Towards a Personalist Understanding of the Church

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the personalist image/understanding of the Church. It was developed at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland) by some eminent contemporary Polish theologians and philosophers. The personalist concept of the Church became a real and serious response to the message of Lumen gentium in the context of the pressure of atheistic ideologies that reduced the Church to a purely institutional reality. The personalist vision of the Church will be presented in three fundamental aspects: the origin of the Church, her essence, and her relation to the world. The specifics of the personalist method will also be briefly discusseds.