A sharp-witted analyst of the church’s contemporary situation once said: No previous council spoke so extensively and so profoundly about the Church as the Second Vatican Council. After no other council was there such great confusion over the question of what the church is and which form it should take. Church is, as Luther said, a blind, vague word. Indeed it is not easy to say what we mean when we speak of Church.

For one thousand five hundred years the church has lived out its existence and often enough suffered to sustain it in adversity. But not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the church begin expressis verbis to reflect on its nature. This reflection originally took place against a background of conflicts: conflicts between the papacy and the up-and-coming nation states, conflicts centred around John Wyclif and Jan Hus and above all against the background of debate and argument in the Reformation era. Yet, although the quarrels of the Reformation were not only concerned with individual ecclesiological questions, but much more with the general understanding of what Church is, the sixteenth century did not get as far as reflecting on what the Church’s teaching on the term ‘church’ should be. Not until the nineteenth century, in the wake of Romanticism, did the understanding of the church as such become the subject of consideration. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who determined the direction of the Protestant Church. On the Catholic side the thoughts of Johann Adam Mohler, the theologian from Tubingen, led the way.

I have devoted a good thirty years of my life to the study of Catherine de’ Ricci, from the early 60s, when the Collana Ricciana began to appear, up to the two volumes of the Breviario Ricciano which appeared in 1990 to mark the opening of the sixth centenary of the saint’s death. Here I have nothing new to add to all that I have said already, only a brief synthesis of how over the years, I have come to see this extraordinary woman. But any synthesis involves a choice, and any choice involves excisions and gaps and is inevitably wide open to criticism. The risk is real and I have accepted it; I ask for the reader’s understanding. This present essay seeks only to present a simple and clear picture, unburdened by an excess of scholarly apparatus. In it I will try to highlight, often in the saint’s own words, three crucial points in her spirituality: love, which is its source and gives it its scope; obedience to the will of God, which is the golden rule by which this love is lived; and the joyful human and supernatural equilibrium which results from it.

It may seem obvious to the point of banality to say that love, or charity, is the soul and heart and root and fullness of the Christian life, that interior growth is measured by the progressive development of love, that the apostolic life in its entirety derives its fruitfulness from love, that any mystical advance is only the gradual process of union between God and the creature, whose means yet again is always and uniquely love. But no two saints are the same. Each has his or her own proper way, because God’s love for his creatures is not expressed in the abstract or in general. He loves each of us with a love which is quite personal, marked with its own peculiar purpose, and so for each one of us he maps out a path which is particularly our own. So no saint has the same countenance as any other.

According to the Hebrew cosmology the earth was flat and the sky was like an upturned bowl studded with stars. The earth, and the creatures of the earth, were made to serve man and are under his domination. This view sufficed for many millennia. Careful studies of the regular motions of the stars and the irregular motions of the planets were made by the Babylonians and the Greeks, and Ptolemy devised a complicated system of cycles and epicycles to describe these motions with some accuracy. It was a cosy, man-centred world.

The development of modem science destroyed this picture with a series of shattering blows. Firstly Copernicus showed that it was much simpler to suppose that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the world. No longer do we think of the sun serving our needs by circling the earth, night and day. It is we who are ruled by the sun. This view of the sun and the planets was firmly established by the dynamics of Newton, which enabled the orbits of the planets to be calculated from his laws of motion, together with his theory of universal gravitation.

In the following centuries telescopes of increasing power probed further into space, and it became apparent that our resplendent sun is but a rather ordinary star situated in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of some two hundred thousand million stars that we see on clear nights as the Milky Way.

About a year ago I was asked if I would present a paper on the theology of laity to a conference whose title was “Patterns of Priesthood”, and whose purpose was to “attempt to open up the ground for a discussion of the subject of ministry and communion”. The inclusion of a paper on laity seemed to me then, and seems now, both significant and awkward. Primarily it is a phenomenon to be rejoiced at, in that discussions of priesthood and ministry cannot take place without a thoroughly ecclesial sense of the whole people of God. The point is clearly being made that the theology of laity—or “laicology”—is, like the theology of ministry, or of ordained priesthood, just one aspect of ecclesiology; all these subjects are concerned with looking at what it means to be Church, each from its particular angle. In expressing this we are, of course, indebted to the work of Yves Congar; in his substantial work on laity, he stressed that the purpose behind a theology of laity was fundamentally the reworking of ecclesiology and, in particular, the complementing of a dominant “hierarchology”. Following in this tradition we can recognise the complexity of ecclesiology, where studies of priesthood, laity, religious life and so forth are distinctive, but not discrete. Our basic concern, whether we are talking about laity, the ordained, hierarchical structures or charismatic gifts, is always the same: the Church as a living and structured community, whose identity is found in sharing in Christ’s ministry in a rich variety of ways.