“The second volume of my collected essays, Sponsa Verbi, asks explicitly: ‘Who is the Church?’ According to the answer given, the Church in her deepest reality is the unity of those who, gathered and formed by the immaculate and therefore limitless assent of Mary, which through grace has the form of Christ, are prepared to let the saving will of God take place in themselves and for all their brothers. Wherever and to whatever extent this fundamental act of hearing the word takes place (as faith, love, obedience, bridal fidelity), there is the spiritual Church. Wherever this is lacking, the Church becomes herself the ‘whore Jerusalem’, as discussed in the lengthy article ‘Casta Meretrix’. Reception of the word by the whole man, body and soul, requires a unity of word and sacrament, as described in ‘Seeing, Believing, Eating’. The institutional aspects of the Church exist for the sake of this act and receive their intelligible form from it.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar, in My Work in Retrospect, 1965