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…
Remember that Pope Benedict was speaking as a German, where the major religions operate with state help.
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…
I agree that this will absolutely happen if we here in the US quit allying ourselves with whichever party we decide is the “lesser of two evils” because we want our votes and our political contributions to “count.” (I don’t speak about other places only because I’m ignorant of their politics.)
If we were to press both major US parties on where they fall short, then yes, we will quickly find ourselves welcome in neither and also unwelcome in most of the smaller parties. People willing to expose the warts in their own parties are too much of a political handicap. It is a matter of not being able to serve both God and the pursuit of secular political power, which is a mistress even more demanding than Mistress Mammon.
