Catechism of the Catholic Church

260 Part One the dead.” 549 Encounters with the risen Christ characterize the Christian hope of resurrection. We shall rise like Christ, with him, and through him. 996 From the beginning, Christian faith in the resurrection has met with incomprehension and opposition. 550 “On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resur- rection of the body.” 551 It is very commonly accepted that the life of the human person continues in a spiritual fashion after death. But how can we believe that this body, so clearly mortal, could rise to everlasting life? How do the dead rise? 997 What is “rising”? In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God, in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls, through the power of Jesus’ Resurrection. 998 Who will rise? All the dead will rise, “those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.” 552 999 How? Christ is raised with his own body: “See my hands andmy feet, that it is I myself”; 553 but he did not return to an earthly life. So, in him, “all of them will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear,” but Christ “will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body,” into a “spiritual body”: 554 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel . . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. . . . The dead will be raised imperishable. . . . For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. 555 549 Acts 1:22; 10:41; cf. 4:33. 550 Cf. Acts 17:32; 1 Cor 15:12-13. 551 St. Augustine, En. in Ps. 88, 5: PL 37, 1134. 552 Jn 5:29; cf. Dan 12:2. 553 Lk 24:39. 554 Lateran Council IV (1215): DS 801; Phil 3:21; 1 Cor 15:44. 555 1 Cor 15:35-37, 42, 52, 53. 643 366 1038 640 645