“Let us continue our Lenten journey in a spirit of penance and conversion, imploring God’s mercy and peace for ourselves and for the whole world”, Pope Leo XIV said in his greetings to German-speaking pilgrims. “The Church is a well-organized body, in which the human and divine dimensions coexist without separation and without confusion”. With these words, the Pope began his catechesis, once again devoted to Lumen gentium, clarifying the meaning of the adjective “complex” attributed to the Church by the conciliar document. “The first dimension is immediately perceptible, in that the Church is a community of men and women who share the joy and struggle of being Christians, with their strengths and weaknesses, proclaiming the Gospel and becoming a sign of the presence of Christ who accompanies us on our journey through life”, he observed. “Yet this aspect – which is also evident in its institutional organization – is not sufficient to describe the true nature of the Church, because it also has a divine dimension”. The latter, the Pontiff explained, “does not consist in an ideal perfection or spiritual superiority of its members, but in the fact that the Church is generated by God’s plan for humanity, realized in Christ”. The Church, therefore, “is at the same time an earthly community and the mystical body of Christ, a visible assembly and a spiritual mystery, a reality present in history and a people journeying towards heaven. The human and divine dimensions integrate harmoniously, without one overshadowing the other”.
The Church “is a reality that is both human and divine, which welcomes the sinful man and leads him to God”,
the Pope summarised with regard to the Church’s “paradox”, as described in Lumen gentium, which refers back to the life of Christ. “Those who met Jesus along the roads of Palestine experienced his humanity, his eyes, his hands, the sound of his voice”, Leo XIV commented. “Those who decided to follow him were moved precisely by the experience of his welcoming gaze, the touch of his blessing hands, his words of liberation and healing”. “At the same time, however, by following that Man, the disciples opened themselves to an encounter with God”, he continued. “Christ’s flesh, his face, his gestures and his words visibly manifest the invisible God”.
“When we look at her closely, we discover a human dimension made up of real people, who sometimes manifest the beauty of the Gospel and other times struggle and make mistakes like everyone else”,
he said, referring to the Church. Yet “it is precisely through her members and her limited earthly aspects that Christ’s presence and his saving action are manifested”.
“There is no opposition between the Gospel and the institution;
on the contrary, the structures of the Church serve precisely for the ‘realization and concretization of the Gospel in our time’”, he affirmed, echoing Benedict XVI. “An ideal and pure Church, separated from the earth, does not exist; only the one Church of Christ, embodied in history”, he added, commenting on the first chapter of Lumen gentium. “This is what constitutes the holiness of the Church: the fact that Christ dwells in her and continues to give himself through the smallness and fragility of her members”. This is “God’s method”: He “makes himself visible through the weakness of creatures, continuing to manifest himself and to act”. For this reason, Pope Francis, in Evangelii gaudium, exhorts everyone to learn “to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other (cf. Ex 3:5)”. “This enables us still today to build up the Church”, Leo concluded, “not only by organizing its visible forms, but by building that spiritual edifice which is the body of Christ, through communion and charity among ourselves”.
