by Fr. Paul D. Scalia.

The Acts of the Apostles recounts Saint Paul's conversion three different times. Some details vary, but one is constant. When Saul of Tarsus, lying on the ground outside Damascus, looks into the blinding light and asks who it is, the response is the same in each telling: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Saul was forever changed by that revelation.

I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Our Lord makes no distinction between himself and his Church. Paul discovered that Christ and His Church are so profoundly one that to persecute the Church is to persecute Christ. He had struck at Christ's Church and found that he was striking Christ himself. Years later he wrote to the Corinthians, "Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it." (1 Corinthians 12:27) The doctrine of the Body of Christ was one Paul learned directly and painfully.

This doctrine is the fundamental and most ancient way to understand the Church. As in Saint Paul's day, so also now, the doctrine of the Body of Christ keeps us from various errors about the Church. The first of which is how exactly the Church is related to Christ. Most people don't see an intrinsic relation between Christ and the Church. Christ is one thing, the Church another. At best, the Church is merely the community that gathered to continue His memory. At worst, it's a bunch of Pharisees who coopted Jesus' message of [insert your agenda here]. The doctrine of the Body of Christ teaches differently.

It's more than a metaphor to speak of Christ as head and the Church as his Body. It's not "as if" Christ is the head or that the Church is "like" Christ's Body. Nor is their connection the legal union of a contract or the moral union of a shared purpose. Christ and the Church have an organic oneness, as between a head and body or a vine and its branches. The Church is the extension of Christ himself throughout the world and throughout history.

One effect of this doctrine is to deliver us from the anti-hierarchy heresy of our culture. Since this Church organism is both Head and Body, there is an actual hierarchy as there is in the union between your head and body. The head governs. But Christ the head doesn't rule over the Church tyrannically. He governs the Church the way your head rules your body, as one organism. This is an organic hierarchy, not one imposed.

Christ entrusted his headship first to Peter and the Apostles and now exercises it through their successors, the pope and bishops. They must exercise this headship - no one else can. Of course, there are advisors and consultors and all the rest. But at the end of the day, the Church is not governed by committee or council or synod but by the Shepherds who watch over it in place of the Apostles.

This doctrine is also a healthy corrective to our culture's fascination with equality. The burden of Paul's words to the Corinthians is that no member of the body is less a member than the others. There's a fundamental equality because every member of the Body was "in one Spirit. . .baptized into one body."

Our egalitarian age loves to emphasize this equality but omits an important aspect of it. Namely, that the equality of the members means also an equal obligation to holiness. Nobody is off the hook. Equality in the Church is a truth that shouldn't be used to tear down the hierarchy, but to remind all the baptized of their obligation to strive for sanctity.

To the fractious Corinthians Saint Paul emphasizes the oneness of the Body of Christ. "As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ." This oneness is based on the supernatural not the natural. It doesn't come from common descent, mutual social interests, or a shared political purpose. It's not something willed by us or imposed by external forces. It comes from being incorporated into one Body by one Baptism in one Spirit.

This oneness means that each member has responsibilities to the wh...