"There's a great scene in the Old Testament where the Israelites are doing battle, so the young guys, the soldiers, are out doing battle." "Then up on the hillside is Moses, and he has his arms up like this, invoking the aid of God." "And then when his arms get tired, his friends come and they hold up his arms." "Well, it's a great image of the Church." "There is the kind of fighting church out there that's in the trenches, doing the work of social justice and everything else, caring for the poor and the hungry." "But then they're supported by prayer." "And then the prayers are supported by people that make their life possible." "Think of those who contribute to religious communities and to monasteries and all that." "Well, they're the people holding up the arms of the prayers who in turn make the work of the army possible." "That's a great image for the Church." "How strange that we believe in the Church." "In the Creed, we state our belief in the one God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and it seems reasonable enough." "But then we also say this," ""We believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church."" "Isn't that an odd, even blasphemous, mixing of the Creator and the creature?" "How would you believe in a human institution?" "The whole point is this:" "the Church is not simply a human institution." "The Church is, as Vatican ll said, a sacrament of Jesus." "That means it shares in the very being life and energy of Christ." "Or in that inexhaustibly rich metaphor of St. Paul, the Church is the body of Jesus, not just an institution, not an organization, not a collectivity of likeminded people." "The Church is an organism, made up of interdependent cells and molecules and organs." "Think of those wonderful organic images that Jesus uses all the time." ""l am the vine, and you are the branches." "Remain in me." "Live in me." "Eat my body and drink my blood."" "Now, I could be a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln." "I could even join the Abraham Lincoln Society." "I'd never be tempted for a minute to eat the body and drink the blood of Lincoln." "I could admire Gandhi." "I could join the Gandhi Society." "I'd never been tempted to be grafted onto Gandhi." "But we say just those radical things about our relationship to Jesus." "Two great biblical images come to mind here." "One is from the 25th chapter of Matthew's Gospel." "Jesus says, "Whatsoever you do to the least of my people you do to Me."" "He's not simply saying," ""When you feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, you're doing something ethically praiseworthy."" "He's saying, "You're doing something for me."" "He's not simply saying," ""When you fail to do those things, you're doing something ethically blameworthy."" "He's saying, "You failed to do something to me."" "That's how intimate the connection is between Christ and His mystical body, the Church." "Or in the Acts of the Apostles when we hear about the conversion of Saul." "Saul hears the voice," ""Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?"" "Saul was going to persecute the Church of Jesus, the disciples, the followers of Jesus, but Jesus didn't say that." "He said, "Why are you persecuting Me?"" "Again, how close the identification between Christ and His mystical body." "I'm standing here in the great Church of San Clemente in Rome." "Behind me is a 12th-century mosaic." "I think it's the most beautiful depiction of what I'm talking about, this mystical organic quality of the Church." "See the Cross of Christ?" "On it are the 12 doves, symbolic of the 12 apostles, who will go out with the message of Christ to all the world." "But then, look." "Growing from the Cross, swirling around the Cross, all those vines and branches and leaves, all that life, that's the organism of the mystical body of Jesus." "That's all the people joined to Christ across the ages." "And if I can press that natural metaphor, the Church is meant to gather not just the people of the world, it's meant in some mystical way to gather all of creation, all of nature, around the energy of Christ." "St. Joan of Arc at her trial was being interrogated, and she said this, "About Jesus Christ and the Church," "I know this -- they are simply one thing and we shouldn't complicate the matter."" "The Church is not a club, it's an organism." "So all of us who were baptized are connected to each other" "like cells in a body." "And so if we're the mystical body, then when someone's getting kicked around, that hurts me." "That affects me." "I can't say, "That's your problem." It has to be our problem." "The Eucharist is the mystical body." "The Eucharist is the sacrament of the mystical body." "Therefore, receiving the Eucharist makes you more attuned to these disruptions of justice." "Not just symbolically." "When you receive the Eucharist " "No, no." "The Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus, so He's " "And that's why when you eat and drink the body and blood of Christ, you're becoming conformed to His body and blood." "I mean, you're becoming more integrated into the mystical body." "And, therefore, Eucharist should give you a heightened sense of justice." "And that's what you see in Dorothy Day very clearly." "She spent a lot of time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, a lot of time at Mass, a lot of time at benedictions and retreats, and then her life was this radical commitment to the poor and to non-violence and to ending war and all that." "It's perfectly congruent." "The more time you spend with the Eucharist, the more time you're going to be devoted to justice." "I don't think most realize or think of that when they go up to Communion." "No, probably not, and that's a tragedy." "But I agree with Godfrey Diekmann, who was actually a figure at Vatican ll." "He was an American Benedictine." "He said, "The thing we lost sight of after the Council was the idea of the mystical body."" "And prior to the Council," "lots of the leading theologians had a lot to say about it, and that's why from the Mass comes social justice." "Social justice returns to the Mass." "Those two are always linked." "God is a great gathering force." "God Himself is a community of love." "And through the act of Creation, all things are linked through God to one another." "What is opposed to God is a power of disillusion and division." "God's response to sin was to engage in a great act of gathering in." "The means He chose was the formation of a people." "He called Abraham, and through him, He called the people Israel, making them distinctive, unique, peculiarly His own." "He gave them laws, rituals, covenants, liturgies, a form of life meant to be pleasing to God." "None of it was for the glorification of Israel, but rather that Israel might be the magnet by which the whole world would be gathered eventually unto God." "Jesus was the culmination of God's plan, the fulfillment of Israel, the perfection of law, covenant, prophecy, and liturgy." "He was Israel at its finest and therefore, He was the supreme divine magnet." "We hear in the Gospel of John," ""When the Son of Man is lifted up, He will draw all people to Himself."" "And so Jesus gathered a people." "He formed the Church." "Outside of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus said to Simon," ""You are Peter and upon this rock, I will build my Church."" "The word used there for church in the Greek is ekklesia." "It comes from two other words, ek and kaleo, meaning "to call out from."" "Therefore, when considering the Church, we have to ask three basic questions." "Who does the calling?" "What are we being called out from?" "And what are we being called into?" "In our common Western view of things, we join organizations." "We decide what we want to belong to." "That really isn't true of the Church." "In the Church, someone else calls us." "We are claimed and summoned, branded by Christ." "Paul says, "l am the slave of Christ Jesus,"" "so Christ does the calling." "What are we called out from?" "We're called out from what the Bible terms "the world,"" "what St. Augustine called "the region of unlikeness."" "This means that whole realm of sin, of hatred and violence and corruption and self-absorption." "That's the world we're being called out from." "And what are we being called into?" "We're being called into the life of Christ, into God's way of being." "This idea is beautifully exemplified in stone and glass right behind me." "Doesn't Notre Dame look for all the world" "like a mighty ship moving along the Seine, the flying buttresses coming out the side, a bit like oars?" "And again, this is not accidental." "The Church is meant to look like a great ship, and the idea is, as long as we stay within its life, we find a place of haven and safety, even in the midst of the stormy world." "But remember in the story of Noah, the idea is not to stay hunkered down behind the walls of the Ark." "Rather, the moment he was able," "Noah lets the life out for the transformation of the world." "So in the Church, we live the life of God's beautiful community within the Church, but we're not meant to remain hunkered down behind its walls." "Rather, we go out from the Church, now to transform the world." "Consider the example of Pope John Paul ll." "Young Karol Wojtyla came here to Krakow to the Jagiellonian University at the age of 19." "He commenced his studies in September of 1939, the very moment when the Nazis invaded Poland." "The invaders almost immediately decapitated Polish society." "They imprisoned or killed off the Polish intelligentsia." "What did Karol Wojtyla do?" "Well, he hunkered down." "He joined the underground seminary of Cardinal Sapieha, but he also gathered together with a small group of friends." "They called themselves the Rhapsodic Theater." "Behind closed doors and shuttered windows, they recited the great works of Polish poetry and literature and drama." "But they were doing much more than preserving Polish literature." "Because ingredient in those texts was the Catholic faith." "They were preserving those ideas about God, about human dignity, about the freedom of the human person." "When the war ended, the Nazis were succeeded by the Communists, and young Father Wojtyla was forced once again to hunker down." "He gathered around him small groups of students." "He taught them in classrooms, but also in these fields and woods around here, on kayaking and hiking trips." "He formed them in Catholic spirituality." "In the traditions of Catholic prayer and Catholic theology, he shared with them the treasures of the tradition." "And then, the propitious moment arrived." "That young priest, now come of age as Pope John Paul ll, returned here to Poland, and he then unleashed the life that he had preserved." "In his great speeches and sermons, he spoke the truths of God, of human life, of human rights and freedom." "And it's as though he gave a signal to those young people he had formed." "They were now come of age as journalists and teachers and writers and businesspeople." "He said, "Let what you have learned now invade the society."" "And we saw the effect that it had." "It transfigured not only Poland, but eventually the world." "Just like Noah, who hunkered down in the Ark during a time of the Flood, but then when the moment arrived, allowed that life to be released for the transfiguration of the world." "So John Paul ll hunkered down, yes, but we're never meant to crouch defensively behind our walls." "We're meant to flood the world with the life that we preserved." "That's the task." "That's the mission of the Church." "According to the Creed, the Church has four basic marks or characteristics." "The Church is one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic." "Let's take the first one first." "The Church is one because God is one." "Go back to the sixth chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy." "You find this great prayer." ""Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is Lord alone."" "That's called the Shema." "It sums up that great monotheistic belief of the biblical Jews." "There's a Christian version of the Shema." "It's the very first line of the Creed." "Credo in unum Deum." ""l believe in one God."" "Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVl, has commented," ""Both the Shema and the Credo are subversive statements."" "Because when we say, "We believe in one God,"" "we are disempowering all other false claimants to deity." "We're saying that no president, no prime minister, no culture, no country, no ideology is God." "There's only one God." "Now, the Church is the vehicle by which the one God wants to draw all people to unity with Himself." "That's why Jesus prayed at the Last Supper," ""Father, that they might be one, as you and I are one."" "Now, I realize, especially for us today, this stress on unity can seem problematic." "We've seen the danger of excessive unity." "It's totalitarianism." "In fact, in the terrible ideologies of the last century, we saw this dark, destructive side of the call to unity." "Well, the Church throughout the ages, at its best, has had a very creative way of dealing with this problem, and it has to do with Jesus." "Jesus is not simply one figure among many, not one prophet in a long line of prophets, but He is Himself the very Logos of God." "That means the very mind of God, by which God fashioned the universe." "Therefore, whatever is true and good and beautiful in nature or culture can find a connection to Christ." "All that's good and true and beautiful in nature and culture can be drawn to Him." "I'm standing here in the Pantheon, the most perfectly preserved of the ancient buildings of Rome and, for my money, one of the most beautiful covered spaces in the world." "Pantheon, the temple to all the gods." "See how beautifully it sums up the genius of paganism, that reverence for the necessities and rhythms of nature." "Well, the Church was able to assimilate this great space." "It's now a church, of St. Mary of the Martyrs." "The Church was able to assimilate to itself the best of the pagan culture." "This calls to mind what Origen did, what Augustine did, what Ambrose did." "They used the work of Plato in their theology." "It speaks to me of what Thomas Aquinas did when he used the philosophy of Aristotle in his theology, when he used the work of the Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides." "It calls to mind what Vatican ll said, that there are rays of light, elements of truth in all the great religions of the world." "Newman said, "The Church has the power of assimilation," "like a healthy organism that's able to move into its environment, holding off what it must, but assimilating to itself what it can."" "So the Church at its best down through the ages, drawing all that is good and true and beautiful into its own unity." "The oneness of the Church is not a crushing, totalitarian oneness." "Rather, it is an assimilating and living unity." "When Catholics say, "Jesus is the One, the only One,"" "yet folks say," ""How could you eliminate all these other religions or..." "Yeah." "...Indians who worship something else or, you know, the Muslims and all the rest?"" "But we don't." "That was the whole point of my talk at the Pantheon, was that, because He is the Logos, all the other logoi, the smaller expressions of God's Truth, can find relation to Him, so we can find rays of light." "We can find elements of truth in all the great religions." "We can find elements of truth in all the great philosophies." "We can look at every culture and say, "That's good." "That's good." "That's true." "That's right." "That's just."" "And Christianity can assimilate all those things to itself." "So it's not an aggressive move to say, "He's the only One."" "It's actually a very inclusive move to say, "As the Logos, He's the One."" "But that includes everybody else, to a degree." "They can all find relation to Him." "Then the Muslims must say, to a degree, in the opposite direction." "Probably, yeah." "But then we have to get down to, you know, a good argument." "See, one thing that concerns me is we've forgotten how to have a good religious argument." "The two options seem to be either bland toleration or violence, and there is a middle ground between like," ""Oh, we all believe different things." "So what?" "I'll let you believe yours, I believe mine."" "But, see, we don't believe that about politics." "We have good arguments about politics." "You know, if I'm a Democrat and you're a Republican and I want to convince you," "I want to have a good argument with you." "And the options aren't bland indifference or violence." "We find a way to actually have an argument." "I want to recover a way for religious people to have an argument that's not just bland toleration, it's not killing each other." "Look at Thomas Aquinas." "He figured out how to do it." "Thomas Aquinas argues very effectively with a whole range " "Jews, Muslims, pagans, non-believers, everybody." "That's the model." "The Church is holy because Christ is holy, and the Church is Christ's mystical body." "In its traditions, in its Scriptures, in its liturgy, in its sacraments, especially the Eucharist, in its architecture and the lives of its saints, in its Apostolic governance, the Church bears the holiness of Christ to the world." "This is the Church's entire purpose, to make saints, to make people holy." "Everything it is, everything it has is meant to produce that end." "In this sense, the Church is always the new Jerusalem." "It's always the fountain of living water." "It's always the spotless bride of Christ." "What about the far less than holy things that people have done in the name of the Church over the centuries?" "One hears over and again about the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, the opposition to modern political reforms, institutional corruption, too much money and worldly preoccupation, and, in recent years, the abuse of children by some priests" "and the countenancing of this by some bishops." "Given that litany of abuses, how could we possibly speak of the Church as holy?" "To say that the Church is holy is not to deny for a minute that it's filled with sinners." "To say that the Church is holy is not to deny for a minute that church people, even of the highest rank, have done cruel, stupid, and sinful things." "Was St. Bernard wrong, even sinful, to preach the Second Crusade?" "Yes." "Was the Church wrong, even sinful, when in collusion with the Spanish government, it launched the Inquisition?" "Yes." "Were a number of popes wrong, even sinful, in their implicit support of slavery?" "Yes." "Were a disturbing number of priests and bishops wrong, even sinful, in their contribution to the sex abuse scandal?" "Yes." "But none of this gain says that the Church is holy, that the Church is a bearer of grace." "In the 4th century, St. Augustine battled the Donatists." "The Donatists had said that only spiritually and morally worthy ministers could be conduits of grace." "Augustine said, "No, the grace in the sacraments comes not from the moral excellence of the ministers, but from God."" "Long ago, St. Paul reminded us that we hold the treasure of Christ's life in earthen vessels, in us who are weak and fragile and sinful." "And so it's gone up and down the Church's life, the grace of God, which makes the Church holy, comes often through weak and sinful channels." "We say the Church is Catholic." "The word "Catholic" comes from two Greek words, kata holos, meaning "according to the whole."" "The Church is universal, because it's the means by which God wants to gather the whole world to Himself." "The Church is the new Israel and, hence, it's meant to be a magnet to all the nations." "On the Feast of the Pentecost, 50 days after Easter, we hear that the Holy Spirit rushed upon the disciples, and the first thing they did was to go out into the streets of Jerusalem and to preach Jesus risen from the dead." "They preached to Jews who had gathered there for the feast from all over the world, and, miraculously, they were heard in the various languages of the world." "At its best, the Catholic Church has always exulted in this universal nation and culture transcending identity." "In the Middle Ages, St. Anselm, an Italian, could become a monk and abbot in France and end his life as the Archbishop of Canterbury in England." "Thomas Aquinas, another Italian, could be educated in Germany and then become a world-renown professor in Paris." "Pope John Paul ll embodied this same Catholic spirit when, beginning in the 1980s, he called young people from all over the world for World Youth Days." "He never wanted the young people to deny their national identities, but he wanted to convince them that they belonged to a family, a body that transcended their nationalities." "One of the biggest crowds in human history gathered around him in Manila to celebrate this Catholicity." "It's one of the great gathering places of the whole world," "St. Peter's Square." "I mean, you see everybody here." "When I was handing out Communion a couple of years ago at the Easter Mass," "I looked out from right up at the front there and it's an absolute throng." "I think it's like 300,000 can fit all the way down to the river." "And, see, Bernini's columns are meant to look like arms reaching out to gather in the whole world." "And so it's, you know, "Go preach to all nations,"" "Jesus said, and who would have taken Him seriously at that stage?" "But it worked." "The Word did go out to all the nations, and they all come here." "So it's an amazing sort of actual realization of what was said 2,000 years ago." "You can actually see it in front of you." "The fourth great mark of the Church is Apostolicity." "We say the Church is Apostolic." "It means something very simple." "It means it's rooted in the Apostles, those 12 men whom Jesus personally chose, shaped, and formed according to His own mind." "Remember that great scene at the beginning of John's Gospel?" "Two of John the Baptist's disciples come to Jesus." "He turns on them." "He says, "What do you seek?"" "They say, "Lord, where do You stay?"" "He said, "Come and see," and then they stayed with Him." "That's a model of the apostolic life, these people who stayed with Jesus, in close quarters with Him." "They were formed and shaped by His mind." "It's upon those figures that Christianity rests." "Again, the Church is not a philosophical debating society." "It's grounded in this person, Jesus, whom these apostles knew." "That's why in the early Church, apostolic pedigree was so important." "They could trace their faith back to an apostle who preached to them." "That's why the city of Rome became so paramount in the early Church, because not one, but two of the great apostles," "Peter and Paul, lived here, taught here, died here." "I'm standing in this magnificent Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome." "Behind me, you can see, over the main altar, are reliquaries that hold, tradition says, the heads of Peter and Paul, the two great apostles." "And then surrounding me, they form the ribs and the structure of the church itself, are depictions of the 12 apostles." "You can't see it anywhere better in the world than here, the apostolic nature of the Church." "We can see, too, why apostolic succession was so important." "The Apostles at one point passed on their authority to those whom they had trained, who they knew had the apostolic faith." "Then those successors in turn passed it on to others, to others again, even down to the present day, so that bishops today can claim that they are the successors of the Apostles." "Every priest in the Catholic Church is ordained by a bishop." "Whatever power or authority I have as a priest comes to me from the fact that I was ordained by a bishop." "That means that the whole leadership of the Church is apostolic in structure." "The word "hierarchy" comes to mind." "We speak of the hierarchical church." "Don't think of it primarily in terms of power." "Think of it in terms of this etymology." ""Hierarchy" comes from two Greek words, hieros and arche." "Hieros means "priest," arche means "rule" or "principle."" "The hierarchical church is one that's ruled by priests." "Again, don't think of it as a power game." "Think of it as a church ruled, governed, grounded in this apostolic faith." "A last thought, the word "apostle" comes from the Greek word apostelein." "It means "to send."" "Jesus took these 12 people whom He had formed after His own heart and then He sent them." "The Christian faith is never meant to be held onto as a private privilege." "It's meant to be shared, to be spread like seed around the world." "And so the apostolic church to the present day still has that great missionary purpose." "Again, this quality of the Church is countercultural, at least in the West." "We favor democracy, the free play of ideas, freedom of expression, the power to vote leaders in and out." "Aren't these values out of step with a church hierarchically arranged?" "As I indicated, the Church is not a philosophical debating society nor a democratic polity, but rather a body grounded in revelation." "There is accordingly a structure and a content that are simply given and have to be maintained in the course of the centuries." "Here, the hierarchy of the Church is not unlike the Supreme Court in our political system, since it maintains the fundamental structure without which the body would collapse." "The Church would not be itself were it to deny the divinity of Jesus, the facticity of the Resurrection, the existence of the triune God, the activity of the Holy Spirit, etc." "And mind you, all of these things have been denied by figures up and down the centuries." "Were these matters able to be adjudicated through a vote of the faithful or theologians, the Church would lose its integrity." "This brings us to what is perhaps the most controversial and misunderstood dimension of the Church's apostolicity," "namely the charism of infallibility enjoyed by the Pope, the successor of the Prince of the Apostles." "It would be helpful, I think, first to state as clearly as possible what papal infallibility is not." "It does not mean that the Pope is omniscient." "It does not mean he can predict the future." "It does not mean that he is immune from making bad practical judgments, and it certainly doesn't mean that he's above criticism or incapable of sin." "In fact, some of the saints were sharp critics of popes, and Dante places some wicked popes in the lower circles of hell." "So what does it mean to say the Pope is infallible?" "It means that he knows who Jesus is and, therefore, when summoning his full authority, he articulates those doctrines and moral precepts that flow from that knowledge, he is prevented from