3. The Church the Body of Christ

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The Church is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all (Eph. i, 23).

When we define the Church as essentially the Kingdom of God and the Body of Christ, it follows as her first particular attribute that she is supernatural and heavenly. The Church is ordinated towards the invisible, spiritual and eternal. Of this we have spoken already. But the Church is not only invisible. Because she is the Kingdom of God, she is no haphazard collection of individuals, but an ordered system of regularly subordinated parts. And because the Church is the Body of Christ, she is essentially an organism, with its members purposively interrelated, and a visible organism. That is her second particular attribute. The advocates of a purely spiritual religion, both in ancient and in modem Christianity, have maintained that the Spirit of Christ which works in the Church is in it as a sort of freely suspended force, as a saving power that invisibly penetrates only into this or that person. But that is not so. On the contrary, Christ the Lord, as the Head of His members, never works on the individual believer in dissociation from His Body, but always in and through it.

That is to say that the supernatural redemptive might of Jesus, as it reveals itself in the Church, is not tied to a single person, so far as he is a person, but only so far as he is a divinely-appointed organ of the community. The Spirit of Jesus is introduced into our earthly life, not through the medium of individuals endowed with special charismatical gifts, but through the ministry of an ordered hierarchy, which being appointed by Jesus to be the structural basis of the community, creates, supports and develops it. So the Church possesses the Spirit of Christ, not as a many of single individuals, nor as a sum of spiritual personalities, but as the compact, ordered unity of the faithful, as a community that transcends the individual personalities and expresses itself in a sacred hierarchy. This organized unity, this community, as germinally given with the Head, Christ, and depending upon His institution, is a fundamental datum of Christianity, not a thing created by the voluntary or forced association of the faithful, not a mere secondary and derivative thing depending on the good pleasure of Christians, but a thing which, in the divine plan of salvation, is in its essence antecedent to any Christian personality and is to that extent a supra-personal thing, a comprehensive unity, which does not presuppose Christian personalities, but itself creates and produces them. The Church did not spring into being when Peter and Paul, James and John, grasped the mystery of Jesus, His God-man being, and on the basis of their common faith formed a fellowship which was called after Him. No, the Church, though certainly achieving full historical actuality only with the association of Christian believers, was already in existence, fundamentally and in germ, and in that sense is a divine creation. For she is the unity of redeemed humanity, a unity made possible by the Incarnation of the Son of God; she is the kosmos of men, mankind as a whole, the many as one.

This is a thought which does not lie on the surface, but we must grasp it if we would understand the visible nature of the Church, her external manifestation. If Christ is what the Church confesses Him to be, the Incarnate God and Savior of men—as indeed He is—then it must be His mission to reunite to God mankind as a unity, as a whole, and not this or that individual man. The wretchedness of fallen humanity, the essence of the original sin, consisted in this, that the supernatural union with God, in which man was originally created, and through which alone he could attain his perfection, his wholeness, his completion, was by Adam's fall broken and dissolved. When Adam fell away from God, all humanity in him and through him fell away likewise. That is a basic conviction of Christianity, which was adumbrated in certain post-canonical Jewish writings, and received formulation as a Christian doctrine especially at the hands of St. Paul. At the basis of this Christian dogma of an original and inherited sin, and of our redemption through the new man Christ, lies the great and striking thought that mankind must not be regarded as a mass of homogeneous beings successively emerging and passing away, nor merely as a sum of men bound together by unity of generation, as being descendants of one original parent, but as one single man. So closely are men assimilated to one another in their natural being, in body and in mind, so profoundly are they interlocked in thinking, willing, feeling, and acting, so solitary is their life, their virtue and their sin, that they are considered in the divine plan of redemption only as a whole, only as a unity, only as one man. This one man is not the individual man, but the whole man, the totality of the innumerable expressions of that humanity which is reproduced in countless individuals. This one man includes all men who were thousands of years ago and all who shall be thousands of years hence. Such is the one man, the whole man. And the guilt and destiny of every single man, though certainly his own guilt and his own destiny, yet affect the whole of humanity in proportion to the importance which Providence has assigned him in the organism of humanity.

