My quote earlier from Joan of Arc about how Christ and the church are “just one thing” and “we shouldn’t complicate the matter” brought up the question of how some of the other quotes from the same section of the Catechism might qualify and illuminate that sort of crude language. Well, here they are (emphasis mine):

Let us rejoice then and give thanks that we have become not only Christians, but Christ himself. Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God’s grace toward us? Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man…. The fullness of Christ then is the head and the members. But what does “head and members” mean? Christ and the Church. (Augustine)

Our redeemer has shown himself to be one person with the holy Church whom he has taken to himself. (Gregory the Great)

Head and members form as it were one and the same mystical person. (Aquinas)

Now, clearly all of these quotes use far superior language and employ greater sophistication than the quote from the Maid of Orleans. However, I don’t see how they amount to anything much different. To say that the church and Christ are “one person”, even one “mystical” person (definitely not a distinctly Pauline iteration of body of Christ language there), seems to posit a form of unity that is far too conflating. If Christ and the church are “one person” the very notion of distinguishing between the action of the church and the action of Christ is lost, thus rejecting the biblical notion of Jesus as the one who saves, who is the “one mediator between God and humankind” (1 Tim 2:5).

As one might expect, the teaching of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church is heavy in its emphasis on the church as the body of Christ. In its discussion of the totus Christus, and the nature of Christ’s headship over the body there are several sources sited: Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and . . . Joan of Arc?

Indeed. Not only is Joan of Arc quoted, she is quoted as summing up “the faith of the holy doctors and the good sense of the believer”:

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.

Now obviously I don’t want to make a statement by Joan of Arc out to be the height of Roman Catholic theological sophistication regarding the nature of the totus Christus. However, the Catechism clearly says that it sums up the teaching of the doctors and the sense of the faithful. As such this seems utterly inadequate and, in fact, an outright contradiction of the New Testament’s way of talking about Jesus and the church. Whatever the relation, Jesus and the church certainly are not “just one thing.”