

The first of these realities that comes to mind is that we are a First Amendment culture. Freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and free speech are our deservedly prized achievements. Like other valuable things, these achievements can be idolized, but, looking around the world, one sees why we prize them. During the Second Vatican Council, American Catholics made our positive experience of the First Amendment a gift to the whole church, which has now adopted a policy of religious freedom and defense of the rights of conscience, be- coming in the past thirty years a champion of human rights in lands less blessed than our own.

American Catholics live in a country born in dissent and sustained by it. In one way that creates a problem for communion. But in another sense the American conviction that religious faith must be personal, voluntary, free of coercion, and subject to all the pressures and cross-currents of free speech and open debate is a declaration of what communion must be about.

In the mid-1980s I participated in an international conference of Catholic business leaders and high church officials on one of the drafts of the American bishops' pastoral letter on the U.S. economy. It became clear to me that regardless of whether their proclivities were liberal or conservative, the European and Roman churchmen were highly suspicious of the extensive process of wide consultation and open discus- sion that the American bishops had mounted in writing both that letter and the pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear age. For the Americans, such a process naturally strengthened the authority of the bishops' letter. For the Europeans, such a process of consultation and open debate automatically weakened the authority of the bishops' letter, because the proc- ess acknowledged the need to get input from other than ecclesiastical sources. I believe that the American bishops' procedure better reflected an understanding of the church as communion, and I am disturbed that despite the Vatican's en- dorsement of communion ecclesiology, the American hierarchy, increasingly shaped by new appointments and the shadow of Vatican displeasure, might well back away from any such consultative process today.

Second, and less happily, our First Amendment culture is also, and not coincidentally, an individualist culture. We view and organize society in terms of individual rights and personal choices, which seem to trump all social bonds and social responsibilities. We are more pluribus than unum. This mindset makes a sense of community and concern for the common good fragile and vulnerable. It affects not only our civic comm unity but reaches into the realm of religion, raising obstacles to communion. It is not just that we love underdogs, naysayers, people who thumb their noses at established authority. No, our individualism leads us to believe that religious faith needs no community.

Some keep the Sabbath going to church; 

I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.

Emily Dickinson's verse is echoed throughout the best and worst of American culture: it is the lone worshiper in nature, not the gathered congregation, that we respect and celebrate. The same outlook is confirmed in Gallup polls in which Americans overwhelmingly endorse the importance of being religious but agree that one can be religious without attachment to any organized religion. Catholicism has challenged that American assumption, and our challenge once made the culture very nervous. But increasingly American Catholics are being shaped by the individualist culture.

The healthy, practical-minded, live-and-let-live form of tolerance that individualism also encourages can easily slide into a shallow relativism. If everyone has his or her own opinion, and if everyone's opinion is as good as everyone else's, then there is no real reason to re-examine, grapple, rethink. Both dissent and communion are trivialized, treated almost as mat- ters of happenstance that can be worn lightly and shed as easily.

All this is reinforced by a dominant market economy and consumer culture. We exercise our judgment simply by abandoning one product or label for another. The ultimate in such selective ease is TV channel-surfing, and baby-boomers are said to be religion-surfing, moving from church to church on the basis of whatever satisfies their immediate needs, from a twelve-step program or a child-care center to their special taste in music.

This consumer culture has given us terms like cafeteria Catholicism, supermarket Catholicism, pick-and-choose or mix-and-match Catholicism. I think such images are an insult to those Catholics who have made conscientious decisions after serious prayer, reflection, and anguish that a specific church teaching does not deserve their adherence. But I also think that such terms do name a reality, and one that is obviously at odds with both communion and serious dissent.

Finally, some words about the media. Virtually every discussion of the church's difficulty these days—a point echoed in every other religious group as well—occasions an indictment of the media. I am as ready to indict the media as the next person, but let me first offer some caveats.

Frequently the readiness of religious leaders to blame their ills on the media strikes me like the persistence of Soviet leaders in blaming seven decades of crop failures on each year's bad weather. Do we dare whisper the word "alibi"? Whatever the shortcomings of Soviet weather, real or imagined, you can't keep claiming year after year that they took you by surprise.

Literacy was a fact of the post-printing press world, just as illiteracy was a fact of the Middle Ages. The church had to adjust to both. Media saturation is a fact of the modern world. The church need not respond in a subservient fashion to that fact, bending to glib prophets of an electronic age. Baroque Catholicism successfully employed image and ceremony, rather than concentrating on the private word as did various streams of Protestantism. Today Catholic teaching does not have to be refashioned for MTV, but the reality of MTV and network news and sitcoms and talk radio and elite newspapers has to be part of Catholic teachers' calculations just as much as is, say, the reality that significant numbers of U.S. Catholics speak Spanish or Vietnamese or Haitian Creole. Today we all speak media, in a dozen distinct dialects.

