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.
Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future (1969)Just something to think about...in light of Bishop Conlon's comments.
Thanks, Mark, for the post. We need a BIG purification and the process is long and hard. Unfortunately the grease in the corrupt machine is money: if the Church is really poor like Christ, all of the wackos will leave and only those who love Christ and the Church will remain because there won’t be any money - just Jesus and His Bride the Church on Calvary.
Unfortunately many good and innocent souls are the victims and suffer under the politics, greed, lust, etc. of the corrupt members. My prayer: Come Holy Spirit and purify Thy Church, no matter what the cost. Amen.
A Gideon’s army would be nice about right now. I think of what Archbishop Fulton Sheen said about the encyclical Humanae Vitae:
from Orbis Catholicus Those Mysterious Priests
c. 1974 By Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
“The press and sometimes theologians said that the Holy Father should never have issued the letter [Humanae Vitae] because it divided the Church. Of course it divided the Church as Elijah divided those who had to choose either Baal or God; it divided the Church as the Lord divided it: ‘He that gathers not with Me, scatters.’ Certainly, it thinned the ranks of the Church just as God’s order to Gideon, trimmed his army from 30,000 to 10,000 and from 10,000 to 300 to do battle with an army of about fifty thousand. Humanae Vitae, quite apart from its teaching, is perhaps the most important Church document in modern times. It enabled the Church to know how many would follow the flesh instead of the spirit.”