These are thoughts that may seem strange to the modern man, or which at least would have seemed so a short time ago. The individualism of the Renaissance, the dismemberment of man and his relations in the age of Enlightenment, and finally the subjective idealism of Kant, whereby our minds were taught to relinquish the objective thing, the trans-subjective reality, and to indulge in boundless subjectivism: these influences tore us from the moorings of our being, and especially from our true and essential basis, that humanity which produces, supports and enfolds us. We became imprisoned within the walls of our own selves, unable any more to attain to humanity, to the full, whole man. The category "humanity" became foreign to our thought, and we thought and lived only in the category of self. Humanity as wholeness and as fullness had to be rediscovered.

But there is now beginning, under the influence of early Christian ideas, of socialism and of the great war—quite apart from purely philosophical, epistemological reactions—a gradual revolution of our whole mental attitude. We are beginning to feel uncomfortable in the narrow hermitage of our own selves and are seeking a way out. And we are discovering that we are not alone, but that by us, with us, round us, in us, is all humanity. We are realizing with astonishment that we belong profoundly to this humanity, that a community of being and destiny, and a joint liability bind us to it. We are learning that we come to our whole self only by its means, that our individual being broadens out into the whole man only in it and through it. With this new mental attitude we are able to appreciate the fundamental Christian conceptions of the first man and the new man, of Adam and Christ, in their profound significance. Adam, the first man, called to share by grace in the divine life, represented in God's eyes the whole of mankind. Adam's fall was the fall of mankind. Detached from its original supernatural goal, mankind then, like some planet detached from its sun, revolved only in crazy gyration round itself. Its own self became the center of its striving and yearning. Man came to feel God, the very source of his spiritual life, as a burden. The first "autonomous" man in the ethico-religious sense was Adam, when he took the fruit of the tree of life. And so man no longer had any source whence he might renew his strength, except his own small self. He had abandoned the eternal source of living water, and dug himself a poor cistern in his own self. And the waters of this cistern were soon exhausted. Man fell sick and died. His self was his sickness and his self was his death. And all mankind died with him. Then, according to the eternal decision of God's love, the New Man came, the man of the new, permanent and indissoluble union with God, Christ the Lord. In Him erring mankind, man radically cut off from the divine source of his life, was finally reunited to God, to the Life of all lives, to the Fount of all power, truth and love. Mankind—not merely this man and that, not you and I only, but the whole of mankind, the unity of all men—was brought home again from its terrible diaspora, from its dispersion, back to the living God. The whole man came once more into being, permanently united with God, and so effectively united that for mankind as a whole the grace of redemption can no more be lost, although the individual man can withdraw himself from this whole. Therefore Christ, as the God-man, is the new humanity, the new beginning, the whole man in the full meaning of the phrase.[1]

Whence it follows clearly that the Church was already, in the mystery of the Incarnation, established as an organic community. The "many," the sum total of all who are redeemed in Christ, are in their inner relationship to one another, in their interrelation and correlation, in their organic communion, objectively and finally the Body of Christ, for this Body is redeemed humanity, the "reconciled world" (S. Aug., Sermo xcvi, 8).

It is clear therefore, in the light of the redemption, that the Church did not come into being only when Peter and John and Paul became believers. It became objectively existent when the divine Word united His nature with human nature in the unity of His person. The Incarnation is for Christians the foundation and planting of that new communion which we call the Church. The Body of Christ and the Kingdom of God came into being as objective reality at the moment when the Word was made flesh. Apart from the Greek Fathers it was especially St. Augustine, the great and saintly doctor of Hippo, who perceived this connection between the Incarnation and the Church and by its means established anew the supernatural sublimity of the Church's nature.[2]

We must take this connection to heart if we would appreciate the Catholic conception of the Church in all its profundity. Only so shall we understand why the idea of community is its dominant idea, and why the community cannot be the product of the faithful, a creation of these or those persons, but must be a supra-personal unity, a unity which permeates and embraces the whole of redeemed humanity. As such a unity the Church is nothing vague or undefined, but the actual inner unity of redeemed humanity united with Christ. In the Catholic conception of the Church the decisive element is not this or that person, but all mankind.

