According to Catholicism, why do we need a resurrection if we have an immortal soul?

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Although I am not a Catholic, I feel confident that I can answer this, as the answer is shared by all Chalcedonian Christians.

This question really gets to the heart of what it means to be a human. And the best way to answer that is to look to the incarnation of Christ.

In the incarnation the eternal person of God the Son was united to a finite human nature. Chalcedonian Christians believe that the incarnation was not just God the Son talking on a human body, but a complete human nature: a human soul, a human mind, a human will, human emotions and desires. Just as a human body has many organs but none of those organs are enough to be called a human by themselves, so too a human person has physical and non-physical parts, which by themselves are not enough to be considered human by themselves. In the early church Apollinaris argued that Jesus had just his single divine mind and took on a human body. This was declared to be heretical by the First Council of Constantinople, as it meant that Jesus was not fully human.

Many Christians today fall into the same trap. I've heard Christians say that we are a soul who has a body. This is a departure from orthodox Christianity which says that the human nature is a complex union of body and soul (a complex union in the sense that it is one thing but yet has distinct parts or aspects.) Instead we should say that human beings are body-soul unions. While the human soul and body may be temporarily separated from each other, that is an unnatural state for a human to be in. Just as Jesus Christ forever remains incarnate in the flesh, so too will the souls of all humans be reunited to flesh in the resurrection.

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