There are careless phrases, and then there are phrases that tell you how a man sees the Church.
“The Church is called to disappear so that the Kingdom may grow.”
That sentence belongs to Father Mario León Dorado, the 52-year-old Spanish Oblate whom Leo XIV has just appointed coadjutor archbishop of Rabat, Morocco. The Vatican announced the appointment on September 12. Dorado has governed the tiny Apostolic Prefecture of Western Sahara since 2013 and has served this year as apostolic administrator of Rabat. As coadjutor, he is being placed in line to succeed Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero.
This is worth dwelling on because Dorado’s sentence was neither fabricated by a traditionalist blogger nor excavated from some adolescent Facebook post.
He wrote it as a missionary.
And the surrounding context makes it worse.
Dorado’s 2022 reflection dealt with missionary life among Muslims and the problem of evangelization versus proselytism. After discussing the need to approach the religious experience of the other, he turned to ecclesiology:
“The Church is called to disappear so that the Kingdom may grow.”
He explicitly compared this to John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” The “experience of John the Baptist,” Dorado concluded, “is the experience of the Church.”
No.
John the Baptist is not the Church.
John was the forerunner. His public mission receded when Christ appeared because the One whose coming he announced had arrived.
The Church is Christ’s Bride and Mystical Body. Christ did not establish her as scaffolding to be dismantled once humanity learned to get along. He sent her to teach all nations, baptize them, transmit everything He commanded, and endure until the consummation of the world.
Continue reading at Hiraeth in Exile