Two important consequences follow from this. One of these has already been developed, the fact, namely, that the organ of the redeeming spirit of our divine Savior, its incarnation and manifestation, is not the individual personality, but the community as community. The spirit of Christ is realized in the community. Therefore the visibility of the Church does not consist merely in the visibility of its individual members, but in the visibility of its compact unity, of its community. But where there is a community, a comprehensive unity, there is distribution and co-ordination of functions. That is the second consequence that follows from the mystery of the Incarnation. The Christian unity is no mere mechanical unity, but a unity with inner differentiation, an organic unity. The Body of Christ, if it be a true body, must have members and organs with their special tasks and functions, which, each in its measure, serve the development of the essential form of the body and which therefore serve one another. When St. Paul, the first apostle to formulate the expression "Body of Christ," develops this conception in the twelfth Chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians, he already stresses this point and speaks of the organic functioning of this body: "Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but the same God, who worketh all in all . . . For as the body is one and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body: so also is Christ.... God indeed hath set some in the Church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly doctors; after that miracle-workers, then the graces of healings, helps, governments, kinds of tongues, interpretations of speeches." It is therefore the view of the apostle that the community is of its nature differentiated, that the body works as a unity through a diversity of organic functions, that the unity of the whole attests the unity of the spirit of Jesus. It is true that St. Paul does not distinguish the various functions of the one organism with theological precision. Such precision came with later developments and with the speculation that sprang from them. Time made it clear that some of the gifts, such as those of the apostolate, of teaching, and of government, belong to the nature of the Church and could not be discarded; whereas others, such as the gifts of prophecy, miracles and tongues, were the manifestation of a superabundant Christian life, and to be regarded not as structurally necessary to that life, but rather as signs and expressions of it.

But the fundamental thought, that the Body of Christ is and must be an organic body, that it works by its very nature in a manifold of functions, and that this manifold is bound together by the one Spirit of Christ into an inner unity: this thought is native to St. Paul, and it is the heritage and fundamental principle of the whole Christian Gospel.

Let us now consider more nearly the organization of the Body of Christ, its unity in fullness and fullness in unity. The first point to be insisted on is this, that since the community and not the individual is the bearer of the Spirit of Jesus, and since its visibility consists especially in the manifestation of this essential unity, therefore the visible organism of the Church postulates for its visibility a real principle of unity in which the supra-personal unity of all the faithful obtains perceptible expression and which supports, maintains and protects this unity. The pope as the Rock of the Church is the visible expression and the abiding guarantee of this unity. So, if we regard the matter thus, it becomes plain that the original nature of the Church, her fundamental determination as a unitary organism, achieves its purest expression in the papacy. In the papacy the community strives after and achieves the fullest consciousness of its essential and necessary unity. In the papacy it grasps and realizes itself as the one Kingdom of God, as the one Body of Christ on the earth. And so the Catholic never regards the pope as separated from this unity, as an independent factor, as a charismatical personality, as a personality possessed of supernatural powers like a Moses or an Elias. The pope, as the visible head, is to him the plain embodiment of the unity of the Church, that real principle whereby redemption-needing mankind achieves its form as complete and perfect unity. In the pope his unity with his brethren becomes visible to the Catholic. His view broadens and his eye passes beyond all the limitations of personalities, beyond all bounds of nations and civilizations, beyond all seas and deserts. And the whole massive Christendom, with all the organic interrelation of its parts, its great and sacred communion of love, becomes manifest for him in the pope, and stands out before him as a sublime and glorious reality. Therefore no misuse of papal authority and no human failings in the wearers of the tiara can rob him of his veneration and his love for the papacy. When he kisses the pope's hand he kisses all his brethren, who are joined together into one in the person of the pope. His heart broadens out into the heart of all Christendom, of the unity in fullness.

