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THE ECCLESIOLOGY OF VATICAN II!
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger!
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What the Church IS NOT? The Church is not an apparatus (machinery), nor a bureaucracy,
nor one social institution among many others, nor an organization that one has to relate from
the outside. It is not an institution devised and built by men. !
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"The Church is awakening within souls”. (Romano Guardini) The Church is something within
us— that lives within us. It is the organism of the Holy Spirit, something that is alive, that takes
hold of our inmost being. The church is something we all bring forward in faith in a living way,
just as the Church brings us forward. !
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The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ.Christ and His act of founding are never over but
always new. In the Church, Christ never belongs just to the past, He is always and above all the
present and the future. *The Church is the presence of Christ: He is contemporary with us and
we are His contemporaries. "Since Christ is the Light of the World ... the Church is a mirror of
His glory; she reflects His sole ndour”. (Lumen Gentium) That is why *the first word of the
Church is Christ, and not herself. The Church is healthy to the extent that all her attention is
focused on Him.!
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INTERIORITY. Christ is present in our hearts and it is there that Christ forms His Church. *The
Church grows from within and moves outwards, not vice-versa. The Church is formed primarily
in a life of prayer, the sacraments and the fundamental attitudes of faith, hope and love. HOW
TO BECOME CHURCH? Thus if someone should ask what must I do to become Church and to
grow like the Church, the reply must be: you must become a person who lives faith, hope, and
charity. What builds the Church is prayer and the communion of the sacraments; in them the
prayer of the Church comes to meet us.!
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COMMUNITARIAN. “We” are the Church. It is we who constitute the Church. This "we" does
not represent an isolated group (“someone else”) , but exists within the entire community of all
Christ's members, living and dead. It is an open "we" that breaches social and political
boundaries, and the boundary between heaven and earth as well. This gives rise to a CO-
RESPONSIBILITY and also the possibility of PERSONAL COLLABORATION. From this
understanding there derives the right to criticize but our criticism must be above all self-criticism. !
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CHURCH IS A BODY, NOT AN IDEA. Christ has formed a body for himself. Christ gives
Himself only in His body, and never as a pure ideal. This means that He gives Himself in the
uninterrupted communion that endures through time and is His Body. If I want to find Him and
make Him mine, I am directly called to become a humble and complete and full member of His
Body in this world. The idea of liberal theology that Jesus on his own would be interesting, the
Church would be a wretched reality, contradicts this understanding completely. The scandal of
becoming flesh that Jesus' incarnation caused so many of His contemporaries, is repeated in
the "scandalous character" of the Church.!
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CHURCH REMAINS IDENTICAL WITH THE BEGINNING IN CHRIST BUT DEVELOPS IN
TIME. It is a living continuity that has developed the beginning and preserved the beginning
precisely through this development. Whoever wants to attach himself solely to the literal
interpretation of the Scriptures or to the forms of the Church of the Fathers imprisons Christ in
"yesterday". The result is either a wholly sterile faith that has nothing to say to our times, or the
arrogant assumption of the right to skip over 2,000 years of history, consign them to the dustbin
of mistakes, and try to figure out what a Christianity would look like either according to Scripture
or according to Jesus. !
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“EUCHARISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY” (Henri de Lubac:“Corpus Mysticum”) In the Eucharist,
Christ, present in the bread and wine and giving Himself anew, builds the Church as His Body,
and through His Risen Body He unites us to the one and triune God and to each other. The
Eucharist celebrated in different places is universal at the same time, because there is only one
Christ and only a single body of Christ.!
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A Marian understanding of the Church: is totally opposed to the concept of the Church as a
bureaucracy or a simple organization. We cannot make the Church, we must be the Church. We
are the Church, the Church is in us only to the extent that our faith more than action forges our
being. Only by being Marian, can we become the Church. At its very beginning the Church was
not made, but given birth. She existed in the soul of Mary from the moment she uttered her fiat.
This is the most profound will of the Council: the Church should be awakened in our souls.