"If there were only God and a collection of individuals, Christianity would be unnecessary. The salvation of the individual as individual can and could always be looked after directly and immediately by God, and this does happen again and again. He needs no intermediary channels by which to enter the soul of the individual…For the salvation of the mere individual there would be no need of either a Church or a history of salvation, an Incarnation or a Passion of God in this world…
Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that, on the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos….Man is a being that can only “be" by virtue of others….One is not a Christian because only Christians are saved; one is a Christian because for history Christian loving service has meaning and is a necessity….Being a Christian means essentially changing over from being for oneself to being for one another."
--[former] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, from Introduction to Christianity
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