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. (Read more.)
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The Last Judgment
1 week ago
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