ABSTRACT
The whole people of God preserves the Tradition, celebrates and lives the truth received from the apostles. The whole Church is apostolic. The whole body is given life by the Spirit which distributes its charisms throughout it, that is to say, talents and gifts of grace (see Rom. 12:6). But the body has a structure, it is organised. Christ established apostles, prophets, evangelists in it and the Letter to the Ephesians adds that pastors and teachers are for ‘the equipment of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ’ (4:12). From the time of the apostles the community, alive as a whole, has been internally differentiated: if there are pastors, there is a flock or ‘the brethren’. This differentiation within the ‘brotherhood’ in due course developed into: (i) a distinction between clergy and laity, a distinction which was clear from the third
century onwards but which came to take the proportion of a fundamental juridical structure for those who disregarded it: ‘Ordo ex Christi institutione clericos a laicis in Ecclesia distinguit’ (‘By Christ’s institution order distinguishes the clergy from the laity in the Church’);
(ii) the massive and often repeated affirmation, especially from the time of Gregory XVI onwards, of the fact that the Church is a ‘societas inequalis, hierarchica’. From then on, until Vatican II, this assertion became fundamental;
(iii) the distinction, expressed in various analogical ways, between ‘teaching Church’ and ‘Church taught’. Apart from certain anticipations on the part of anti-Protestant controversialists, the initial context of this distinction seems to have been a reaction to Jansenist ecclesiology and to the refusal of the bull Unigenitus. It was current towards 1750 and in the catechisms at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was generally
bishops united with the pope and the ‘infallibilitas in credendo’ attributed to the faithful. It is clear that this distinction needs to be carefully understood.
