ABSTRACT
That the Church is a body is frequently asserted in the Sacred Scriptures. ‘Christ’, says the Apostle, ‘is the Head of the Body of the Church’.4 If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity, according to those words of Paul: ‘Though many we are one body in Christ.’5
But it is not enough that the Body of the Church should be an unbroken unity; it must also be something definite and perceptible to the senses… . Hence they err in a matter of divine truth, who imagine the Church to be invisible, intangible, a something merely ‘pneumatological’ as they say, by which many Christian communities, though they differ from each other in their profession of faith, are united by an invisible bond [14] … .
