"It is essential that the Church, which is God’s people in the Christological sense, not in the sociological sense, be really part of Christ". In today’s audience, focussed once again on Saint Augustine, the Pope quoted a passage from the "De civitate", in which the Doctor of the Church stresses that "the human being is social by nature but antisocial by vice and is saved by Christ, who is the only intermediary between God and mankind and the universal way of freedom and salvation", as John Paul II had repeated in the letter "Augustinum Hipponensem". As the "only intermediary of salvation", then, "Christ is the head of the Church and is mystically joined to it to such an extent that Augustine can state: ‘We have become Christ. Indeed, if He is the head and we are the limbs, the complete man is Him and us’". In Augustine’s view, the Church, as "God’s people and God’s house" concluded the Pope , is "therefore closely bound to the concept of Christ’s Body, based on the Christological interpretation of the Old Testament and the sacramental life built around the Eucharist".
