In 2023, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio that calls for interdisciplinary revisions in theological method. In this document, Francis argued that "theologians must not settle for a desk-bound theology…Openness to the world, to human persons in the concreteness of their existential situations, with their problems, their wounds, their challenges, their potential…must urge theology to be rethought epistemologically and methodologically." Similarly, in the decades after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), leading US Catholic ecclesiologist Joseph Komonchak argued that the Church is not a "what." The Church is a "who" in the concrete first-person plural. The Church is a "we" and as a "we," the Church conceived as a "congregatio fidelium" has both theological and sociological dimensions. Theologically, this community is constituted by faith as a response to God's self-offering. Sociologically, the Church is unambiguously a human and social reality committed to the Gospel. In response to Francis and Komonchak, how much theologians study the Church if they are called to remain open to the existential wounds of the Church as a "we"? My paper responds to this question by first exploring Komonchak's reservations with postconciliar ecclesiology and his distinctive interdisciplinary contributions to theological method, which require not only a "hermeneutics of texts" but also a "hermeneutics of social existence." Part two opens with a snapshot of my own ethnographic research with migrant Eastern Catholics in the US before exploring how ethnographic methods support the simultaneity of Komonchak's objective and subjective principles in his constructive proposal. Finally, I will bring this ethnographic case study into dialogue with Komonchak's development of the council's implicit theology of the local Church to demonstrate how ethnographic methods can contribute to the study of the council's reception in a global and synodal Church.