What Kilber called an inadequate definition of the Church in function of its body is the very definition which St. Robert had shown to be the real description of the Church militant of the New Testament. St. Robert had used every resource available to him to prove conclusively that the Church cannot be defined in terms of its members other than through the use of the outward bond of ecclesiastical unity.
By the inept and unrealistic use of St. Robert's own terminology, Tournely had come up with a description of the Church as invisible, the very thing St. Robert had worked to prove that the Church militant of the New Testament is not. Kilber had imagined an "adequate" definition of Our Lord's Church which would apply only to Catholics in the state of grace.
There was only one more step possible in the process of misinterpreting St. Robert's teaching. That step was taken before the end of the eighteenth century. Tired of the complexity involved in trying to teach that "an inadequate definition of the Church in function of its soul," as given by theologians like Kilber, applies to an "invisible Church," Louis Legrand and other writers after him cut the Gordian knot and began to apply the term "soul of the Church" to the internal or invisible society they had imagined. According to Legrand, "the internal Church, which we call the soul of the Church, can be defined as the company of those in the state of grace, and especially of those who are predestined to eternal life, who are endowed with the living faith that works through charity." And, in the words of the same theologian, "the external or visible Church, which is called the body of the Church by Catholics, can be defined as the assembly of men gathered together and united in the profession of the true Christian faith, the correct use of the sacraments, and the administration instituted by Christ." [The passage is from Legrand's De ecclesia, in Migne's Theologiae cursus completes, IV, 25. It must be noted that Legrand was not by any means the first Catholic theologian to describe the just and the predestined as constituting some sort of unit within the Catholic Church. Thus, in the second book of his Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei ecclesiae catholicae (Venice, 1621), I, 160, Thomas Netter of Walden, the fifteenth-century English Carmelite, had described "the glorious Church of the predestined" as being within the visible Church "like a wheel within a wheel." And the sixteenth-century James Latomus, in his De ecclesia et humanae legis obligatione, had written of "the assembly of the good" within the "ecclesia permixta." Cf. his Opera, p. 93. What is remarkable about Legrand's teaching is that he employed St. Robert's own terminology to bring out a doctrine-the existence of an "invisible Church" - which St. Robert had worked to disprove]
These two definitions are contained in the sub-section entitled "On the More General Notion of the True Church." In the following sub-section, "On the More Special Notion of the True Church," Legrand gives a definition of the Church "considered adequately, that is, in terms of its soul and its body together." [Cf. Legrand, loc. cit.] Despite the fact that this "adequate" definition of the Church is slightly more prolix [needlessly verbose - J.G.] than the one Legrand applied to that "which is called the body of the Church by Catholics," the two formulae are objectively identical.
Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century the misuse of St. Robert's term "body" and "soul" of the Church had reached its final result. The De ecclesia militante had been written in the first place to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the one and only supernatural kingdom of God of the New Testament is an organized society, the religious community over which the Roman Pontiff presides as the Vicar of Christ on earth. St. Robert had shown conclusively that there is and there can be no such thing as an "invisible Church" in the dispensation of the New Testament. He had concentrated on the proof that there is only one ecclesia, and that consequently there is no possibility of postulating an "invisible Church" in any way distinct from the one visible Mystical body of Jesus Christ in this world.
Now, hardly more than a century and a half after St. Robert's death, the very contradictories to his basic teaching were being set forth by Catholic writers using his own terminology. The name "soul of the Church," which St. Robert had applied to what his contemporaries called the inward or invisible bond of ecclesiastical unity, was gradually deflected from the purpose it had served in the De ecclesia militante until it finally became a vehicle for the expression of the very teaching St. Robert had set out to disprove. For D'Argentre, the "soul of the Church" in the Bellarminian sense was no longer one of the two bonds of union within the Church but became a factor "acting as a principle of spiritual life for the faithful." For Tournely and Kilber this same "soul of the Church" was made to function as a principle in the definition of an "invisible Church" made up of men and women in the state of grace. For Legrand and the men who followed him, this same "soul of the Church" became itself an "invisible Church." And the reality to which St. Robert had applied his classical definition became, not the one true ecclesia of the New Testament, as it was in the De ecclesia militante and as it is in Catholic doctrine, but only "the body of the Church."
Legrand's misuse of the Bellarminian terminology was copied quite frequently during the course of the nineteenth century. One of those who followed him was Bonal, who wrote in his popular and highly influential manual:
The body of the Church is the collection of men who outwardly profess the doctrine of Christ and partake of the same sacraments under the magisterium and rule of legitimate pastors and particularly of the successors of Peter.
The soul of the Church is the collection of men who interiorly assemble in one spiritual Church through the spiritual and internal bond of faith and of charity. [Bonal, Institutiones theologicae ad usm seminariorum, 16th edition (Toulouse, 1887), I, 400.]
This kind of teaching came down into the twentieth century, and by this time it had acquired a false appearance of theological tradition. Paul Vigue asserted that "the theologians distinguished two Churches, the one visible and the other invisible, the body and the soul of the Church." [Vigue, in the symposium Ecclesia, edited by Agrain and published by Bloud et gαy (Paris, 1933), p. 101.] Otto Karrer claimed that "theology has deduced the doctrine of an invisible Church of good men and women, even outside the communion of the visible Church." [Karrer, Religions of Mankind, translated by E. I. Watkin (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1938), p. 262.] The "theology" responsible for this deduction was, in the last analysis, merely a long and gradual deformation of terms originally and unfortunately employed by St. Robert Bellarmine in his De ecclesia militante. The "theologians" who propagated this teaching were men who misunderstood the original meaning St. Robert had attached to the terms "body" and "soul" of the Church.
There can be no doubt that the progressively more inaccurate teachings about the "body" and the "soul" of the Church were in great measure responsible for poor teaching about the dogma that no one can be saved outside the Catholic Church. The individuals who were misled into believing the reality of an "invisible Church," in some way more extensive than the visible Church of Jesus Christ, were prone to imagine that this "invisible Church" was the social unit really necessary for the attainment of eternal salvation.
The greatest favor accorded to sacred theology by the encyclical letter Mystici Corporis Christi was the banishment from theology, once and for all, of this teaching about an "invisible Church." Since the appearance of the Mystici Corporis Christi, and especially since the publication of the Humani generis and the Suprema haec sacra, the elements that have militated against an accurate explanation of this dogma have lost their force. These docuмents of the Holy See have manifested the truth of the Church's necessity for salvation for what it really is, the statement of the dignity of the Catholic Church as the one supernatural kingdom of the living God.
It should be reassuring to those of good will who believe or believed that non-members of the Church cannot be saved within the Church to know that in this series they will find that the official teaching of the Church is in agreement with them regarding the fact that there is no salvation outside the Church, that there are no exceptions to this teaching, that the Roman Catholic Church and the Mystical Body of Christ are one and the same, there is no broader conglomerate in which one can be saved, that a member of the Church is at a minimum, one who partakes of the Sacraments, professes the faith and submits to legitimate ecclesiastical authority. The key distinction is accepting Church teaching that it is possible for non-members who share the inner bonds of unity with the members of the Church to be saved within the Church. Those of good will shall clearly see that the Church teaches this and hopefully they will understand why such a teaching is true.