We (people) are the Church
Today one can often hear the opinion that our Church is wrong in something, does something wrong, does something wrong, and there are even worse expressions. However, it should be recalled that in the Orthodox tradition the concept of the Church includes all believers – or, more precisely, all Christians baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church.
This is one of the main differences from Catholicism. Western Christianity understands the church only as an aggregate of the priestly class – deacons, priests and bishops. And ordinary Christians are placed in the outer circle. They are not inside the church, but around it. Hence the theory of the Pope’s infallibility. He is the head of the Catholic Church in the sense that he stands at the top of the entire institution, being the direct ruler and leader of all lower church ranks.