[ Note: Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, gives expression, not only to the Blessed Sacrament, but also the Body of those called out of the world in Holy Baptism, into the ecclesial reality. Thus, the Feast of Corpus Christi is a feast, first of all the Church, and second of all, pariticipation of the faith in the very life of Christ's own Body and Blood.]
The Church is not merely a religious institution, established to meet religous needs.
.... by a consecration of the whole of mankind which took place in the incarnation and death on the cross of the eternal Word of the Father.
As the people of God socially and juridically organized, the Chruch is not a mere eternal welfare institute, but the continuation, the perpetual presence of the task and function of Christ in the economy of redemption, his contemporanceous presence in history, his life, the Church in the full and proper sense.
Christ is the primal sacramental word of God, uttered in the one history of mankind, in which God made known his irrovacable mercy that cannot be annulled by God or man, and did this by effecting it in Christ, and effected it by making it known.
The Church is th abiding presence of that primal sacramental word of definitive grace, which Christ is in the world, effecting what is uttered by uttering it in sign. By the very fact of being in that way the enduring presence of Christ in the world, the Church is truly the fundamental sacrament, the well-spring of the sacraments in the strict sense. From Christ the Church has an intrinsically sacramental structure.
(Christ) does not abaondon the Church, and cannot do so, since he himself wills to remain forever in the flesh of the one human family.
The abiding presence of Christ in the Church is the sign that God in his merciful love identifies himself in Chirst with the world. And because the Church is the sign of the grace of God definitively trumphant in the world in Chirst, this sign can never - as a real possibility - become a meaningless symbol.
The Church is the official presence of the grace of Christ in the public history of the one human race. ... And wneh we examine what this one reallity implies, it means a presence, as it were an incarnation, of the truth of Christ in the Church through Scripture, tradition, and magisterium ....
... the Church is the primal and fundamental sacrament.
Karl Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments
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