Dr Nicolete Burbach, CCSTP Steering Group member and Social and Environmental Justice Lead at the London Jesuit Centre, introduces the thinking behind a new LJC reflection group aimed at helping practitioners within Catholic organisations (charities, schools etc) to learn about topics that deepen their faith and understanding, and to apply this new understanding in order to illuminate their work.
Practitioners within Catholic organisations often wrestle with the question: “just why am I doing this”? There are two parts to this question. The first is about how our faith leads us to engage with the world. What does it mean to be ‘in’ the world as a Catholic? What kinds of activities are we prompted towards by our faith? How does our practice, and indeed our daily life, fit into this picture?
The second is more of a complicating factor: the religious dimension to our activities can often seem superfluous. For example, suppose you work in social justice. We all have an idea of justice, and that idea probably more or less lines up with some prevailing attitude within our secular culture.
Faith may provide a certain inflection to the way in which we talk about justice, or tell us why justice is important. But secular people are just as able to sustain a commitment to justice without a religious rationale, and talk about it effectively without religious language.
Similarly, the significance of faith to our actual practices may not seem particularly clear. On a day-to-day basis, your job will be the same set of routine tasks as your secular counterparts. Likewise, although your organisation’s mission statement may make reference to things like the importance of faith or Catholic Social Teaching, the projects in which you are engaged will likely look very similar to those of other organisations in your sector regardless of faith or ethos.
So what is the role of faith in all of this? What should it be?
This question is especially pressing for Catholics because of the nature of our faith itself. Catholic faith is “sacramental”, seeing creation as a vehicle for grace: sacraments are worldly signs that are intrinsically linked to divine reality. God is actually present in them, and grace is directly encountered through them, connecting the world to God.
This conviction leads to a particular sense that grace and faith ought to be intrinsic to the whole of human life – and poses questions about what this means. Indeed, these questions have been a core theme throughout the history of the Church.
The sacramental world
For example, in medieval Europe, society was understood as being united in the Body of Christ through shared participation in the Eucharist; a model known as “Christendom”. Civic life thus emerged from the sacramental life of the Church, and was seen as being rooted in the divine through the sacramental connection between heaven and earth (1).
At the end of the medieval era, Christendom collapsed. Late medieval power struggles between emperors and popes saw a change in the way people conceptualised the Church as the Body of Christ, which became associated with a disembodied spiritual sphere distinct from the world of temporal power (2).
The Reformation later disrupted the ecclesial unity of medieval society, and gave rise to the figure of the national church, which provided a spiritual counterpart to the worldly government of independent nation states.
Later still, enlightenment secularism detached government from its foundation in the Church altogether. Popes then responded to these latter developments by conceding the Church’s loss of temporal power, doubling down instead on the Church’s spiritual authority, in the process further alienating the spiritual from civic life.
Grace came to be seen primarily as something that happened in the Mass itself rather than something embodied in the wider life of the Church in the world. Correspondingly, the life of faith became a private, inwards matter, focused on beliefs and values, acts of personal devotion, and the individual’s encounter with grace.
A return to sacramentality
However, in the mid-20th Century, the world needed new spiritual resources to cope with the existential problems posed by the two world wars. Simultaneously, widespread dissatisfactions with the kind of theology used to articulate this privatised vision of the faith prompted many theologians to seek alternative ways of doing theology (3).
In the 1960s, leading theologians at the Second Vatican Council recovered then-neglected ideas from the early Church and medieval era to outline a theological vision for this new age. The Council figured the Church as the “People of God” (4), living out its life of faith in the everyday lives of the faithful.
In doing so, the Council returned to something like the medieval vision of life: the People of God is the Body of Christ, united in the Eucharist as “fount and apex” of Christian life (5). Its life in the world is the life of the Body, bringing the sacrament to worldly fruition in a way that links everyday life with divine reality.
The result is that modern Catholicism also has a keen sense for civic life as the place in which the sacramental life of the Church is lived out. Yet this sense emerges through a process of questioning about the relationship between the Church and the world: modernity shook the certainties of the medieval world, then the painful lessons of the 20th century problematised the Church’s response to these challenges.
Finally, although Vatican II sought to provide new answers to those questions, the meaning of the Council’s vision remains a question in turn. This latter question is bitterly contested both around the issue of how Catholics ought to exist in the world, and also what remains distinctive about the way Catholics exist in the world. What does it mean to be Catholic today? And have we just become another undifferentiated part of our surrounding culture?
In this context, the puzzlement of today’s Catholic practitioner is just the latest episode in a centuries-long story.
Grappling with questions and searching for God
The People of God is still journeying through history. Correspondingly, we have yet to arrive at a clear answer to any of these questions. Rather, what it means to be the People of God is to continue to grapple with them: to try and find a faithful answer, knowing that no decisive answer may be given to us – except that we are created for this faithful searching itself, as part of the search for God (6).
To this end, the London Jesuit Centre is running a reflection group aimed at helping practitioners within Catholic organisations (charities, schools etc) to engage faithfully with these questions. Through monthly online reflection sessions, a reflective portfolio, and quarterly in-person workshops, participants will have the chance to learn about topics that deepen their faith and understanding, and to apply this new understanding in order to illuminate their work.
At London Jesuit Centre, we hope you can join us in collective puzzlement to deepen your faith and practice – and therein journey together into the questions that have so long animated the Church’s life; a life in which God is truly present.
If you are interested in doing so, you can sign up here – but be quick! It starts at the beginning of October 2025. We also have a programme filled with other courses and events. Check it out here!
(1) See Catherine Pickstock. 1997. After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.
(2) See Henri de Lubac. 2007. Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons, trans. Gemma Simmonds with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
(3) See John W. O’Malley. 2008. What Happened at Vatican II. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
(4) Gaudium et spes, no. 3.
(5) Lumen Gentium, no. 11.
(6) See Dignitatis Humanae, no. 1.