It is through His Church that Christ continues in the world today His work of sanctification and salvation: communicating essential life to our spiritual souls, both for time and eternity. Without the Church, the world is cut off from Christ and is spiritually, eternally dead: "...without Christ...and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12).
With St. Paul we can recognize the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. Only to the degree that the members of the Church abide in living spiritual union with Christ does the Church herself truly live and fruitfully act, sanctifying and transforming a broken and suffering world. Without intense and vital union with the Head, the members of the Body of the Church wither or even die, and wider society deteriorates without remedy.
Therefore, as the Church's spiritual adherence to Christ and her living union with Him, the contemplative life is the very heart and life of the Church on the deepest levels...and therefore of the world.
The health of the Church, the health of all of society, and the welfare of countless families and individuals rely upon the provision and communication of divine grace, which is the fruit of the spiritual life faithfully and generously lived: the special work of contemplative religious. This spiritual work of the contemplative life hidden in the heart of the Church supplies an essential grace to the whole Body of the Church, cooperating with and uplifting all of the other members of the whole Church in their various circumstances.
Hence we can come to recognize the primacy and centrality of the spiritual life not only in the life of society but for the fruitfulness of the Church itself. As the steady, beating, driving heart that vitally animates all that the Church does as a whole and in each of her members, only the contemplative life offers the adequate remedy to the ills that we face today, for without a strong heart, all of the other parts of the Body begin to suffer or even die.
Indeed, contemplative life is not supplementary to the Church’s work—it is vital, powerful, and foundational, even as the Church and her Popes have solemnly taught for millennia and the facts of centuries of history have demonstrated.
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