Catholic Commentary
Greetings from the Wider Church
19The assemblies of Asia greet you. Aquila and Priscilla greet you warmly in the Lord, together with the assembly that is in their house.20All the brothers greet you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.
1 Corinthians 16:19–20 relays greetings from the churches of Asia and specifically from Aquila and Priscilla, whose house serves as a meeting place for believers, followed by Paul's instruction for the Corinthians to greet each other with a holy kiss as a sign of sacred communion. This closing emphasizes the interconnected fellowship of the early Christian churches despite internal conflicts addressed in the letter.
The Church's unity isn't abstract doctrine—it's real people in real homes greeting real people across the Mediterranean, sealed with a bodily kiss.
1 Corinthians 16:19 — The Assemblies of Asia Paul writes from Ephesus (cf. 1 Cor 16:8), the metropolitan capital of the Roman province of Asia (modern western Turkey), and so he naturally carries greetings from the network of communities surrounding him. The plural "assemblies" (Greek: ekklēsiai) is deliberate and significant. Paul does not use the singular, as though Ephesus alone acknowledges the Corinthians; rather, an entire web of local churches — in Ephesus, Smyrna, Colossae, and beyond — stands in solidarity with Corinth. This reflects what would later be articulated as the communio ecclesiarum, the communion of churches that together constitute the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The many assemblies do not compete; they greet one another across the Aegean.
1 Corinthians 16:19 — Aquila and Priscilla This couple appears six times in the New Testament (Acts 18:2, 18, 26; Rom 16:3; 2 Tim 4:19), always together, always in active ministry. Jewish by birth, expelled from Rome under Claudius's edict, they had met Paul in Corinth (Acts 18:2–3) and traveled with him to Ephesus. Notably, in four of the six references Priscilla (Prisca) is named before her husband, an unusual inversion suggesting her particular prominence in the early community — a detail the Church Fathers noticed. John Chrysostom remarks admiringly: "She was more zealous than her husband" (Homily on Romans 31). They greet the Corinthians "in the Lord" (en Kyriō), a Pauline phrase that situates even casual social greetings within the framework of union with Christ. Their private home functions as an ekklēsia — a gathered assembly — which underscores that the earliest Christian worship was domestic, intimate, and inseparable from everyday life. The domus ecclesiae (house-church) was not a compromise arrangement but the original incubator of Eucharistic communion.
Verse 20a — All the Brothers The expansion from named individuals to "all the brothers" broadens the circle of solidarity still further. Paul himself, his co-workers, the wider Ephesian community: all of them are united in affection for the Corinthian church, despite the tensions and rebukes the letter has contained. This is not formulaic courtesy. Coming after chapters of sharp correction on divisions, lawsuits, immorality, and eucharistic disorder, the inclusive "all" is theologically charged: the corrected community is still, fully and unreservedly, greeted as beloved members of the Body of Christ.
Verse 20b — The Holy Kiss The command to "greet one another with a holy kiss" (philēma hagion) appears identically in Rom 16:16, 2 Cor 13:12, and 1 Thess 5:26, and in a variant form (kiss of love, philēma agapēs) in 1 Pet 5:14. Its repetition across multiple letters suggests this was a liturgical practice already embedded in apostolic worship — not merely a social custom. Justin Martyr (†c. 165 AD) describes it explicitly as part of the Sunday Eucharist: "When we have finished the prayers, we greet one another with a kiss" (First Apology, 65). The kiss migrated in later centuries to the pax (sign of peace) within the Mass, surviving into the present rite. The modifier hagia ("holy") is crucial: this is not a secular greeting transformed by good intentions, but a bodily act of ecclesial consecration — the body itself becoming a site of sacred communion. It anticipates the eschatological embrace of the whole Christ, Head and Body, fully united.
From a Catholic perspective, these two verses compress an entire ecclesiology into a closing salutation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the Church is one" not despite her many local expressions but through them: "From the beginning, this one Church has been marked by a great diversity which comes from both the variety of God's gifts and the diversity of those who receive them" (CCC 814). The network of greetings in vv. 19–20 enacts this truth: Asia greets Corinth; named individuals greet the whole; the whole greets itself with a sacred gesture. Unity and diversity are not in tension — they are mutually constitutive.
The house-church of Aquila and Priscilla carries particular theological weight for Catholic tradition. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (§11) calls the family the ecclesia domestica (domestic church), and this teaching is richly grounded in the Pauline evidence here. The family home is not a lesser setting for the Church's life but its first and most formative one. Aquila and Priscilla model what LG envisions: spouses who, "by the grace of the sacrament of matrimony, signify and share in the mystery of the unity and faithful love between Christ and the Church."
The holy kiss, furthermore, is a sacramental gesture in the broad sense the Fathers used: an outward sign of inward, spiritual reality. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his Sermons on the Song of Songs, develops a rich theology of the kiss as the mode of divine union (Sermon 2–3), grounding the liturgical kiss of peace in the soul's mystical embrace by Christ. The body, for Catholic anthropology (cf. CCC 362–368), is never merely instrumental; the holy kiss affirms that bodies participate in the communion of the Church.
Contemporary Catholics can be tempted to experience the Church as a loose federation of like-minded individuals, each choosing their preferred parish the way one chooses a gym. These two verses challenge that consumerist ecclesiology at its root. When Paul writes that "the assemblies of Asia" greet Corinth, he presupposes that communities which have never met face to face are nonetheless genuinely accountable to one another in love — not merely in organizational structure, but in affection and prayer.
Practically, this passage invites the Catholic today to: (1) cultivate awareness of the universal Church, especially persecuted communities, in daily prayer — to "greet" them spiritually by name, as Paul does here; (2) take seriously the domestic church in one's own home, asking whether the family home is truly a place where Christ is encountered, studied, and worshipped; and (3) enter the Sign of Peace at Mass not as an awkward interruption, but as the direct descendant of the holy kiss — a bodily act of ecclesial love that means something real about the Body of Christ one is about to receive in the Eucharist.
Commentary