which had just been focused, in its entirety, in Christ.45 The Church, which is the locus of this concentration of the people of God, is always “God’s Israel”.46 If we are to survey all its dimensions, in the focus of faith, we must go even deeper into the past. “The ancient Patriarchs [already] belonged to that same body of the Church which we constitute”;47 we have to look beyond Moses and the covenant of Sinai and beyond the promises made to “our father Abraham”48 into the dawn of time. The Church,