She herself… is free from every trace of sin… She does penance for her members – who are not she, but who are of her and belong to her. She accuses herself, in her members, with whom she identifies herself through love; she weeps for her failures, which are the failures of her members, not of herself, and which she makes her own through love. She pleads unceasingly for forgiveness, for her members, whose sins she assumes through love. She sometimes cries out to God from the depths of the abyss, in making, through love, of the anguish of her members and of their distress her own distress and her own anguish. She is in perpetual labor of purification, in her members and for her members… That is how the Church is penitent.
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973)