ABSTRACT
The encounter that, at its maximum intensity, merits the name of marriage is personal and takes place between God as person and man as person, though all that gives this encounter an ecclesiological stamp is its prerequisite only and is not the encounter itself. Admittedly, the whole complex of those things instituted by God for salvation is the most sublime, the richest
the sake of the individual creature and fulfills its purpose only when he is reached and brought home to God. Much in these institutions is, in the deepest sense, conditioned by time and disappears when fulfillment is reached in the next world. That is the case with the official, hierarchic structure of the Church and her individual sacraments and also with certain provisional forms of the life of grace they impart: faith and love in their veiled condition, the cardinal virtues as conditioned by time and the necessity of struggle. What never falls away is the nuptial encounter between God and the creature, for whose sake the framework of the structures is now set up and will later be dismantled. This encounter, therefore, must be the real core of the Church. The structure and the graces they impart are what raise the created subjects up to what they should be in God’s design: a humanity formed as a bride to the Son, become the Church.
