In this volume, Mary Doak has provided a substantive contribution to ecclesiology that carefully weaves together multiple concerns and frames of reference. The book highlights the interconnectedness of the church's needed responses to religious diversity, to injustice affecting women and girls, to economic globalization, to climate change, and to migration. It calls for a renewed mission of the church to be both sign and instrument of communion within and across these diverse realities.
The first, most important aspect, of the book is the connection Doak underlines between theologies of the church's nature and issues of ethics and justice—or, better, Doak's refusal to limit ecclesiology to internal issues of self-definition to the neglect of the church's “public and prophetic” mission in service to the world. Her first chapter treats the Second Vatican Council's theology of communion and outlines a wide-ranging understanding of that communion that connects Lumen Gentium's teaching on unity in diversity within the church with Gaudium et Spes's more extensive teaching on unity in diversity beyond the bounds of the church. Her analysis leads beyond a myopic concept of ecclesiology that forgets the missional call of the church to be a prophetic sign of what is possible for a healed world and a public instrument to create that world with others.
The second section of Doak's analysis looks at what she names two “signal failures” of the church to live up to its call to a communion of unity in diversity, namely, its relation to others outside of the church, exemplified in the church's history of anti-Semitism and its relation to “others” inside of the church, exemplified in its history of misogyny and androcentrism. In both of these chapters, the author exemplifies an enviable command of the literature and of the issues at stake in the church's sinful failure with regard to maintaining unity in diversity. In linking these two issues, Doak helpfully suggests that the church's treatment of the Jewish people and other religious others, on one hand, and of women and other marginalized genders, on the other, are not unrelated instances of ecclesial malfeasance. Rather, she argues, both underline a fundamental flaw in the church's self-understanding that weakens its ability to serve as the sign and instrument of unity in diversity God intended it to be.
In the third section of the book, Doak then explores how these three aspects of ecclesiology, namely, the church's call to be a prophetic sign and public actor, its need for greater openness to external religious and secular others, and its need to confront specifically its androcentric and misogynistic tendencies, provide new lenses by which to understand major issues facing the church and the world in our times. In chapters on economic globalization, climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, and internal and international migration, Doak draws upon extensive sociological and scientific data and Catholic social teaching, especially the magisterium of Pope Francis, to outline where the church needs to grow in its prophetic witness and public advocacy. In doing so, she also highlights where the church's lack of attention to otherness within and without has hampered the church's mission. While noting issues of interreligious diversity, the book is strongest in highlighting the gendered realities of globalization, climate crisis, and migration and the lack of critical attention to gender even in some of the church's strongest responses to these issues.
Given the complexity of the connections the author makes within and across these multiple concerns, the overall line of argument can be a little difficult to perceive on a first read. But the breadth of the topics and sources consulted and the relative independence of each of the chapters are a major strength of the book. The book as a whole is necessary reading for all who want to understand ecclesiology beyond classical discussions of the “nature of the church,” and in highlighting the church's mission, and its failures in that mission, in response to the crises of our times, underlines the inadequacy of entirely internally focused ecclesiologies. In addition to specialists, graduate students and advanced undergraduates would benefit greatly from the book as a whole, but also from the individual chapters.
