Feb 11 Tue
Is the Church a congregation or a Body?
When Saul of Tarsus, lying on the ground outside Damascus, looked into the blinding light and asked, “Who are you?”, the response was: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
Paul discovered that Christ and His Church are so profoundly one that to persecute the Church is to persecute Christ.
But how does the Church relate to Christ? Most people don’t see an intrinsic relation between Christ and the Church. Christ is one thing, the Church another. At best, the Church is just the community that gathered to continue His memory. At worst, it’s a bunch of Pharisees who followed Jesus’ message of [you may insert your agenda here]. The doctrine of the Body of Christ teaches differently.
It’s not “as if” Christ is the head, or the Church is “like” Christ’s Body. Nor is their connection the legal union of a contract or the moral union of a shared purpose. Christ and the Church have an organic oneness, as between a head and body, or a vine and its branches. The Church is the extension of Christ himself throughout the world and history.
One effect of this doctrine is to deliver us from the anti-hierarchy heresy of our culture. In this Church organism, there is both a Head and Body. The head governs. But Christ the Head doesn’t rule over the Church tyrannically, but the way your head rules your body, as one organism. This is an organic hierarchy, not one imposed.
Christ entrusted his headship first to Peter and the Apostles and now exercises it through their successors, the pope and bishops. They must exercise this headship – no one else can. Of course, there are advisors and consultors and all the rest. But at the end of the day, the Church is not governed by committee or council or synod but by the Shepherds who watch over it in place of the Apostles.
No member of the body is less a member than the others. There’s a fundamental equality because each member of the Body was “in one Spirit…baptized into one body.”
Our egalitarian age loves to emphasize this equality but omits an important aspect, namely, an equal obligation to holiness. Nobody is off the hook. All the baptized must strive for sanctity.
“As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.” This oneness is based on the supernatural not the natural. It doesn’t come from common descent, mutual social interests, or a shared political purpose. It’s not something willed by us or imposed by external forces. It comes from being incorporated into one Body by one Baptism in one Spirit.
This oneness means that each member has responsibilities to the whole. There are no independent limbs in the Body of Christ any more than in your own body. Each of us has a responsibility to the others. Thus, “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”
Finally, the Body of Christ has authentic diversity. For a body to work properly, it must have different members, each fulfilling its proper role, a diversity that doesn’t divide.
When her members live their baptismal calling properly, the Church appears as she truly is, Christ’s continuing presence in the world. And the world finds in the Church what it seeks elsewhere despairingly: hierarchy without inequality, equality without mediocrity, diversity without division, unity without uniformity.
Excerpts from Fr. Paul D. Scalia
Video: