Vatican City - This morning at ten o’clock, Pope Leo XIV presided over the customary General Audience in St Peter’s Square, resuming the cycle of catecheses devoted to the documents of the Second Vatican Council. After five sessions focused on the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, the Pontiff has now chosen to turn his attention to Lumen gentium, a key text for understanding the identity and mission of the Church.
A journey through the documents
The path through Lumen gentium had begun on 18 February, when Leo XIV introduced the conciliar category of “mystery” as a key for reading the Church. In concise terms, the Pope explained that, in Pauline language, “mystery” refers to a plan of God first hidden and then revealed: a project directed towards unity, made possible by the reconciling action of Christ, already experienced in the liturgical assembly gathered by the proclamation of the Gospel. In that first catechesis, Leo XIV also recalled the programmatic affirmation of Lumen gentium: the Church as “sacrament”, that is, sign and instrument of union with God and of the unity of the human race, reaching as far as the perspective of the Church as the “universal sacrament of salvation”.
The sequence of audiences was interrupted last Wednesday, when the Pope did not hold the weekly meeting because he was engaged in the spiritual exercises. Today’s resumption, awaited by many of the faithful and followed with enthusiasm and attention by the clergy as well, brought the conciliar “worksite” back to the centre with a particularly interesting catechesis.
The Church is a complex reality
Leo XIV asked what it means, concretely, when Lumen gentium speaks of the Church as “a complex reality”. The Pope clarified that “complexity” should not be read as a synonym for confusion or an insurmountable difficulty. He instead recalled the sense of the word in Latin, where “complex” describes “the ordered union of different aspects or dimensions within the same reality”. For this reason, he explained, the conciliar Constitution can state that the Church is “a well-knit organism”, in which “the human dimension and the divine dimension” coexist, “without separation and without confusion”.
The catechesis then developed, through very concrete passages, the first face of this reality: the Church as a visible community. Leo XIV described it as “a community of men and women who share the joy and the effort of being Christians”, with “strengths and weaknesses”, committed to proclaiming the Gospel and becoming a “sign of the presence of Christ” in everyday life. This dimension, he specified, also includes the organisational and institutional structure, but it does not exhaust the nature of the Church. The Pope then turned attention to the divine dimension, linking it directly to God’s plan of love fulfilled in Christ. With a series of linked definitions – “earthly community and mystical body of Christ”, “visible assembly and spiritual mystery”, “a reality present in history and a pilgrim people journeying towards heaven” – Leo XIV offered a synthesis that holds together believers’ concrete experience and the Church’s theological origin. To make this approach immediately intelligible, the Pontiff drew on a Christological analogy: Lumen gentium points back to the very life of Jesus. Those who met him, he recalled, perceived his humanity “in his eyes, in his hands, in the sound of his voice”, and precisely that humanity opened the disciples to encounter with God, because “the flesh of Christ” makes visible “the invisible God”. The same criterion, he concluded, helps one to look at the Church: up close one meets real people, fragile, at times radiant and at times struggling; and yet “precisely through its members” there is manifested “the presence of Christ and his saving action”.
Within this framework, Leo XIV included a reference to Benedict XVI, citing the idea that ecclesial structures are not an obstacle to evangelical life, but serve the “realisation and concretisation of the Gospel in our time”. The Pope then insisted on a point with strong pastoral impact: the holiness of the Church is understood in the fact that Christ dwells within her and continues to give himself “through the smallness and fragility of her members”. It is a way of reading the constant tension between the Church’s historical reality and her deeper identity. Ambrose defined her Casta Meretrix.
In concluding the audience, Leo XIV spoke of the “method of God”, which becomes visible “through the weakness of creatures”, and recalled Pope Francis’ invitation in Evangelii gaudium to “remove one’s sandals before the sacred ground of the other”. The Church, he reiterated, is built up even today above all through “communion and charity”, because charity “constantly generates the presence of the Risen Lord”. Leo XIV’s cycle of catecheses continues to trace a recognisable course: bringing the texts of Vatican II back to the centre of the Church’s ordinary life, not as an archive of the past, but as a compass for reading the present.
fr.E.R.
Silere non possum