"From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much.
She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.
She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity.
As
the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her
social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much
more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision.
As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.
As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.
Undoubtedly
she will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the
priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many
smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care
will normally be provided in this fashion.
Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly.
But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.
But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.
In
faith and prayer she will again recognize her true center and
experience the sacraments again as the worship of God and not as a
subject for liturgical scholarship.
The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.
The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.
It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystalization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy.
It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek.
The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed.
The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed.
One
may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long
and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism of the eve of
the French Revolution—when a bishop might be thought smart if he made
fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no
means certain—to the renewal of the nineteenth century.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.
Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.
Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty.
Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new.
They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times.
The real crisis has scarcely begun.
We will have to count on terrific upheavals.
But
I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church
of the political cult, which is dead already with Gobel, but the Church
of faith.
She
may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she
was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as
man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death."
Father Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, (published originally in German in 1970 as Glaube und Zukunft), republished by the Vatican Press in 2006.
