Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Optional Memorial of Saint Martin de Porres, Religious
St. Paul exhorts us to have “the same attitude” as Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:2). Obviously, that will mean loving God and loving neighbor. And what does it mean to love God and love our neighbor? Well, that is not always so obvious. We have to go deeper into the teachings and the deeds of Christ Jesus in order to work out the details, but in doing so, we must take care not to allow our personal habits and preferences to be normative.
Where St. Paul tells us to have “the same attitude” as Christ Jesus, what he wrote originally in Greek was τοῦτο φρονεῖτε (touto phroneitē), which Latin can crisply translate as hoc enim sentite. That Latin verb, sentite, comes from the Latin infinitive, sentire, which is a word that rings a bell for students of Ignatian spirituality, because St. Ignatius devotes an entire chapter of his Spiritual Exercises to rules for sentire cum ecclesia, that is, to rules for thinking with the Church. In that chapter, St. Ignatius writes that “I must be convinced that in Christ our Lord, the bridegroom and in His spouse the Church, only one Spirit holds sway, which governs and rules for the salvation of souls” (#365). Thus, sentire cum ecclesia is ultimately the same as sentire cum Christo, and the attitude of the Church is the same as the attitude of Christ, because it is the same Holy Spirit that governs both.
Although bishops and priests may sin, sometimes even mortally, we must entrust ourselves to their government, not necessarily because of their personal sanctity, but because we know that God has chosen to work through them, and, because, apart from the Church that He founded, we can never have “the same attitude” as Christ.