The article studies the way in which Henri de Lubac approaches and studies the mystery of the Church, which he considered more difficult to believe than that of Christ. What is according to him the essential structure of the Church? What spiritual experience does belonging to the Church procure? The article also asks whether the cautions expressed by the Cardinal after Vatican II imply a step backward in comparison with his previous writings in ecclesiology.

It is through ritual that religions often express their deepest truths, and historians and anthropologists of religion have long recognized the impor-tance of its symbolic dimension. Yet it remains to be explained how religious rituals perform this function. That is, in what ways do ritual gestures symbolize or refer – reserving these two general terms to cover all ways of bearing semantic-like relations to objects, events, and states of affairs? In this essay I will take some first steps toward answering (...) this question by constructing a taxonomy of symbolic gestures in the rituals of Judaism, drawing for this purpose on various categories of reference, first distinguished by Nelson Goodman in his study of symbol systems, including the arts, and more recently elaborated by Israel Scheffler. (shrink)