We have now seen the Church at the first level of our understanding - the Kingdom. A society of men who come to receive God's gifts of truth and life through the Holy Spirit. A society in which we are in the company of Christ. At that, it would still be glorious; but it is in fact much more and we should come to a deeper level of understanding. It would be a shame for a Catholic to live out his life in the Church without the fullest realization of the magnificence that is his.
22.1
This deeper level is bound up with the meaning of Our Lord's words, “I am with you.” Go back to the words Our Lord used of Himself in answer to St. Thomas's question at the Last Supper: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.”
These words are used to examine what Our Lord came to do. Our Lord used them to describe not His work but Himself. They apply to His work because they already apply to Him. Examining the phrase as Our Lord said it, we are struck with its strangeness. What makes it strange is the word "am", particularly as followed by the words, "truth" and "life". We might have expected Him to say: "I have the truth", and "I have the life". The difference makes an enormous difference to us. Had He said "I have the truth", we could have asked Him to fill our minds with it, since truth is the mind's first need. By saying "I am the Truth", we must ask Him to fill our minds with Himself. We ask Him, not to enlighten our minds, but to be the light of our minds. If He had said "I have the life", we could ask Him to give it to us. By saying "I am the Life", we can only ask Him to live in us. We take possession of the gifts only by taking possession of the giver. The gifts and giver are the one same Christ. The Church in which we receive His gifts is now seen as the Church in which we receive Him. The union with Him, as members of the Church, is now seen to be a union as intimate as truth with the mind, and love with the will.
To understand this new concept of the Church, take the statement that since Christ is the life, we cannot have life unless He lives in us. This precise thing He has Himself said is the recurrent theme of His long discourse at the Last Supper. We have already noticed the phrase of Our Lord in His prayer to the Father for the unity of His Church that “while Thou art in Me, I may be in them, and so they may be perfectly made one.” (John 17:23) This is the truth which St. Paul puts so grandly: “I am alive; or rather not I; it is Christ that lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20)
Christ is to live in us; and we are to live in Him. We find Our Lord saying at the Last Supper: “It is only a little while now, before the world is to see Me no more; but you can see me, because I live on and you too will have life. When that day comes, you will learn for yourselves that I am in My Father and you are in Me and I am in you.” (John 14:19-20) He makes this even more explicit in the parable of the Vine and the Branches. “You have only to live on in Me, and I will live on in you. The branch that does not live on in the Vine can yield no fruit of itself; no more can you, if you do not live on in Me. I am the Vine, you are its branches; if a man lives on in Me, and I in him, then he will yield abundant fruit.” (John 15:3-5)
That He should live in us and we in Him, brings us to the heart of the truth about His Church. Only in a living body can the verb "to live in" be used both ways. Our Lord had shown this by the living body of a vine. St. Paul uses the comparison of the living body of a man. I can say of the cells of my body that I live in them, because it is by my life that they live; but equally I can say that they live in me, because though it is from me that their life comes. It actually does make them alive. If we are to live in Christ, and He is to live in us, then there must be a similar relationship between us and Him, as between a person and the cells of his body. In this sense the Church is the Body of Christ, not merely an organization, for the gifts our souls need, it is an organism, a living body with its own life-secret and its own life-stream. He Whose Body it is, is Christ. He is the life-secret. The life-stream flows from Him to every cell in the Body. As we are alive, it is with His life. We are living in Him because He is living in us. The reality of the Church, is men bound together as one by the one life-stream flowing from the Head which is Christ.
22.2
St. Paul's Epistles are alive with the doctrine. Not unnaturally, for the first word Our Lord said to him, in the vision on the road to Damascus which converted him: “Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me?” Persecuting Christ's church is persecuting Christ, for Church and Christ are one.
We must now see things through this new language of organic union with Christ. Baptism, no longer means entry into the Church, or rebirth into the supernatural life, it means rebirth into Christ. By rebirth in baptism, we are incorporated with Christ; as by birth in the natural order, we are incorporated with Adam. By our incorporation with Christ, we share in the satisfaction He offered for sin, and the super-natural union with God, He merited. (see Col. 2:12-13.)
