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, she
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.
What an extraordinary mind and person! Curtsy:
Fr. Z.
