There are times when I deeply treasure being able to slowly walk through a paragraph or even a portion of a paragraph and feast on the beauty of the meaning. My current reading affords me that.
“Under the New Covenant, this ‘people’ is the whole of humanity. Hence the role of the Church in the world is not to be a kind of alternative society, shut off and enclosed, a community or society preoccupied with its own internal affairs, a spiritual ‘society of the perfect” that exists side by side with the secular order. The whole justification for her lies in her communicating to the rest of mankind the universally valid truths concerning God’s liberating and redeeming work with fundamental openness, which in itself is but the continuation of God’s involvement in Christ for the sake of the world.” — Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God