My second caveat about indictments of the media is that some- times I think they really disguise the hierarchy's unwillingness to come to terms with the realities that a great many among the Catholic laity are well-educated and their thinking is outside the hierarchy's direct control.

Persuasion is central to the question of dissent and communion. Yet the church's commitment to persuasion remains hobbled by a hankering after control and censorship. There is no way in which new questions and challenging opinions are going to be kept from the ears of Catholics. If robust theological discussion of issues that deeply concern people is stifled in Catholic institutions, Catholics will simply draw on the discussions in institutions where the Catholic tradition may be less present.

The church still labors under a long history of silencing critical and questioning thought, a history sometimes simplistically entrenched in the mythology of modernity. In this regard, it is scrutinized more than many other institutions, and it pays dearly therefore in loss of credibility for its every sign of resistance to free inquiry and debate.

None of this dispels the problems that the media create in the relationship between dissent and communion. There is, for example, the megaphone effect. Any dissenting voice may be amplified, so that it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish marginal views, whether on the right or the left, from convictions reflecting serious theological study or enjoying the support of large groups of the faithful. The media sword is, of course, two-edged: fringe opinions can needlessly disrupt the composure of the faithful, or serious questions that should rightly disrupt our composure can be dismissed as sensationalism or media mischief.

Much of the megaphone effect arises not so much from the ill will of the media as from its structure. Newspapers and broadcasting work under extreme constraints of space and time. Competition for readers or audiences demands matching stories. The result is simplification, dramatization, highlighting of conflict, and a wrenching of dissent from its context.

Added to these structural constraints and competitive pressures is an ideological factor. Journalism inherits from the muck-raking era an ingrained skepticism toward authorities and a suspicion that pronouncements of ideals generally mask hypocrisy. Entertainment in the media, by contrast, often panders to conventional morality, all the while spicing its performances with as much of the forbidden and titillating as it can get away with.

News coverage and entertainment frequently converge in viewing conservative religion, especially evangelical Protestantism or official Catholicism, as the bulwark of a morality experienced as either hypocritical or constraining, constrict- ing life rather than protecting or enhancing it. Dissent, whether of the left or right, will be perceived and presented as confirmation that the church is a brittle fossil or an authoritarian throw-back. Catholics as much as non-Catholics absorb these images of the church, and they are not images likely to foster communion.

It is naive or disingenuous for Catholics who dissent not to recognize that this is the media context in which they act, and deliberately to do their best to foresee, prevent, or compensate for the kinds of distortions that may result.

How do we bridge all of these chasms between dissent and communion, some of our own making, some of the culture's? That is a topic for another article. But I believe the best starting point is our most common and direct experience of communion, the Sunday liturgy.

The Mass is, I think, both the first work of the church and the last, the opening up and the summing up, the beginning and the end of what we are supposed to be doing; or, as Henri de Lubac, S.J., has put it: "The church produces the Eucharist, but the Eucharist also produces the church." The Mass gathers us, and our work, our joys and our sorrows, our dissent and our as- sent, and helps us to reflect on them, to pray over them, to offer them up. We might say that the Sunday liturgy both confronts us and comforts us with ultimate meaning in a world suffering a crisis of meaning. In the Eucharist not only is the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but in that transformation, the people too are transformed, our work given meaning, our sorrows blessed, our lives reordered and reoriented, our hearts turned from stone to living flesh....

And then we are sent forth in the name of the Lord... to do mischief, be an annoyance, to live our faith in this world, this United States with all of the ambiguities, conflicts, and tensions inherent in our kind of culture. We Catholics, all of us, need to become smarter about how we deal with them and live with them. We need to practice a pedagogy and politics of persuasion.

Let me end with some other words from de Lubac, a man who was a dissenter, was silenced for his dissent, and yet who saw his sense of the church come to fruition in the work of Vatican II. Perhaps more than anyone, he gave a secure foundation to this idea of communion ecclesiology, one we are still trying to achieve. I quote from his book, The Splendor of the Church: "The church...really makes herself by the celebration of the mystery; the holy and sanctifying church builds up the church of the saints. The mystery of communication is rounded out in a mystery of communion--such is the meaning of the ancient and ever-fresh word 'communion.'"