We need to shout out loudly today — time and again those bold words of Saint Peter to a group of important people in Jerusalem: This is the stone which was rejected by you builders, but which has become the head of the comer. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

Thus spoke the first Pope, the rock on which Christ built his Church. He was moved to do so by his filial devotion to the Lord and by his solicitude for the little flock entrusted to him. From him and from the rest of the Apostles, the first Christians learned to love the Church tenderly.

Have you seen, in contrast, how people talk heartlessly about our Holy Mother the Church nowadays? What a great consolation it is to read the ancient Fathers' ardent and loving phrases about the Church! Let us love the Lord our God; let us love his Church, Saint Augustine writes. Let us love Him as our Father, and her as our Mother. Let no one say: 'It is true that I still go to the idols and consult the possessed and the sorcerers, but I have not abandoned the Church, I am a Catholic.' You may still be united to your Mother, but you offend your Father. Someone else might say: 'God forbid. I do not consult sorcerers or the possessed. I do not practise sacrilegious prophecies nor go to adore demons nor serve gods of stone. But I belong to the Donatist party. ' What use will it be to him not to offend his Father if his Father will avenge his Mother whom he offends? And Saint Cyprian puts it more briefly: No one can have God as his Father who does not have the Church as his Mother.

In our days many refuse to listen to the true doctrine about our Mother the Church. Some want to redesign the institution, trying to introduce foolishly into the mystical body of Christ a democracy modelled on that of some civil societies. Or worse yet, they clamour for an ecclesiastical body whose members would be equal in every respect. They refuse to believe that by divine institution the Church is made up of the Pope, with the bishops, priests, deacons and lay people. That is how Christ wanted it to be.