The Church is not an apparatus; it is not simply an institution... It is Woman. It is mother. It is alive.
The Marian understanding of the Church is the strongest and most decisive challenge to the concept of a Church which is organisational or bureaucratic. We cannot make the Church, we must be the Church... It is only by being Marian that we become the Church.
In the beginning, the Church... was born when the word “fiat” was formed in Mary’s soul. This is the deepest desire of the Council: that the Church be reawakened in our hearts. Mary shows us the way.
Card. Joseph Ratzinger
Die Ekklesiologie des Zweiten Vatikanums
IKZt 15 (1986) pp. 41-52