Moreover the pope himself teaches, acts, strives, suffers only from out of this unity. It is true that, inasmuch as he is by the wise disposition of Providence at the same time bishop of Rome, he can make regulations and give decisions which are valid only for his immediate Roman flock and which therefore possess only a local significance. But when he speaks as pope, as successor of St. Peter, then he speaks with a divine authority that demands the obedience of all the faithful; he speaks as the visible basis and pledge of unity, out of the compact fullness of the Body of Christ, as that principle in which the supra-personal unity of the Body of Christ has achieved visible reality for the world of space and time. Therefore he does not speak as a despot in his own right, as some absolute monarch, but as the head of the Church, in intimate vital relationship to the complete organism of the Church. So he cannot, like a Delphic Oracle, give dogmatic decisions purely at his own discretion and according to his own subjective notions. On the contrary, he is bound, as the Vatican Council emphatically declares, bound strongly in conscience, to proclaim and interpret that revelation which is contained in the written and unwritten mind of the Church, in the twin sources of our faith, sacred Scripture and Tradition.

On the other hand, it is of the nature of the Church as a supra-personal unity, and thereby also of the nature of the papacy, that the pope should not be regarded as a mere representative of the Church, as a sort of mouthpiece of the general mind. For the very reason that the community is not exhaustively represented by the members of the Church nor owes its original existence to them, but is a supra-personal unity established in the Incarnate God, a principle of organization which is effective in and of itself, a power in its own right: for that reason the pope, in whom this community by Christ's will obtains visible form, rules absolutely "ex sese," that is to say that in his activity he is in no respect dependent on any member of the Body of Christ, neither on the whole episcopate, nor on individual bishops, nor on the rest of the faithful. He is not merely one "pastor" alongside others; he is the pastor to whom alone the sheep of the Divine Pastor are committed (cf Jn. xxi, 15 ff.). And he is not merely one stone in the holy building, nor only the first stone, but the rock (cf. Mt. xvi, 18), to whom all other stones have another relation than that they are supported by it, and are in their whole being and activity dependent upon it. The new Code of Canon Law (canon 218, 1, 2) formulates with truly monumental power this papal plenipotency (suprema et plena potestas jurisdictionis in universam ecclesiam), which is "independent of every human authority" and immediately embraces not only all and single "churches," but also all and single pastors and faithful."

What the pope is for the whole Church, that in an analogous sense the bishop is for the particular community, for the diocese. He is the representative and objective form of its inner unity, he is the mutual love of its members made visible, the organic interrelation of the faithful made perceptible (Mohler). That explains why the Catholic knows no more venerable names on earth than those of pope and bishop, and why in the centuries when the western world was impregnated with the Catholic consciousness, no honor was too great, no ornament too precious to be bestowed upon pope and bishop. This did not, and does not, hold good of the person of pope or bishop—no one makes so sharp a distinction between the person and his office as does the Catholic— but it did and does hold good exclusively of their sublime function, that namely of realizing, representing and assuring the unity of the Body of Christ in the world. When a man is present at a pontifical High Mass, and sees with amazement the vast circumstance of pomp and splendor, the rich ceremonial with which the person and the actions of the pontifex are surrounded, if he sees in all this nothing but a consequence and survival of the court ceremonial of Rome and Constantinople, he has grasped only half the truth. The motive force, the dominant idea of this magnificence, is the joy of the Catholic in his Church, in her overpowering unity, in that affirmation of the communion of the brethren, of the one Body of Christ, which is so to say personified in the bishop. One God, one faith, one love, one single man: that is the stirring thought which inspires all the Church's pageantry and gives it artistic form. It is a seeking and finding of love, of love for Christ and for the brethren who in Him are bound together into one.

