The Mystical Body and its Sinful Members
Naturally, this left him in considerable anguish of mind concerning the Church's claim to infallibility.
Perhaps the first thing to realize is that my correspondent misunderstood the Pope's distinction between the Church and her members. By “the Church” my friend meant “the hierarchy” and not “the body of Christ in union with the bishops and Pope in succession from the apostles”. Given this false conception of the Church, he naturally began with a mistaken notion that the Pope was somehow exempting the hierarchy from the sin of Jewish persecution when he distinguished between the Church and “members of the Church”.
In reality, however, when the Pope speaks of “members of the Church” committing sin, he is not exempting the hierarchy from responsibility for sin, for they are members (that is, body parts) of the Church too. The reason for the Pope's distinction between members of the Church and the Church is not that lay people are sinners and clergy aren't but that the Church-that is the Mystical Bride of Christ-is in some mysterious sense a full participant in the holiness of Christ and is truly without sin, yet the members of the Church-from Pope to dogcatcher-are still on pilgrimage to full participation in that mystical reality.
