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And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, gathers her chickens under her wings? Truly, Lord, you are a mother; for both they who are in labour and they who are brought forth are accepted by you. You have died more than they, that they may labour to bear. It is by your death that they have been born, for if you had not been in labour, you could not have borne death; and if you had not died, you would not have brought forth. For, longing to bear sons into life, you tasted of death, and by dying you begot them. You did this in your own self, your servants, by your commands and help. You as the author, they as the ministers. So you, Lord God, are the great mother.

...he is wooing, overshadowing, and operating on us to bring forth in us that immortal birth, that babe of divine life, which, when brought forth, and increased in stature, would bind the strong man and cast him out, spoiling his goods, and slaying utterly the carnal mind, the enmity..."

As a sacramental community, the Church should signify in its own internal structure the salvation whose fulfillment it announces. Its organization ought to serve this task. As a sign of the liberation of man and history, the Church itself in its concrete existence ought to be a place of liberation. A sign should be clear and understandable. If we conceive of the Church as a sacrament of the salvation of the world, then it has all the more obligation to manifest in its visible structures the message that it bears. Since the Church is not an end in itself, it finds its meaning in its capacity to signify the reality in function of which it exists.