Mystici Corporis Christi

Mystici Corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ) is an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII on 29 June 1943 during World War II. Its main topic is the Catholic Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. The encyclical is remembered for its statement that the Mystical Body of Christ is the Catholic Church. According to Mystici corporis, to be truly a member of the mystical body, one must be a member of the Catholic Church. Non-Catholics who erred in good faith could be unsuspectingly united to the mystical body by an unconscious desire and longing. According to the Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles, Mystici Corporis was "the most comprehensive official Catholic pronouncement on the Church prior to Vatican II". Its primary writer Sebastiaan Tromp drew mainly on the first schema of Vatican I and on the encyclicals of Leo XIII. It de-emphasized papal jurisdiction, but insisted on the visibility of the church and warned against an excessively mystical understanding of the union between Christ and the Church. The encyclical builds on a theological development in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, France, Germany and England, which all re-discovered the Pauline concept of the Mystical Body of Christ. In 1936, Emile Mersch had warned of some false mysticisms being advanced with regard to the mystical body, and his history of this topic was seen as influencing the encyclical. On 18 January 1943, five months before the promulgation of Mystici Corporis Christi, Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Fribourg promulgated a letter in which he addressed the docetic tendencies of some mystical body theology (tendencies to separate the spiritual and the material elements in man). Timothy Gabrielli saw Pius' emphasis on the church as a perfect society on earth as an attempt to save the mystical body theology, with its many theological, pastoral, and spiritual benefits, from the danger of docetism. The encyclical teaches that both laypeople and the leadership have a role to play in the Catholic Church.