A major takeaway from the Gospel passage today is the importance that Jesus places on unity. Christ specifically prays that all who believe in him will be united together as one. Just as the Father and the Son are one, he prays that all people might be one in him and brought to perfection together in unity with the Holy Trinity. This is not a throwaway line. It reveals a very fundamental dimension of God’s desires for us. And God’s desires for us are always oriented towards our greatest possible flourishing and fulfillment.
The word Catholic is often interpreted to mean “universal”, but perhaps a slightly more accurate rendering from the original Greek would probably be something like, “oriented towards the whole.” God desires unity, not uniformity. He doesn’t want us to be a mass of identical cookie-cutter robots bereft of individual traits, quirks, and personalities. Rather, the unity that God desires for us is union in difference. He has designed us as totally unique, individual masterpieces that, at the same time, are meant to be completely oriented towards relationship with him. The love of Christ is the ultimate self-organizing principle. We cannot properly love Christ without properly loving and desiring the good of one another.