The Mystical Body of Christ

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We all have heard of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ. I wonder how well we and the world understand it. It means that we believers are somehow united to Christ in a mystical way. Christ is still the same as He always has been, but we are very much different. Christ wants to present Himself in a special way. He wants everybody to know that He has incorporated those who believe Him, love Him, and obey Him into a union with Him that shows how intimately our union with Him really is.

In a mystical way, He presents His whole Church as being in intimate union with Him. We should not consider ourselves as separated persons who follow Christ but as part of an organized organic whole in which Christ dwells. His Church is His Mystical body, which brings Christ into intimate contact with His creation. His Mystical Body is actually Him dealing with His whole creation. He maintains His physical presence in the world through His Mystical Body and no longer through a cloud as He did in Old Testament times.

Our separated brethren

Those Christian groups that have broken away from the mother Church do not realize what that separation has cost them. They are not only separated from the Church that Christ Himself has founded in intimate subordination to God, many of them have substituted national churches that are subordinate to civil authority.

The Anglican Church, for example, is subordinate to the crown of England not directly to the person of God. During the Reformation, the English people chaffed at being subordinate to the Vicar of Christ on earth. They chose subordination to an earthly king instead, and those who chose to remain faithful to the pope were ridiculed by the English with the derogatory term “papists.”

Those who followed Martin Luther in Germany were also hostile to being bound to the papacy and chose to be bound to their own German government instead. It was similar with many of those groups who broke away from the mother Church. Many of them wanted to be free from foreign influence. Today more than 500 years later, not much of the early hostility against the mother Church still exists, but the divisions do. People have learned to be more tolerant of each other’s differences. But, when you think of it, many have left behind a magnificent privilege of being explicitly united to the Church that Christ founded.

What the Mystical Body actually is

The Mystical Body is actually a combination of all baptized believers living the sacramental life of the Church and considered as though they were parts of the whole Body of Christ. In religious matters they are no longer subservient to a political state but subservient to God Himself. They love God and obey Him in all things, and when they act, they act in union with the Incarnate Son of God.

Think of it: when they act, the Divine Son is acting through them. They are actually sons and daughters of God. They are so wedded to Christ they would never dream of doing anything contrary to God’s will. How would you like to be God’s own son or daughter, operating in God’s heavenly kingdom? You are free to be as generous as you want with God’s gifts and blessings, knowing that your Father is rich beyond imagination, and God is not stingy. It would be a totally different life for you, who only know the sadness and darkness of this world.

What do you think Heaven is like?

Heaven is not at all the way the world jokes about it: people sitting on clouds, having clumsy wings, strumming on harps, and singing songs of praise to God. When I was a child hearing those stories, I thought, “How boring!” Who wants to sit around all day and sing songs? I would much prefer to explore the woods, learn about animals, and actually learn about everything. The world, under the influence of Lucifer, goes out of its way to blindside us about everything pertaining to God.

Now that I am grown up, I see many more things in this world that are worthy of my attention and incredibly more in the next world. Of course, I would sing songs to God, but not the type of love songs we sing in this world. I would love people in the next life, but not with a love that is fervent to begin with but that gradually grows old and forgotten as I see the flaws in the person I so fervently loved at the beginning.

In the next life, I would love God above all because I would realize what a worthless wretch I was to begin with. How could God love me when I resented Him and wanted to distance myself from Him through sinning? It will be my recognition of His fervent love for me that would trigger my love for Him. And it would not be a love song written by someone else. No. It will be a song written from my own personal experience with God, who lovingly called me out of my wretchedness into a total infatuation with God.

My Song

Most of what I would sing to God would be My Song, a recounting of the marvelous way God called me from where I was into the blissful relationship I finally arrived at with Him. It will be different from other people’s song because God chose a gloriously different path for me. I would sing it with my whole heart better than any song I heard in this life primarily because it will be based on absolute truth. My words would be as genuine as possible and everybody will resonate with them.

Very little of what we hear on earth is absolute truth. There is always some deceit in love songs and in the way we describe the world, especially the way we describe spiritual beings. There is only one divine Being. All other beings are created. Yet the world presents us with countless gods, witches, demons, evil and magical creatures, mythological animals with divine powers etc. All of this is repugnant to God who knows exactly what absolute truth is. God operates on absolute truth, and you and I, if we want to get into heaven, should do the same.

The Mystical Body, a mosaic

I have heard the Mystical Body compared to a mosaic, where each chip in the mosaic is a human being in heaven similar to the way a mosaic is composed of minute colored chips that, when viewed at a distance, show the face of God. I think this is a very good comparison for the Mystical Body.