making a mistake." "Now, I know it's difficult for us, especially in the West, to accept this doctrine." "We believe in the free play of ideas." "We're naturally suspicious of claims to authority, especially infallible authority." "Maybe John Henry Newman could help us a little bit." "Newman said this," ""lf it pleased God to reveal something to the Church, it should also please God to give us a living voice of authority that would interpret that revelation down through the ages."" "In Newman's time, many Protestants said," ""Well, the Bible, that's the source of authority."" "But Newman knew the Bible was subject to a wide variety of interpretations." "The young Newman himself said," ""The consensus of the Church fathers." "That's the source of authority."" "But it dawned on Newman as he grew older that the fathers were not a living voice, no matter how wise and insightful they were." "It was only the Church of Rome that claimed that the Pope, in communion with the bishops, was a living voice of authority." "If I might apply Newman's comparison a bit, anyone that loves baseball knows that the umpires are indispensible to the flow of the game." "Without an umpire, a baseball game would devolve in very short order into bickering over calls." "Is he safe?" "Is he out?" "Was that fair?" "Was it foul?" "The umpire who is present to the game and is a living voice of authority and can make a decisive decision, he allows the flow of the game to go on." "So, the infallible Pope is not there to shut down the play of the Church's life." "That means the Church in its teaching, its care for the poor, its proclamation of the Good News, its liturgy, its art, all of that." "The Pope is not there to shut that down." "Rather, he's there as a living voice of authority, to allow that play to continue, lest it devolve into bickering." "Perhaps just a word about the keys." "Jesus said to Peter, "l will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven."" "G.K. Chesterton saw something." "He said, "A key would be useless if it changed shape, if it changed form." "It's the very hardness of the key that makes it effective in opening locks."" "What was given to the Church was a key to unlock the secret to life, the secret to the great mystery of all things." "Well, if that key was flexible, if that key was changeable, it would lose its whole reason for being." "And so it's upon this rock of Peter's authority, the one who holds the keys, that the Church is indeed built." "So the Church is apostolic." "It's formed by the faith of these 12 apostles of Jesus." "Well, then here's an objection." "How come the Church seems to change so much over the centuries?" "How come even today, in many of its external forms and practices and customs, the Church seems so different than in apostolic times?" "If Peter or Paul walked into this great basilica, would they feel completely at home?" "Well, probably not." "How do we explain the changes within the Church?" "John Henry Newman to me is very helpful here." "He talks about the development of doctrine." "Newman says, "Look, ideas exist, not on the printed page." "Ideas exist in the play of lively minds."" "If I take in an idea, I analyze it." "I judge it." "I compare it." "I contrast it." "I turn it around." "I then throw it to somebody else." "They do the same thing." "They toss it back to me." "It's in this lively play that the full panoply of the idea unfolds." "Newman said, "A real idea is equivalent to the sum total of its possible aspects." "Only when I've seen all the different angles and profiles of an idea do I really understand it."" "Think of it in terms of a physical object, like St. Peter's Basilica." "Now, I've seen St. Peter's up close." "It looks a certain way." "I've seen it from all the way across the city of Rome." "I've seen it even from an airplane." "I've seen in from the Janiculum Hill." "In each perspective, it looks different, a different aspect appears." "Now consider the doctrine of the Church, an idea as complex as the lncarnation or Creation or the Trinity." "That idea can be taken in by the Church only over time, as the idea unfolds." "That's why Newman says," ""The apostolic faith is not passed on like a dumb object," "like passing a football from one to another." "Rather, it unfolds like a river that deepens and broadens in time." "It grows like a great tree that might begin as an acorn, but then it develops as this mighty oak tree."" "That's why we see change in the life of the Church, not as though the essential apostolic faith has been betrayed, but rather it's growing, unfolding." "We are, yes, an apostolic church, but we are also a living church." "Just before boarding the train that would carry him to Rome in the conclave that would elect him Pope John XXlll," "Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli commented in regard to himself and his fellow cardinals," ""We are not here to guard a museum, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life."" "The Church of Jesus Christ is not a collection of cultural objet d'art, not a stuffy institutional holdover from another age." "It is, rather, as the mosaic at St. Clemente suggests, a living thing, an organism, a body." "Its head is Jesus Himself, and its lifeblood is the Holy Spirit." "Its purpose is to be a conduit of the Divine life to the world," "a light to the nations, a new Eden."