Our incorporation with Christ is so real that, in the phrase of St. Thomas, "His sufferings avail for us as if we had suffered them ourselves" (S.T. 3 q. 69). The words are the natural development of St. Paul's phrase (Gal. 2:19): "with Christ I hang upon the cross". The satisfaction He made is ours, because we are in Him. The supernatural union with God, the purpose and crown of redemption, is ours because we are in Him. We have seen why Our Lord said I am the Life. We can also see why He said I am the Way. He not only opens the way for us and points the way to us: He is the Way. We must enter into Him and abide in Him. That is salvation. United organically with His sacred humanity, we are united with His Person, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and so with the Triune God. In our life in Him, the breach between man and God is healed and the relation of oneness restored. It is the formula of restoration, He uttered at the Last Supper: “I am in my Father, and you in Me, and I in you.”
Redemption finds a new statement in terms of the Mystical Body, as does the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was sent to do, for the Church and its members, the work of supernatural sanctification and illumination, which He did for the human nature of Christ. The Holy Spirit comes to us because we are inbuilt into Christ in whom He is. The life which is Christ's is ours, because His is the operation of the Holy Spirit in His human nature. We may speak of life in the Body as Christ living in us, or the Holy Spirit living in us. Our Lord speaks of both in-livings and so does St. Paul. In one passage (Rom. 8:9-11) he has them both - "Christ lives in you, the Spirit dwells in you, a man cannot belong to Christ unless he has the Spirit of Christ. Just as both live in us, both operate in us: All this is the work of one and the same Spirit." Because of the indwelling and operation of the Holy Spirit in Christ Our Lord, we cannot be incorporated in Christ without having the same indwelling and operation. "Your bodies belong to the body of Christ," says St. Paul (1 Cor. 6:15); and "Your bodies are the shrines of the Holy Spirit." (1 Cor. 6:19) For this presence, the Church has various phrases: Christ is the Source, the Holy Spirit the operative principle, or Christ is the Head of the Body, the Holy Spirit the Soul. One lovely variant of this last phrase used by St. Thomas and again by Pope Leo I: “the Holy Spirit is the Heart.”
22.3
By birth in Adam, we are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, man or woman. By our rebirth in Christ, we have put on the person of Christ. By birth we are members of a family, by rebirth, parts of a body. The unity, of the members of a family, is a shadow of the organic unity of the members of a body. Brothers of one another is as nothing compared to being members of one another. The human family of our birth is a widely scattered family, largely forgotten as a family. Its head, Adam, died in a dim and dateless past and most of his children have never heard of him. Adam communicated life to his son, he to his son, and at last reached us. We owe our life to him and in that sense, he lives in us. Only in that sense, as he can do no more about it. If our life weakens and dwindles, we cannot turn to him for renewal. In the Body, we are in immediate and continuing contact with our Head, Christ. The flow of His life through us, His members, never ceases. It is always there for our growth and renewal.
Our relation to Christ is closer than the natural relation of brother to brother, or children to a parent. It is like the cells in the body of a person. It is closer than any natural relationship, one human being can have with another. By membership of the Mystical Body, we are more closely related to Christ Our Lord, than Our Lady is, simply as His mother in the natural order. Motherhood, even hers, is not as close as membership of Christ's Body. This involves living from instant to instant by the selfsame life, that He is living by. Our Lady is also a member of the Mystical Body, living more totally and intensely by His life, than we shall ever live. A lesser consequence of this is that our relationship to one another, as members of Christ's Body, is closer than any possible natural relationship. Each one of us is more closely related to every other member of the Church by this life of grace, closer than to his own natural mother. "And you are Christ's body, organs of it depending upon each other." (1 Cor..27.) If we really try to live by it, its immediate effect would be a remaking of ourselves, so that nature shrinks from it. The ultimate effect would be to renew the face of the earth.
