The Church is not only the small group of activists who find themselves together at a certain place to initiate a communitarian life. Nor is it simply the great host of those who gather together on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist. Finally, the Church is also much more than the Pope, bishops and priests, those who are invested with the sacramental ministry.
All these whom we have named are part of the Church, but the radius of the company which we join through faith goes far beyond that, goes even beyond death. All the saints starting from Abel and Abraham are part of it, and all the witnesses to hope that the Old Testament recounts, and Mary, Mother of the Lord, and his disciples, down to Thomas Becket and Thomas More, to Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein and Piergiorgio Frassati.
And so are all the unknowns and the unnamed, whose faith no one has known except God, the men and women in all places and all times whose hearts reached to Christ with hope and love, to the ‘leader and perfecter of faith’, as the letter to the Hebrews calls him (12,2).
It is not the occasional majorities who form here and there in the Church who decide her path and ours. They, the saints, are the true determining majority according to which we orient ourselves. It is to them that we look to! They have translated the divine into the human, the eternal into time. They are our teachers in humanity, who do not abandon us in pain and in solitude, but even at the hour of death, are there beside us.