How true are these words now ....
The church will become small
CARDINAL JOSEPH RATZINGER (1969)
The church 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 . . . she
will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church]
will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members....
It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of
crystallization 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 long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on 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 . . . 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. 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, 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.
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