22.4
There is not an accusation hurled at Christ that has not been hurled at His Church. His Church is also bitterly hated, not for the human faults of Her members, but for what is clearly the operation of Christ. Her insistence, on the primacy of the spiritual, is twisted into the same accusation, that was brought against Him. The accusation, that She is setting up a kingdom to dominate the kingdoms of men. She is hated, as He was, for Her teachings that the body is subordinate to the spirit, and is capable of sanctification. She is hated for Her assertions that divine truth and divine law are absolute, not to be modified by human circumstances, that She is infallibility and that She is to judge the world. She is hated for Her claim to be unique, and for being in fact unique. The similarity of the world's reaction is small compared with the actions She produces to the actions of Christ on earth. She lives the very details of His life. His public ministry is continued in the active work of the hierarchy and the missionary. His hidden life at Nazareth continues in the lives of the contemplative orders of men and women. The Church has the same alternation of fasting and feasting, the same sudden intervention of God by miracles, the same glorification of virginity and the same fruits of virginity. We could say that without the Gospels, we could reconstruct the whole picture of Christ by studying the daily life of the Church, the whole picture, including His redemptive suffering.
22.5
The Church, as a whole, and we its members, have some kind of share in the redemptive suffering of Christ. This truth may best be studied in relation to Christ's mother, the one perfect member of the Body. Every element in the life of the Body, will be seen most intense in her.
The Church has always had a sense of the enormous love of Christ for His mother, but the Gospel record provides little concrete evidence of it. The Gospels do not record a single word of tenderness, though at the very moment of His death, there is profound tenderness when He asks St. John to take His own place as her Son: “Woman, behold thy son.” The word, woman, is a term of honor, as used, though hardly a term of affection. The Gospel does not show that He ever addressed her as mother, and are the briefest possible record of a life fuller than any other man ever lived. After the description of Our Lord's infancy, there is complete silence for the next twelve years, then a single incident and then silence for eighteen years. The main concern of the evangelists is the three compressed years of the public ministry. It would take much more, than being left out of the Gospels, to persuade anyone that the perfect Son did not love His mother with perfect love.
There is a note of remoteness in what is actually recorded. The Church in her doctrine of the Compassion of Our Lady, explains in marvelous combination, both the apparent remoteness and the immeasurable love. In Our Lord's twelfth year, told in St. Luke's second chapter, His parents, returning from Jerusalem, find Him missing. They search for three days, finding Him in the temple, posing questions and solutions to the doctors’ marvel. Our Lady asks Him: "My Son, why hast thou treated us so? Think what anguish of mind thy father and I have endured, searching for thee." He answered: "What reason had you to search for me? Could you not tell that I must need be in the place which belongs to my Father?". The answer, from a boy of twelve, to a mother enduring three days of anguish with no word of regret or sympathy. We should be puzzled, as were Mary and Joseph. These words which He spoke were beyond their understanding. He went back with them. "His mother kept in her heart the memory of all this."
Simeon had said that a sword should pierce her heart. These words of her Son, kept in her heart and pondered, may have been part the sword turning. Her question to Christ is "My Son, why hast thou treated us so?" What exactly had He done to them? What she cries to her Son in anguish is very close to what He cries to His Father in His anguish on the Cross. The theologians have seen it, not as mere chance, but as part of the very design of our redemption.
In the natural order, one imagines that Christ must have been like His mother. There could be no question, as to which parent He resembled. She found it with the delight as most mothers find it, that her Son was like her. This remains in the natural order. In the supernatural order, her supreme glory, is that she was like her Son. That she was like Him is accepted by any Catholic, yet we may miss certain important elements in the likeness. He was sinless and the Man of Sorrows. She was sinless, and we think of her naturally as the Mother of Sorrows. From the moment of her Son's birth, almost all that we know of her is marked with grief. There is the flight into Egypt to save her Child from murder, the knowledge of the children massacred by Herod, and the three days loss of Christ when He was twelve. His death as she stood by the cross: He suffered; she suffered. The strange episode in the Temple points to a relation between her suffering and His, that we might have failed to see. Her suffering was related to His, but it was not merely her reaction to His, it was hers. She suffered not with Him, but in her own right. Before He experienced His desolation, she experienced her desolation. He had His Passion, but she had her passion too. His accomplished everything. Hers, not for nothing, was part of the design of the Redemption. While the Divine Person suffered the Passion that redeemed us, a human person suffered a passion parallel with His.
