ECCLESIOLOGY AND MARIOLOGY
Thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican.
ATTY. MARWIL N. LLASOS, OP REV. FR. WILLIAM CAJES, SThD
Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry Professor
THE CHURCH AS RELATIONSHIP
The Holy Trinity is a communion of Persons in mutual self-giving and love. In the Triune God, there exists relationship between and among the Three Persons. If God were not a Trinity, there is something He could not communicate to us – relationship.
As the “family of God,”[1] the Church mirrors the Trinity in the sense that there is relationship in the Church. In truth, the Church is relationship. This reality is empirically verified in each and every believer who exists always in relation and never in isolation in the Church.
I was born and raised Catholic. Starting with my parents, I have always been surrounded by Catholics who have shown me love. I learned relationship in my family. As a child, I am related to my parents. As a brother, I am related to my siblings. My family where I learned relationship is Church – a domestic Church. When I got older, I expanded my relationships with people outside my family – and they too are Catholics. Wherever I go, I am surrounded by people who are not strangers to me but who are in actually my brothers and sisters in the Church.
My idea of the Church is that it is a relationship. In baptism, I was born again as a precious child of the Father, one infinitely loved. I have put on the Lord Jesus Christ (Gal. 2:27) who is my Brother. I have become the living temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19) who is my Friend and the Guest of my Soul. A whole new relationship between me and the Triune God has been inaugurated the very moment I was baptized. That new relationship enabled me to be a “partaker of the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4).[2]
I was incorporated to the Church through baptism. Thus, I become a part of Christ’s Body. I now have a living personal relationship with Christ who is the Head of the Church. I am configured to Him and conformed to His image. I now live the life of Christ who loves me and continuously gives Himself to me (cf. Gal 2:20).
Being a part of the Body of Christ as a member of His Church, I am fully aware that I am in relationship with the members of Christ’s Body individually and collectively. Hence, the person who sits beside me on the pew during Mass is a member of the Lord’s Body just as I am. Even those who are not in the church are my brothers and sisters as well and I must reach out to them in brotherly love. I belong to so great a family united by the bonds of faith, hope and love gathered into one Body by the Holy Spirit.
This relationship in the Church is called koinonia – fellowship, or even more aptly, communion. The Church is communion. It exists “so that you may have fellowship (communion) with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn. 1:4). St. Paul, in closing his second letter to the Corinthians, imparts to us this blessing: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor 13:14).
This “communion” of all the members of Christ’s Body is called the Communion of Saints. Of course, we who are wayfarers on this earth who have to constantly face the challenges of the world, the flesh and the devil who constitute the Church Militant are in communion with each other. But this communion of all Christ’s faithful is not bound by space and time. Our relationship with one another, marked as it is by love, transcends these limitations. As love is stronger than death, then our relationship is not broken by death. Like St. Paul, we too are “sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).
It is thus clear that our loved ones those who have gone ahead of us to the next life are in reality not far away from us. We are bound to them by the same sentiments of love and devotion we had for them in this world. In fact, they are even closer to us now than we can ever imagine because they are no longer limited by space and time. The saints in the glory of heaven are interested in our affairs and assist us by their prayers. We are truly “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1) praying for us, cheering for us and egging us on to finish the race.
We also not forget the souls under purification in Purgatory, the Church Suffering. As our dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we have to share in their burden by praying for them offering to them the benefit of our suffrages and good works. While they cannot pray for themselves, they nevertheless pray for us. Thus, we fulfill the law of Christ to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2).
Our membership in Christ’s one Body allows us to broaden our relationship unto cosmological proportions. As members of Christ’s Church, we are empowered us to enter into relationship with the holy angels, our “fellow servants” (Rev. 19:20, 22:9) who concerned with our salvation (Heb 1:14). We can have friendship with them, especially to our own guardian angels. Our Lord Jesus clearly revealed the truth that we do have guardian angels when He said, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 18:10).
While the Church is relationship, it certainly does not mean that I am limiting my relationship with those who are within the visible confines of the Church. Certainly, I have to relate with the men and women of goodwill who are not yet in communion with the Church. This includes our separated brothers and sisters. I must pray for them and foster the unity of the Church prayed for by the Lord: “That they may all be one” (Jn 20:21).
The Lord Jesus Christ instituted His Church as relationship, specifically family relationship. Our Lord’s task was to build a family for God – God’s family – and that is the Church. In that family, we have relationship with God as our Father and with Our Lord Jesus Christ as our Brother, the “first-born among many brethren” (Rom 8:29). We are now brothers and sisters in Christ, “sons in the Son” of the Father. But just before Jesus Christ ended His earthly life on the Cross, the Savior established a relationship between His beloved disciple and His mother: “Woman, behold your son! … Behold your mother!” (Jn 19:26-27). God’s family, the Church, is now complete.
As the Lord’s beloved disciple, I too must take Mary, the mother of Jesus, into my own home and begin the relationship of a “mother and son” as willed by Jesus my Brother. Having accepted Mary as my mother, I must now let her teach me the essence of relationship with God, her Son Our Jesus Christ and with my brothers and sisters. Mary’s “maternal presence” in my life is a continual reminder that I am fully a person – and that we are truly Church – only in relation with the Other and others and never in isolation from them. “None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself” (Rom. 14:7).