The unchanged text of the first seven chapters of the original 2008 edition of Gaillardetz’s magisterial work in ecclesiology marvelously anticipates his new eighth chapter in this revised edition, which replaces the original conclusion. The volume remains essential reading for graduate theology students as an introduction and a classic resource for all scholars of ecclesiology. Sadly, this new edition serves as a reminder that the English-speaking world has lost a clear-thinking and deeply eloquent theologian in Richard Gaillardetz, who died late in 2023, shortly after its publication.

Acknowledging his own Western Roman Catholic perspective on ecclesiology, Gaillardetz skillfully traces the spread of a variety of Christianities after the age of the apostles, first eastward into Asia and Africa and more recently into newly imagined local churches led by courageous clergy and laypeople in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Philippines in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Accordingly, the notion of Catholicity in the second chapter demands an understanding of church unity as irreducibly diversified and missional, resoundingly reaffirmed in the new final chapter in Gaillardetz’s analyses of Francis’s Laudato Si’ and Querida Amazonia and his pushing of the church toward local and global synods as a new way of governance.

The third chapter highlights Gaillardetz’s notion of “ecclesial vitality,” which he contrasts with Vatican II’s historically helpful but (in his view) ultimately inadequate theological distinction between the hierarchical-sacramental-institutional “fullness” of the Catholic Church and the varying degrees of structural and sacramental “defectiveness” in the non-Catholic churches. He thus helps the reader see how clearly Francis has chosen to focus on Christ-centered and Spirit-driven vitality as a marker of apostolic integrity in his own service to the communion of the church among its members and with the triune God. Chapters 4 and 5 on ministry and discipleship likewise resituate the question of ministry on the foundation of baptism, as opposed to ordination, as the primary category of ecclesial identity. He describes the permanent diaconate implemented in Chiapas by Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who empowered local Mayan leaders and parish catechists to study Scripture together and identify candidates for ordination based on mature and intimate knowledge of their communities. Subsequently, the diocese was able to discern the best way to form these deacons to serve the mission of the church in their context in Chiapas.

In Chapters 6 and 7 on memory and the church’s ministry of memory, he points to a constructive tension between Eastern Orthodox John Zizioulas’s sacramental-symbolic emphasis on memory and Roman Catholic Johann Baptist Metz’s emphasis on the apocalyptic volatility of the memory of Jesus through history. This tension then renders more fruitful an existing tension between the Western historical emphasis on the facticity of episcopal succession from the twelve apostles and the Eastern emphasis on the twelve as the sign of an eschatological gathering in the kingdom of God. The concept of memory in the 2008 edition thus serves as a bridge to chapter e in the revised edition, in which Gaillardetz recapitulates the themes of the whole book in light of Pope Francis’s ministry, focusing especially on the themes of mission and communion. Responding to critics who see too much risk in communion ecclesiology’s emphasis on the universal, the sacramental, and the mystical to the detriment of the historical, the particular, and the culturally diverse, he lifts up Francis’s synodality movement as an expression of the Vatican II concept of subsidiarity (as opposed to mere “decentralization”). His ministry in “real time” has demonstrated how Pope Francis longs for the global church to see itself and live as a “communion of communions,” guided by a “listening orthodoxy” that remains ever open to the reality of the Spirit’s grace in local churches that govern themselves in context. Once again, Richard Gaillardetz has helped theologians in carrying out this task of fostering a renewed and ever-renewable vision in the church.