Vocation of the Church

"The upshot of all this is to refocus our attention on the church's true vocation. Perhaps it's time for it to retire from most of the plausible business it has been in for years and to start thinking about its real work as the sacrament of the Mystery of the Word. Perhaps it ought to stop justifying its pretension that it is the world's finest question-answering machine and the human race's chief of moral police, and accept the fact that things are a little more obscure and tricky than the Roman Curia, the Episcopalian Mini-Vatican, and the New York Conference of the United Methodist Church have so far seemed willing to admit." (Robert Farrar Capon, The Romance of the Word, 230)