An Apologetical Explanation of the

Church as the Bride of Christ

Why is the Church called the “Bride of Christ”?

The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Savior.  As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.  Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her…. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church.  (Eph 5:23-32)

The disciples of John came to [Jesus], saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”  And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?  The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.  (Mt 9:14-15)

In his Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul compared the relationship between Christ and his Church as that of a bridegroom and his bride:  a headship that is expressed as a covenantal love of total self-giving for the sake of his spouse.

Christ also referred to himself as the “bridegroom” (cf. Mt 9:15; Mk 2:19-20, Lk 5:34-35), and the Church is “adorned” as a bride in the Book of Revelation.  Christ represented himself as the Bridegroom in his parable of the ten maidens (cf. Mt 25:1-13), and even St. John the Baptist referred to Christ as a Bridegroom and to himself as the “friend of the bridegroom” (Jn 3:28-29).  (Cf. CCC 523, 796)

After describing the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ—in which the faithful are members or parts of the Body with Christ as its Head—St. Paul went on to explain this “headship” of Christ over his Body as that of a husband’s union with his wife, his bride (cf. Eph 5:23).  A few verses later he quoted a passage from Genesis that helps draw together these two seemingly unrelated images: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Mt 19:5; cf. Gn 2:24).  St. Paul recognized that it is as Christ’s Bride that the Church is made “one flesh” with him; the Church is truly his Body through which fallen humanity is reunited with God.  (Cf. CCC 789, 823, 1089)

In the Book of Revelation, the image appears again as the Church, the “holy city, the new Jerusalem,” descends from Heaven “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2) to become “the wife of the Lamb” (Rev 21:9), who is Christ.  (Cf. CCC 756, 865, 1045, 1138)

The Catechism addresses this question in paragraph 789.

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