Nuncio in Germany underscores papacy, Eucharist to bishops

Dutch Archbishop Hubertus van Megen addressed the German bishops at the opening of their autumn plenary meeting. He was appointed the Pope’s ambassador to the country earlier this year.

“The Catholic Church rests on two great pillars of its visible unity – the Petrine ministry and the Eucharist,” Archbishop van Megen said on September 28.

“The Pope safeguards the unity of faith and ecclesial communion, while the Eucharist sacramentally realises and nourishes this unity.”

The Eucharist “is not merely a symbol of unity”, Archbishop van Megen said, but “actually creates and strengthens the communion of the Church”.

The Pope’s ministry, he added, “is not an end in itself”. Its task is “to protect and foster that communion which finds its highest expression in the celebration of the Eucharist”.

The Dutch prelate cautioned that the two do not guarantee unity “in a purely organisational or mechanical sense”. Still, he said Christ “has given his Church enduring means through which its unity can be preserved and continually renewed”.

Speaking “as a representative of the Holy See”, the nuncio called Rome “the visible centre and the guarantor of the unity of the universal Church, to which the Church in Germany also belongs”.

He noted that the Church in Africa differs from the Church in Europe and that “no local Church is more or less a Church than another”.

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