John Ratzinger offers this neat summary of the relation of local and universal church: “the Church is realized immediately and primarily in the individual local Churches which are not separate parts of a larger administrative organization but rather embody the totality of the reality which is ‘the Church.’ The local Churches are not administrative units of a large apparatus but living cells, each of which contains the whole living mystery of the one body of the Church: each one may rightly be called ecclesia . We may then conclude that the one Church of God consists of the individual Churches, each of which represents the whole Church.” Of course, for Ratzinger, the definition of “local Church” will include references to a bishop and communion with Rome; but as it stands his summary is something Protestants can agree with.
But how are local churches “catholic”? Gerardo Bekes explains:
“Catholic” in its original meaning is “neither an ethnic-geographic concept . . . nor an historical one . . . nor yet a sociological one.” Rather it was originally a “qualitative concept” and as such “catholicity is a reality that was already present in the tiny flock of the apostolic community. The term kath’olon in fact expresses wholeness, totality, fullness, so that katholike as a quality of the Church means that the divine salvation is fully present in the Church.” He cites Colossians 2:9 and Ephesians 1:23, adding, from John 1, the fact that “since the incarnate Son is ‘full of grace and truth,’” we have received from His fullness.
Catholicity means “this fullness of divine salvation, in other words, the divine-human communion that is brought about in the very person of Christ, and that is communicated to the Church as its essential quality through the Spirit.
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