Gill Goulding, C.J., who teaches systematic theology at Regis College in Toronto, has published a magisterial work: A Church of Passion and Hope: The Formation of an Ecclesial Disposition from Ignatius Loyola to Pope Francis and the New Evangelization, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney, 2016.  She situates Ignatius’ sense of the Church within his own very challenging times, and asks the question, “Is there an Ignatian approach to the Church traceable in later generations of Jesuit theologians?  Is there an Ignatian ecclesial disposition that reflects the practice of sentire cum ecclesia?”

While much has been written about Ignatian spirituality, not a lot has been written about Ignatius’ rules or guidelines for “thinking, judging, and feeling with the Church,” as George Ganss, phrases them in his translation of The Spiritual Exercises (John Futrell, deals with them in his Handbook for Directors, and John Wickham, in his Directory for The Communal Exercises).  Though these guidelines come at the very end of the Exercises, they are nonetheless as integral to the Exercises as the “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits;” they are an important part of the text, and a key dimension of Ignatius’ spirituality.

As Gill Goulding develops her argument, it becomes clear that the institutional Church is more than merely the context within which a person comes to experience God: “The very relationship between Christ and the Church becomes the paradigm for the individual’s relationship with Christ and the embodiment within which that relationship is realized.” 

She shows the development of Ignatius’ own ecclesial understanding in a chapter on “Texts surrounding the Text,” and devotes two more chapters to two exemplars of this disposition: Pierre Favre, Ignatius’ first companion at the University of Paris, and Mary Ward, in whom “we encounter the feminine manner of living out the Ignatian ecclesial disposition, honed through a lifetime of persecution.”

Chapters on Henri de Lubac and on Avery Dulles provide us with twentieth century Jesuit theologians, one French and one American, whose lives and work exemplified the Ignatian ecclesial disposition, and lead us to the contemporary papacy of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, in which the author sees “a clear consonance with the ecclesial disposition of Ignatius which emphasizes that the Church is conjoined to Christ.”

     As Gill Goulding testifies in her introduction, the Church today is seen as divided, polarized by differing ecclesiologies and by the relationship to the hierarchy which comes from these differing views of authority and obedience.  It is in an understanding of Ignatian ecclesiology that this timely work seeks to heal these divisions.