Nietjes zijn roestig. Verder uitstekend.
Translated by Canon George D. Smith from the Latin text as published in the 'Osservatore Romano, 4th July 1943.
DO 266

Mystici corporis Christi (English: 'The Mystical Body of Christ') is a papal encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII on 29 June 1943 during World War II. It is principally remembered for its statement that the Mystical Body of Christ is the Catholic Church, a claim later repeated by Pius XII in Humani generis (1950) in response to dissension. According to Mystici corporis, to be truly a member of the Mystical Body one must be a member of the Catholic Church. Other Christians who erred in good faith could be unsuspectingly united to the Mystical Body by an unconscious desire and longing.
It is one of the more important encyclicals of Pius XII because of its topic, the Church, which was strongly debated and further developed in the Second Vatican Council document on the Church, Lumen gentium.
Mystici corporis identified the earthly presence of this body with the Catholic Church, at a time of much theological debate on the meaning of 'Mystical Body'.
According to the Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles, Mystici corporis was "the most comprehensive official Catholic pronouncement on the Church prior to Vatican II." Its primary writer Sebastiaan Tromp drew mainly on the first schema of Vatican I and on the encyclicals of Leo XIII. It de-emphasized papal jurisdiction but insisted on the visibility of the church, warning against an excessively mystical understanding of the union between Christ and the Church.
Background
The encyclical builds on a theological development in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, France, Germany and England, which all re-discovered the Pauline concept of the Mystical Body of Christ. In 1936, Emile Mersch had warned of some false mysticisms being advanced with regard to the mystical body, and his history of this topic was seen as influencing the encyclical.[5] On 18 January 1943, five months before the promulgation of Mystici corporis, Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Fribourg promulgated a letter in which he addressed the docetic tendencies of some mystical body theology (to separate the spiritual and the material elements in man). Timothy Gabrielli saw Pius' emphasis on the church as a perfect society on earth as an attempt to save the mystical body theology, with its many theological, pastoral, and spiritual benefits, from the danger of docetism.
Mystici corporis did not receive much attention during the war years but became influential after World War II. It had rejected two extreme views of the Church.

A rationalistic or purely sociological understanding of the Church, according to which she is merely a human organization with structures and activities. The visible Church and its structures do exist but the Church is more, she is guided by the Holy Spirit: "Although the juridical principles, on which the Church rests and is established, derive from the divine constitution given to it by Christ and contribute to the attaining of its supernatural end, nevertheless that which lifts the Society of Christians far above the whole natural order is the Spirit of our Redeemer who penetrates and fills every part of the Church".
An exclusively mystical understanding of the Church is mistaken as well, because a mystical “Christ in us” union would deify its members and mean that the acts of Christians are simultaneously the acts of Christ. The theological concept una mystica persona, one mystical person refers not to an individual relation but to the unity of Christ with the Church and the unity of its members with Him in her.
(Wikipedia)