On Ecclesiology

Images of the Church

POPE BENEDICT XVI HAS WRITTEN on a very wide range of topics, but his writings on the Church are perhaps more voluminous than those on any other theme. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 1953, dealt with the images of People of God and House of God in the works of St. Augustine, two images of what we call the Church. Ever since then he has shown a consistent interest in ecclesiology. Although the Church appears in the titles of many of his books, he has not written a treatise on ecclesiology. Here I shall try to give the outlines of what such a treatise might look like, if he were ever to compose it.

At the time when Joseph Ratzinger began to write, there was, at least in Germany, a certain reaction against the description of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, the term that Pius XII had privileged in his important encyclical of 1943.¹ The primary objections were two. In the first place, some theologians protested that the idea of the Mystical Body did not sufficiently respect the autonomy and possible sinfulness of the Church’s members. It tended to present the Church too triumphalistically as a mere organ through which Christ acted. Secondly, the image of the Mystical Body as explained in the encyclical made it difficult to see how baptism could incorporate Christians who were not Catholics into the body of Christ. Because of these two problems, the young Ratzinger, before and during the Second Vatican Council, was inclined to prefer the image of the Church as the People of God, another biblical term. “The People of God” is a flexible term that admits of many degrees and modalities of incorporation or affiliation. It is made up of men and women who may or may not be faithful to the Lord. They, rather than Christ, are responsible for their shortcomings. Responding to these difficulties, Vatican II, in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium [hereafter, LG], seemed to subordinate the image of the Mystical Body to that of the People of God.²

Although the young Ratzinger was at first enthusiastic about the change of emphasis, he has since become reserved in speaking of the Church as People of God. He points out that the image has a slender basis in Scripture. There are only two texts in the New Testament, it seems, that use this designation for the Church. The image captures the continuity between the Church and the old Israel, but not the novelty of the Church of Christ. Unlike the old Israel, the Church is not sociologically one people. It becomes one people only because it is the Body of Christ, whose Spirit unites peoples of many nationalities and ethnic characteristics. Thus, in some ways the metaphor of the Body of Christ better expresses the real nature of the Church.³

In the years since Vatican II, Cardinal Ratzinger (as he became in 1977) relied increasingly on another image of the Church prominent in the documents of Vatican II: the Church as sacrament of communion or sacrament of salvation. This image conveys that the Church is a sign and instrument of salvation and that she carries within herself the grace that she confers. The Church is the Church because God dwells in her, giving unity to her members, even though they are not sociologically one people. Because the idea of sacrament is somewhat complex and technical, we should not be surprised that this image of the Church is somewhat neglected in popular works about ecclesiology.⁴

Ratzinger was also ready to speak of the Church as a communion, if that term be rightly understood. He does not mean by it a friendly gathering of like-minded persons, but a grace-given interior union with God, and consequently with all other members of the Church. Communion in that sense is participation in the divine life. It has its source especially in the Holy Eucharist, which is the sacrament of communion.⁵ While approving of the term “communion” in this eucharistic and ecclesial...