Catholic Church's History Reflects The life of Christ?

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So, the short answer is that the Church suffers as a participation in the redemptive suffering of Christ. As the Church is Christ's body, that means that she must suffer as he suffered. So if he meant that the Church suffers as Christ the answer is "yes, and many agree".


This provides us with some useful information, including the JPII quote:

For, whoever suffers in union with Christ— just as the Apostle Paul bears his “tribulations” in union with Christ— not only receives from Christ that strength already referred to but also “completes” by his suffering “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”

That combined with the fact that the sufferings of an individual are the sufferings of the corpus (If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it), we see confirmation of the summary above.

As to how the Church's sufferings will manifest over time, Revelation points out that the sufferings are not complete. However, a striking difference is that there is no point where the Church on earth can or will die. If the gates of hell cannot prevail, then there will most certainly never be a time when the Church is not present on the Earth until this Earth is no more.

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The Catechism of the catholic church states 675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.573 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth574 will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.575

676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. the Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,576 especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.577

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.578 The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.579 God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgement after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.580

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