"Love" and "community" are not enough. Thugs are a community. We need unity. But the foundation of the unity must be the truth, or else the unity is merely external.
Essential to the truth is being "with." That is what "co-worker" means in 3 John 8. It means that the task of the bishop is to act "not...in his own name but [that he] is always and totally linked to a 'with'. Only when he acts 'with' Christ and 'with' the whole believing Church of all times and all places does he do what he is meant to do."
"A mere community of interests without truth would be just a drug, not a healing. Perhaps, in the last analysis, the crucial element in the unfathomable expression 'co-workers of the truth' is the relationship between truth and love."
With this phrase Saint John "...cautions against the self isolation of communities that regard themselves as closed circles; he equates the refusal to offer hospitality to missionaries with a rejection of catholicity and a repudiation of the truth. By comparison, the act of love whereby the faithful provide food and shelter for itinerant messengers of the Faith is a service to the truth."
"Christ is the Way because he is the Truth (Jn 14:6)."
Joseph Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992, 5-6.
Right dogma and right hospitality are two sides of the same Catholic coin!
