Joseph Ratzinger, Faith in the Future (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2006) 114-118.
This passage is from a Radio programme that Fr. Ratzinger did in
December 1969:
“The future of the Church
can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness
of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to
the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they
themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take
the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete,
tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels
them to sacrifice themselves.
To put this more positively:
The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men,
that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than
others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes
men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial.
By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved
by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened.
He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely
able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade
ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some
pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true
that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
How does all this affect
the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a
Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a
Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous.
Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ,
the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond
death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by
the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist,
who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice,
but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them
in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest
will certainly be needed in the future.
Let us go a step farther.
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 it will lose many of
her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more
as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will
make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly
it 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. Along-side
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. In faith and prayer she will again recognize
the sacraments 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. 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
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 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 — 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. 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. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the
extent that she was until recently; but it 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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