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At its core, Virtus Dei – Communio in infirmitate is about both, but they stand in a very specific, interrelated relationship to one another: Community (Communio) is the place and the way in which sanctification occurs in everyday life.
When considering the fundamental ideas of both terms, they complement each other as follows:
1. The Foundation: Community in Weakness (Communio in infirmitate)
- Community of Fragility: It is primarily about an existential Communio – a mutual bearing, enduring, and sharing of weakness, limitation, and hardship.
- Alternative to the Achievement-Oriented Society: Instead of concealing weakness or overcoming it through self-optimization, human powerlessness becomes a space for encounter – both with one another and with God.
2. The Goal and the Dynamics: Sanctification (Virtus Dei)
- God’s Power in Weakness: The name Virtus Dei refers directly to 2 Corinthians 12:9 (“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness”).
- Sanctification of Everyday Life / of Time: Sanctification does not arise here through one’s own achievement, asceticism, or perfect strength, but rather by surrendering and offering one’s own fragility to God. Weakness thus becomes a place sanctified by God.
How are the two connected?
The Communio (Community) is the form, Sanctification the content.
- Without sanctification, the Communio in infirmitate would be merely a self-help group or a solidary bearing of suffering.
- Without community, sanctification would be an isolated, individual pursuit.
Sanctification thus occurs in, through, and as a community of the weak – as an active service to the Mystical Body of Christ and as participation in the love of God in the midst of one’s own powerlessness.
