Fasten your seatbelt.
53 years ago Fr Josef Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict) gave a series of speeches in which he spoke of the future of the Holy Catholic Church. He made it clear though he would not–could not– make hard predictions what was to come, quoting Augustine: “Whoever believes that the church is not only determined by the abyss that is man, but reaches down into the greater, infinite abyss that is God, will be the first to hesitate with his predictions.” He did intimate however there could be major changes ahead.
We do not know whether or not Ratzinger had the German Church in mind when making those speeches so many years ago, but he may have had a notion what was to come much later, taking the form of the recent actions by Germany’s cardinals, bishops and laymen’s ruthless campaign, via their so-called Synodal Path, Their rejection of Church teachings on sexuality, women’s ordination and, perhaps the most radical, the rejection of episcopal authority (and who knows what else) are nothing short of jaw-dropping.
Are we to interpret those extraordinary destructive acts of the German Catholic Church (with Belgium following suit) a foreshadowing of the end of the entire Catholic Church? Not if we believe our Lord’s promise to Peter. What it does mean is Ratzinger may have called it correctly so many years ago when suggesting the day may come when Holy Church will have to remake herself.
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.
As for the hedonistic breakaways from the Catholic Church, some may survive, most just barely, and the rest meeting the fate of those in this long, long list of protestant denominations. Eventually Holy Church will grow ever stronger.
h/t LCH and WJT.
The Taos Tatler 