In the Father’s design the Church constitutes, in Christ, an essential part of the divine plan to redeem and unite all people in the love of the Trinity

At the General Audience of 31 July, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on the Church. Today he speaks of the Church's role in God's eternal design for the human race. The Church lives the divine life of the holy Trinity, a life which brings salvation and unity to the scattered people of the world. The Pope spoke in Italian.

1. The Church is a historical fact, whose origin can be and has been documented, as we will see later. But as we begin this cycle of theological catecheses on the Church, we want to start from the highest and most authentic source of Christian truth, i.e., Revelation, as the Second Vatican Council did. The Council, in the Constitution Lumen gentium, considered the Church in her eternal foundation, which is the saving plan conceived by the Father within the Trinity. The Council says precisely: "The eternal Father, in accordance with the utterly gratuitous and mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness, created the whole universe, and chose to raise up men to share his own divine life; and when they had fallen in Adam, he did not abandon them, but at all times held out to them the means of salvation, bestowed in consideration of Christ, the Redeemer" (Lumen gentium, n. 2).

In the eternal design of God the Church constitutes, in Christ and with Christ, an essential part of the universal economy of salvation in which the love of God is expressed.

2. That eternal plan contains the destiny of human beings, who have been created in the image and likeness of God called to the dignity of children of God and adopted as children of the heavenly Father in Jesus Christ. As we read in the Letter to the Ephesians, God chose us and "destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ in accord with the favour of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in his beloved Son" (Eph 1:4-6). And we read in the Letter to the Romans: "For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers" (Rom 8:29).

To have a good understanding of the Church's beginning as an object of our faith (the "mystery of the Church"), it is necessary to return to St Paul's programme of "bringing to light for all what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God ... so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known throughthe Church to the principalities and authorities in the heavens. This was according to the eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Eph 3:9-11). As is clear from this text, the Church is part of the Christocentric plan designed by God the Father from all eternity.

3. The same Pauline texts regard the destiny of the human person, chosen and called to be an adopted child of God, not only in the individual dimension of the human race, but in its community dimension as well. God conceives, creates and calls to himself a community of persons. This divine plan is expressed more explicitly in an important passage from the Letter to the Ephesians: "He has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favour that he set forth in him [Christ] as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth" (Eph 1:9-10). Therefore, in God's eternal design, the Church as the unity of mankind in Christ the Head, becomes part of a plan which includes all creation, one could say a "cosmic" plan, that of uniting everything in Christ the Head. The firstborn of all creation becomes the principle of "recapitulation" for this creation, so that God can be "all in all" (1 Cor 15:28). Christ, therefore, is the keystone of the universe. The Church, the living body of those who belong to him by their response to the vocation of being children of God, is associated with him, as participant and minister, at the centre of the plan of universal redemption.

4. Vatican II explains the "mystery of the Church" against the background of this Pauline conception, in which the biblical vision of the world is reflected and made precise. The Council says: "He [the Father] determined to call together in a holy Church those who should believe in Christ. Already present in figure at the beginning of the world, this Church was prepared in marvellous fashion in the history of the people of Israel and in the old Covenant. Established in this last age of the world, and made manifest in the outpouring of the Spirit, it will be brought to glorious completion at the end of time. At that moment, as the Fathers put it, all the just from the time of Adam, 'from Abel, the just one, to the last of the elect' will be gathered together with the Father in the universal Church" (Lumen gentium, n. 2). There is no better way of summarizing in a few lines the history of salvation which unfolds in Sacred Scripture than by focusing on its ecclesiological meaning, which was already formulated and interpreted by the Fathers in accord with the indications given by the Apostles and Jesus himself.

5. When seen in the perspective of the Father's eternal plan, the Church appears from the beginning, in the thought of the Apostles and the first Christian generations, as the fruit of the infinite, divine love which unites the Father to the Son within the Trinity: it is actually in virtue of this love that the Father has willed to unite mankind in his Son. The mysterium Ecclesiae thus finds its origin in the mysterium Trinitatis. Here we must make the same exclamation we make at Mass when the renewal of the Eucharistic sacrifice is accomplished, where the Church in turn is gathered: mysterium fidei!

6. The principle of the Church's missionary dynamism is also found in this eternal source. The Church's mission is, as it were, the continuation, or historical expansion, of the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and so one can call it a vital participation, in the form of ministerial association, in the Trinity's activity in human history.

In the Constitution Lumen gentium (cf. nn. 1-4), Vatican II speaks at great length about the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the Decree Ad gentes it speaks precisely about the communal character of human participation in the divine life, when it says that God's plan "flows from 'fountain-like love', the love of God the Father. As the principle from whom the Son is generated and from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds through the Son, God in great and merciful kindness freely creates us and moreover, graciously calls us to share in his life and glory. He generously pours out, and never ceases to pour out, his divine goodness, so that he who is creator of all things might at last become 'all in all' (1 Cor 15:28), thus simultaneously assuring his own glory and our happiness. It pleased God to call men to share in his life and not merely singly, without any bond between them, but he formed them into a people, in which his children who had been scattered were gathered together (cf. Jn 11:52)" (Ad gentes, n. 2).

7. The foundation of the community willed by God in his eternal plan is the work of Redemption, which frees human beings from the division and dispersion produced by sin. The Bible teaches us that sin is the source of hostility and violence, as appears in the fratricide committed by Cain (cf. Gn 4:8), and as that fragmentation of nations which in its negative aspects finds its paradigmatic expression in the account of the tower of Babel.

God willed to free humanity from this state through Christ. This saving will of his seems to echo in Caiaphas' speech to the Sanhedrin, in regard to which John the evangelist writes: "Since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God" (Jn 11:51-52). Caiaphas said these words in order to convince the Sanhedrin to condemn Jesus to death, on the pretext that he was causing political danger for the nation in regard to the Romans who were then occupying Palestine. But John knew well that Jesus had come to take away sin from the world and to save men (cf. Jn 1:29), and so he did not hesitate to give those words of Caiaphas a prophetic meaning, as a revelation of the divine plan. It was written in that plan that Christ, through the redemptive sacrifice accomplished by his death on the cross, would become the source of a new unity for mankind, called in Christ, to regain their dignity as adopted children of God.

In that sacrifice on the cross the Church was born as a community of salvation.