This fundamental conception of papacy and episcopacy of itself answers the objections raised against the primitiveness of Church authority on the ground that Christ preached humility and brotherly love. This criticism sees in our Lord's words, when He settled the dispute among His disciples, "the strictest internal argument" against the hypothesis that He instituted the papacy.[3] The disciples were irritated by the request of the sons of Zebedee, that they should sit the one on the right and the other on the left of the Lord in His Kingdom. Jesus called them to Him and said: "You know that they who seem to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them: and their princes have power over them. But it is not so among you. But whosoever will be greater, shall be your minister. And whosoever will be first among you shall be the servant of all. For the Son of man also is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a redemption for many (Mk. x, 42-45).

In these words Jesus discards for His disciples that absolute power, that domination, which was exercised by contemporary rulers, especially by the Hellenistic princes. The mark of the disciple of Jesus is to be service, and not brutal domination. In God's Kingdom there is to be no "lording it over them" and no "letting them feel one's power," but loving ministry and ministering love. The words themselves make it plain enough that the Master is not excluding all authority and all power from His society, but only that power which is essentially brutal and domineering. This meaning of our Lord's words is brought out still more clearly by the evangelist Luke (xxii, 24 ff.) who gives Mark's logion in the form: "He that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger: and he that is the leader as he that serveth." By those words Jesus makes it perfectly clear that there shall be a "greater" among his disciples, and that there shall be those who are "leaders." So that his recommendation of brotherly humility and love is not directed against the principle of authority in itself, but against the egotistical misuse of this principle. How else could Jesus have set Himself up as a pattern of service and brotherly love, and yet in the same breath call Himself the "Son of Man," that is the Lord of the future and of the judgment, the holder of authority? Just as His brotherly service does not exclude His supreme dignity as Son of Man, so his recommendation of humility and love cannot be intended in an anti-hierarchical sense. Therefore it is a misinterpretation of the plain intention of Jesus to argue that the idea of a primacy is irreconcilably opposed to His teaching concerning humility and brotherly love. The contrary is true. The teaching of Jesus obtains its luminous fulfillment exactly in-papacy and episcopacy, if they be correctly conceived. For the papacy, regarded in the light of the supernatural essence of the Church, is nought else but a personification of love, the manifestation of the unity of the Body of Christ on earth. It is therefore in its essential nature the exact opposite of domination; it is born not of brutality, but of love. Papacy and episcopacy are divine power, but power put to the service of love. Certainly the pope has sometimes to speak out in sharp and peremptory admonition. It is as when Paul cried: "Shall I come to you with a rod?" (1 Cor. iv, 21). And sometimes his anathema rings through the world "in the same tones and with the same language" (Heiler) as St. Paul used when he excluded the incestuous Corinthian from the Christian community. Nevertheless, even this angry and corrective love remains love, love for the community of brethren. The pope has in so far the primacy of love. Nor is there any hierarchy in the Church that may express itself otherwise than in ministering love. Woe to the pontiff who misuses his primacy of love for personal ends, to gratify his lust of power, his avarice, or other passion[4] He sins against the Body of Christ, he offers violence to Jesus. He has to render an account beyond that required of any other member of the Body of Christ. How terribly at the Judgment may the words sound in his ears, when the risen Lord shall ask him: "Peter, lovest thou me, lovest thou me more than these?" That is the great and sacred privilege of his office, to love Christ and His Body more than all other men, to realize that honorable title which Gregory the Great assumed: "Servant of the servants of God" (Servus servorum Dei). Pope Pius XI, in his first Encyclical, laid it down that those who preside are nothing but "servants of the general weal, servants of the servants of God, especially of the weak and needy, after the pattern of the Lord."[4]

