THE BODY OF CHRIST RECEIVES THE BODY OF CHRIST

Our appreciation of church underwent a dramatic shift in the 1940s when Pope Pius XII wrote his encyclical, The Body of Christ (Mystici Corporis). He referred to church as the Body of Christ. This image moved us from a juridical appreciation of church (i.e., a perfect society) to the image of the "people of God" used at Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). When Pope used this image, he was hearkening back to Christianity's first thousand years. During the first millennium the Body of Christ referred to the gathered assembly, the church, and the eucharist. We receive what we are.

Vincent P.Branick ("The Body of Christ" in Carroll Stuhlmueller, C.P.,ed. The Collegeville Pastoral Dictionary of Biblical Theology, Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1996, 102-104) considers the Body of Christ as a key metaphor in St. Paul's correspondence to the Corinthian church. The metaphor is used to address the community factions in Corinth. While there are many gifts and roles in the Corinthian community (12:14-30), all members exist in mutual interdependence. Since all are 'in Christ', the body of Christ makes the community. "God constructed the body (12:24)." We are 'incorporated' into the body through baptism and the Spirit of Jesus. "The Spirit is the source of the mutually supportive roles by which the members function as a body (12:7-11)." The Body of Christ means that there are differences, yet organic unity. This internal unity calls us to unselfish love and a spirit of openness to diversity of persons and cultures. We are in this together. We are more than a crowd of individuals who happen to be together. We express this unity in the community meal, the eucharist. We share from one common loaf and one common cup.

St. Paul had contact with the Christian communities in the Roman World. Today each local church exists 'in Christ' in an organic unity with a global church. Once upon another historical time, the European church exported culture, learning, technology, finances, personnel, and power to the colonies of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Not any more. The Body of Christ is a peasant, native face in Eastern Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia today. The Book of Martyrs of the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-centuries is written red in the ink of peoples seeking justice and human rights, sharing the bread of hospitality and the cup of compassion.

"Sharing at the table of the Eucharist challenges the Church to encourage the gifts of all, to eliminate forms of discrimination, to widen doorways of welcome in order to be in solidarity with other Christians, and to relate the action of the Eucharist to the deepest hungers of the suffering least and the poor in the world. When the local Church or the world Church excommunicates itself from the heartache of the world today and closes in on itself, it ceases to be a leaven in the world and it fails to fulfill its task of proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes again. Both the local Church and the world Church show their nakedness and shame since they may have put off Christ and may have drifted back into a bodiliness that is distant from God. In these instances the Church is called to repentance and a conversion that calls forth a largesse of heart (John J. O'Brien in Stuhlmueller, ed. Pastoral Dictionary, p.106)."