The Mystical Body is the presence of Christ ruling His universe. Each baptized believer is granted admission into the Mystical Body in some way and becomes a miniature Christ charged with some aspect of God’s governing of His world. Put them all together and you have Christ Himself ministering to His world. Don’t look for Christ being separate from His Church. His Church, as His Mystical Body, is actually the physical presence of God in the world.

There is only one Mystical Body

There is only one Mystical Body, and it is found in its essence in the Catholic Church. No other Christian group can claim to be the Mystical Body as such. Since God is very compassionate and forgiving, He accepts other Christians, our separated brethren, into His heavenly kingdom, but according to our teaching, they are not full members of His Mystical Body. That term is specific to those who are in full communion with the Catholic Church.

Vatican II considered our separated brethren as having various degrees of an imperfect communion in relation to the Mystical Body (see Lumen Gentium, 15, 16). My point is that we ought to do everything possible to understand and comply with how God expects to attain this highest level of union with Christ.

In my youth, during my previous wild days, I thought the worst thing that could happen to a human being would be to go to hell. If one escapes hell, one has it made, so to speak, and should be satisfied and proud of himself that he did not deserve hell. But I see many Protestants who are even more zealous than me in living the Christian life. I think, if they knew and understood the doctrine of the Mystical Body, their zeal would help them seek full admission within the Mystical Body themselves.

Now in my mature years I think that the worse thing that could happen to a human being is to believe something contrary to what Jesus taught. I think if someone refuses to believe something Jesus taught, they wind up punishing themselves because if you do not believe a teaching you become unworthy of experiencing what that teaching entails.

The Mystical Body below human wickedness

There is much evil in the world today that, at first glance, covers the Mystical Body with the crust of wickedness. Too many people, because of the sinfulness of many Catholics who think they are doing well, actually form a phony image of Christ visible to others as defective because of their personal sins.

I’m referring to young Catholic women who parade in the streets chanting “God is a male chauvinist” or “God refuses to recognize women’s rights”; or priests who solicit young boys for sexual encounters and who are a disgrace to the Catholic faith just as are those of the laity who are adamant in their refusal to discipline their sexual appetites. Their image blocks out the underlying true image of what the members of the Mystical Body should look like and act like. People see a distorted image and fail to understand what the Mystical Body is.

The deeper layers under the crust

One has to peel off the crust. Actually, God has to pull off the wicked crust and toss it away in order to have the world recognize His tangible presence in His own creation. Peel off the crust deep enough and one will see, for example, Saint Francis display his love for God and his compassion and tenderness even to animals, or Saint Mother Theresa and her love for the downtrodden in India.

In the deeper layers, you will also find saints like Fr. Isaac Jogues, Fr. Junipero Serra and many other missionaries who left the comforts of home to live among the savages in the New World and bring those people into God’s kingdom as Christ requested rather than conquer them, take away their land, and make slaves of them, as so many others did during the exploration of the New World.

It is this inner core of those that are living the sacred life in this world and in the next world that God wanted for most of us. Ponder what even this world would have been like if a very large number of baptized souls actually believed and aspired to this sacramental display of God to others. Think about what they would have done to the world during the 500 years since the start of the exploration of the New World. We would not have had the slaughter and enslavement of so many people and the wars between the colonizing countries and their colonies.

Conclusion

It is not too late to finally believe what the good God wanted all of us to aspire to. You should consider what the Catholic Faith is really all about, and get yourself baptized, cleave to the Church, and act as though you really are sons and daughters of the living God.

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2 thoughts on “The Mystical Body of Christ”

  1. Christ acts in the world through the members of His Mystical Body when His Spirit is within them. The Head of the Body is Christ. It is those who are coordinated by the Head that are the parts of His Body. It is not the whole world. The Holy Spirit is the one who baptizes us and places us in the Body (cf. 1Corinthians 12:13). “The Lord knows them that are His” (2Timothy 2:19). Those who are validly baptized outside of the Catholic Church can also participate in the Mystical Body of Christ. If the Holy Spirit is truly working in them, how can we determine the extent of it? I believe that the Mystical Body of Christ transcends the organizational divisions within Christianity.

    1. @PeterAiello, you are correct in essence. Christ can’t be limited to an institutional structure. Teh Mystical Body is a spiritual union, not an institution as such. Yet, full membership in this Mystical Body can be determined by full membership in the Church which Christ Himself deliberately established as His Body on earth. This is why there are various “degrees” of relationship to the body but full membership in it only comes with membership in and union with the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

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