by Christine J. Murray

The Gospel of John tells us that during His farewell discourse, Jesus said to the apostles, “I shall ask the Father and He will give you another Advocate to be with you forever” (14:16).

Jesus founded His Church with His sacrificial Crucifixion. His followers had been listening to Him, living with Him, watching Him for three years, yet they collectively cowered after Jesus’ death. It took the descent of the Holy Spirit for them to become fearless in proclaiming Jesus Christ as God. They still knew afterward that preaching the Gospel was likely to have them meet the same fate as their Leader. With the Holy Spirit came the realization that as Truth, Jesus Christ was worth the potential sacrifice of their very lives.

The Church became alive with the Holy Spirit’s descent into her members. It is the Holy Spirit that has kept unity for the past nearly two thousand years. The Holy Spirit is entirely in the Christ, who is the Head of the Mystical Body. The Holy Spirit is also entirely in the living members of the Mystical Body and in the three parts make up the Church’s teaching: Scripture (in which the Holy Spirit inspired the human writers), Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church.

Jesus fulfilled the Old Covenant and Law given to Moses. He gave us a New Covenant, with a New Tem ple. St. Paul writes in the second chapter of Ephesians: “As every structure is aligned on Him, all grow into one holy temple in the Lord: and you, too, in Him, are being built into a house where God lives, in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:21-22).

The Jewish temple was destroyed at around 70 A.D., when the Romans sacked Jerusalem. There has not been a temple since. One is not necessary. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The Holy Spirit makes the Church `the temple of the living God’” (CCC no. 797).

St. Augustine succinctly described the Holy Spirit’s role in the Mystical Body of Christ. “What the soul is in our body, that is the Holy Ghost in Christ’s body, the Church” (Sermon 267, 4: PL 38, 1231 D). Popes have since used St. Augustine’s statement as a starting point of a more elaborate explanation, including Pope Leo XIII in his en cyclical Divinum Illud Munus. Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi, touches on the Holy Spirit’s role as soul of the Church.

The soul gives man his unique humanity. It is what makes man ra tional and intellectual. Since the soul is not made of material matter which can die, it is instead immortal.

Our souls can undergo a spiritual death when we are in mortal sin. The immorality and unbelief of even professed Catholics has somewhat deadened the Mystical Body of Christ. This explains the problems in today’s Church. So many have turned away from the Blessed Trinity.

The soul of the Mystical Body of Christ must be immortal. The Church’s soul is the Third Person in the Blessed Trinity, Who is immortal. Because the Mystical Body is not only a visible institution, it can appear dead to the world and still be alive. In Jesus’ founding of the Church is complete, despite some Protestant claims to the contrary. As Pope Leo XIII points out in Divinum Illud Munus:

No further and fuller ‘manifestation and revelation of the Divine Spirit’ may be imagined or expected; for that which now takes place in the Church is the most perfect possible, and will last until that day when the Church herself, having passed through her militant career, shall be taken up into the joy of the saints triumphing in heaven” (Art. 6).

The Holy Spirit assists us, as mem bers of the Mys tical Body, to become holy. Cooperating with the outpouring the grace not only makes us more spiritually healthy, it also strength ens the Mystical Body. He helps us survive Satan’s attacks on us; even with the deceiver’s seemingly increased activity in this century. Of course, He only assists in our temptations in the degree that we request and want His help.

Jesus did not face His temptations alone. And we are to “become daily more and more like our Savior” (Mystici Corporis Christi, 56) with the help of the outpouring of grace the Holy Spirit gives the Church and her individual members.

If we try to muddle through the temp tations and the problems we see in the Church by ourselves, we are doomed to failure. We cannot do it alone. For our own spiritual health and that of the Church’s, we must ask for the graces we need.

Christine J. Murray writes from Mount Pleasant, Michigan.