The Church's Treasury : Communion of Saints

28 April 2019

“If one member suffers, all suffers together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” 1 Corinthians 12:26-27

The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. We as members of the Church are united with Christ through the sacrament of Baptism and are constantly nourished and kept in communion with Him through all the sacraments, most important of them being the Holy Eucharist. The Church however not only includes the faithful who are now on earth but also includes members who have died and are being purified in purgatory and the glorious who lived holy lives on earth and are now in heaven. Thus the Church constitutes members in all these three states. Through our communion with Christ, we are also in communion with the members in all these three states of the Church.

In this communion of members, there is a perennial link of charity between the faithful who have already reached their heavenly home, those who are expiating their sins in purgatory and those who are still pilgrims on earth. Between them there is an abundant exchange of all good things and in this wonderful exchange, the holiness of one profits the others, well beyond the harm that the sins of one could cause others.

When we pray the Apostles Creed we confess that we believe in the ‘Communion of Saints’. The communion of saints is indeed the communion of good of each member in the Church and the most important member being Christ Himself who is the head of the Church. We also call these spiritual goods of the communion of saints as the “Church’s treasury”, which is not the sum total of the material goods which have been accumulated during the course of the centuries.

On the contrary, the “treasury of the Church” is the infinite value, which can never be exhausted, which Christ’s merits have before God. They were offered so that the whole of mankind could be set free from sin and attain communion with the Father. This treasury includes as well the prayers and good works of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They are truly immense, unfathomable, and even pristine in their value before God. In the treasury too are the prayers and good works of all the saints, all those who have followed in the footsteps of Christ the Lord and by his grace have made their lives holy and carried out the mission the Father entrusted to them. In this way they attained their own salvation and at the same time cooperated in saving their brethren in the unity of the Mystical Body.

Just as how in this communion we appeal to saints to intercede in our needs as they are closely united with Christ, we can also benefit from the Church’s treasury and seek remission for our sins. When a sinner with a contrite heart approaches the Church through the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, the Church by the virtue of the power of binding and loosing granted to her by Christ, intervenes in favour of individual members of the Church and opens for them the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints to obtain from the Father of mercies the remission of temporal punishments due to sins. For the faithful who are in purgatory too, we can obtain remission of sins through this same treasury of the Church.

**Source: Catechism of the Catholic Church