Hans Urs Von Balthasar describes what the Church should be in the book "Test Everything, Hold Fast to What is Good"" One should read the whole first sentence: "Lumen Gentium, cum sit Christus." The great light of the world for which people are searching today, is Christ. He is of interest in every form and in every caricature: as Marxist Christ, "Cristo liberatador", as the "Christ principle" of the anthroposophers. All over the world, inside and outside of the Church, Bible groups are laboring to decipher the riddle that is Christ. The Church as an institution does not really interest anyone; as the well known saying goes: Christ yes; the Church no. There is no more important task for the Church today than to demonstrate that in reality Christ, separated from the Church does not exist, that one cannot follow him, or live from him without her"
" Accordingly , the only question the Church has to ask herself today is the following: How should I look, so humanity can see the true Christ through me?"
Nobody will convert to Christ because of a magisterium, sacraments, a clergy, canon law, apostolic nunciatures, or a gigantic ecclesiastical machinery. Conversion will occur when a person encounters a Catholic who communicates the Christian message by his life and thus testifies that there exists not a, but the, believable imitation of Christ within the Catholic sphere."
..."by the assertion that all Christians, not just a number of elect, are called to perfect holiness. ( I might add parenthetically, that this has always been the program of the Ignatian Exercises: "that we ought to prepare ourselves to arrive at perfection of Christian love in whatever state or way of life God may grant us to choose.")
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