Pope Francis, Jesus and the Church

Source, Vatican Insider:

Francis calls for ‘peace in hearts, peace in families, peace among the nations’. He then highlights that ‘It is not possible “to love Christ but without the Church, to listen to Christ but not the Church, to belong to Christ but outside the Church”’. That is because ‘the Church’s activity and mission, is an expression of her motherhood’, since the Church is a mother who ‘tenderly holds Jesus and gives him to everyone with joy and generosity’. …

Paul VI first wrote the statement about the inseparableness of Christ from the Church in his ‘Evangelii nuntiandi’. Right after remembering it, Pope Francis explained that ‘the Church is herself God’s great family, which brings Christ to us. Our faith is not an abstract doctrine or philosophy, but a vital and full relationship with a person: Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God who became man, was put to death, rose from the dead to save us, and is now living in our midst. Where can we encounter him? We encounter him in the Church, in our hierarchical, Holy Mother Church’. The Pope, speaking about the Church’s mission to motherhood, underlined that it ‘is like a mother who tenderly holds Jesus and gives him to everyone with joy and generosity.’ Francis remarked that ‘no manifestation of Christ, even the most mystical, can ever be detached from the flesh and blood of the Church, from the historical concreteness of the Body of Christ. Without the Church, Jesus Christ ends up as an idea, a moral teaching, a feeling. Without the Church, our relationship with Christ would be at the mercy of our imagination, our interpretations, our moods’.