There is almost impenetrable darkness here, but St. Paul helps us to penetrate it a little:
"I am glad of my sufferings on your behalf, as in this mortal frame of mine, I help to pay off the debt which the afflictions of Christ leave still to be paid, for the sake of His body, the Church." (Col. 1:24). St. Paul says that something is left still to be paid, not accomplished by the sufferings of Christ. He says, that by his own sufferings, he will help supply what the sufferings of Christ did not accomplish. There is something, needed by Christ's Body, the Church, which Christ's suffering has not accomplished. Something, which St. Paul and presumably other members of the Church, must help to supply. Clearly nothing could be lacking in what the Divine Person did for the Church. God did for men; all that could have been done. This could only be what could not be done by God, but something men must do for themselves. A part in mankind's redemption, having effect in relation to the effectiveness of Christ's action.
The redemptive act itself, has two elements, the human nature in which the act was done; and the divine Person by whom the act was done. Being an act in human nature, it could be offered for the sin of the human race. Being the act of the divine Person, it had an infinite value which no human act could have had. The human nature should give of its very utmost, and in the human nature of Christ it did. If only in Christ’s human nature, then human nature has not given its utmost. The rest of men would be contributing nothing. The infinite Person of Christ did not need a total giving in His human nature, yet it was fitting that He should redeem us by a total giving. Our redemption also, did not require all humanity to give what it has to give. In the glorious design of God, human love should not be denied a place in the expiation of human sin. Redeemed humanity should suffer with Christ. These sufferings should be co-redemptive.
There is a co-redemptive activity of the Mystical Body, deriving its effectiveness from the redemptive action of Christ. In this activity, every member of the Mystical Body plays a part, as he unites his sufferings with Christ's. Human nature is privileged to repeat in the persons of men, what it has completed in the Person of Christ. What we may do, according to our imperfection, Our Lady did perfectly. Even St. Paul could not make all of his sufferings available for the Church, since some must be set against his own sins. Our Lady had no sins, and all she suffered could be for the sins of mankind. She could suffer like any other mother to see her Son suffer, and much more. She was better than any other; and had a Son more worthy of love. For the completion of suffering, she must have sufferings of her own, and at their highest, these must be in the soul. Her Son chose for her, and she chose for herself, the suffering that would lead to the utmost increase of her sanctification, and contribute the most to the spiritual needs of all. Her Son loved her supernaturally, as God loves all who have His sanctifying grace in their souls. No spirit of man or angel has ever received, and responded to so vast a measure of His grace. Her Son loved her naturally, as a human son loves a mother, and more because of His perfection and hers. This was wonderful but still second to the supernatural relation by grace.
It is possible that for the increase of supernatural love, she denied herself none of His natural love, rather some of the intimacies and consolations, normally flowing from the natural relation of mother and son. With her clarity, she would have realized, that the external aspects of natural love, are not the essence of it. Their self-denial would lead, not only to growth of supernatural love, but to a growth of natural love. Seeing and acting by it, would not diminish the suffering that flowed from the denial. Like us all, she had to deny herself in order to follow Christ. We all have a share in the co-redemptive suffering of the Mystical Body by uniting our sufferings with the sufferings of our Head. What Our Lady did perfectly, we must do in our own fashion. She was suffering, not just as one of us, the closest one to Christ, but on our behalf.
Answering the angel's message, that Mary was to bear the world's Redeemer, she said "Be it done unto me according to thy word". She uttered consent for the whole human race. When she died, she was taken into Heaven, body and soul. Until Judgment, she will be the one human person, complete with soul and body, standing before the throne of God. God allowed, that the suffering of the divine Person, should be accompanied by a wholly human suffering. An earnest suffering by redeemed humanity, that was to be spread for all the ages. As Christ represents humanity in the Redemptive Act, she represents humanity in the co-redemptive act. His suffering was the essential thing, and hers valuable by derivation. His was the Passion, hers the Com-Passion. He was the Redeemer but the Church loves to call her Co-Redemptrix.
The Mystical Body of Christ is a difficult doctrine, but the difficulty is of a special kind. Not in what the Church is saying, as is Blessed Trinity, but in the sense that it is a comparatively simple doctrine. The difficulty is that the Church really means it, a thing so simple, so glorious, and so glorifying to us, actually is so. The hardest thing to realize is, we are what this doctrine says we are. We don’t feel on that scale for such magnificence, but must become reconciled to our own magnificence as Christians, not deluded by our meagerness as men. "Agnosce Christiane dignitatem tuam " - Learn, O Christian, thy dignity. This is what St. Leo meant.