The pope's office is essentially service of the community, love and devotion. And when we prescind from the office, when we consider only the personality of pope or bishop, then there is no distinction of rank in the Church, then the saying of Jesus is true: "Ye are all brethren" (Mt. xxiii, 8). In the same Encyclical Pope Pius lays stress on the point that "only in this kingdom is there a true equality of right, wherein all are endowed with the same greatness and the same nobility, being ennobled by the same precious Blood of Christ." In the Kingdom of Christ there is only one kind of nobility, namely nobility of soul. The wearer of the tiara is the rock of the Church and has the charisma of that office not for himself, but for his brethren. For himself he has no greater Christian rights and no lesser Christian duties than the poorest beggar in the streets. Indeed he is in especial need of the mercy of God and requires the intercessions of his brethren. And if his conscience be burdened with sin, then he also must kneel at the feet of his confessor, who may be the homeliest Capuchin friar. And were he to appeal to Jesus with the request of the Sons of Zebedee: "Lord, grant that I may sit at Thy right hand or Thy left in Thy glory," then would his director give him the same answer: "You know not what you ask. Can you drink the chalice which Jesus drank?"

Church history demonstrates, to every unbiased student, how earnestly and austerely most wearers of the tiara have taken their personal obligations, and how their lofty office has not impaired their humility, love and devotion, but transformed and deepened them. It is true that there have been popes, especially in the tenth century and at the Renaissance, who have given sad evidence of the frailty of human nature. But their number fades into insignificance before the dazzling company of saints and martyrs which the See of Rome has already given to the world. The words of the Protestant theologian Walter Kohler about Pope Pius X are true "mutatis mutandis" of the overwhelming majority of the popes of Rome: "He recked nothing of the political power of the modern state. He was a priest, and his endeavor was to hold the Host aloft, to look neither to right nor left, and to bear his Savior through the world." Such is the idea of the papacy and such its essential nature: to bear the Savior through the world, to devote self to Christ in the service of the community. So all egotism, all domination, all special privilege is fundamentally foreign to the Church. And therefore and in that measure the Church fulfills the noblest dreams of democratic equality. Unity and brotherly love have here built themselves a house, a house in which, as St. Cyprian says and St. Augustine repeats (De bapt. c. Don. vii, 49), only those dwell who are of one heart and one mind. The spirit of the Master pervades that dwelling, the spirit which enriched us with the luminous words: "One only is your Master, ye all are brethren."

Endnotes

1. None of the Fathers sets forth the mystical unity of Christ and the faithful so clearly and impressively as does St. Augustine. He would have the nature of the Church conceived in terms of this unity: Cum ille caput, nos membra unus est Filius Dei (In ep. Joan. Tr. X, 3). Aliter enim est in nobis tamquam in templo suo, aliter autem quia et nos ipse sumus, cum secundum id, quod ut caput nostrum esset, homo factus est, corpus eius sumus (In ev. Joann. Tr. CXI, 5). Et nos Ipse est (Sermo CXXXIII, 8). Ille caput cum ceteris membris unus homo est. Et cum ascendere nemo potest, nisi qui in eius corpore membrum ipsius factus fuerit, impletur: quia nemo ascendit, nisi qui descendit.... igitur jam non duo, sed una caro (Sermo XCI, 6, 7).

2. St. Augustine: Dominus autem securus moriens dedit sanguinem suum pro ea, quam resurgens haberet, quam sibi jam conjunxerat in utero virginis. Verbum enim sponsus et sponsa caro humana; et utrumque unus Filius Dei et idem filius hominis: ubi factus est caput ecclesiae, ille uterus virginis Mariae thalamus ejus, inde processit tamquam sponsus de thalamo suo (In ev. Joann. Tr. VIII, 4).

3. Heiler, op. cit., p. 40.

4. "Arcanum Dei" (1922). St. Augustine delights to describe this Church authority as a ministry of love. cf. Praesunt non ut praesint, sed ut prosint (Contra Faustum XXII, 56). Sic praeest fratribus, ut eorum servum se esse meminerit (Contra ep. Parm. III, 3, 16).

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