Pope: Church in the Western World Facing Crisis of Faith

[prettiefly]

“Crisis of faith”

Pope explicit about plight of Church in the West

“The real crisis facing the Church in the Western world is a crisis of faith,” Pope Benedict XVI told a gathering of lay Catholics on Sept. 24.

“We see that in our affluent Western world much is lacking. Many people lack experience of God’s goodness,” the pope said to the Central Committee of German Catholics on the third day of his state visit to Germany. “They no longer find any point of contact with the mainstream churches and their traditional structures.”

The rest of the article:
calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=37f878d7-e639-4ed0-884d-90304b886046

 

[MariaChristi]

“Crisis of faith”

Pope explicit about plight of Church in the West

“The real crisis facing the Church in the Western world is a crisis of faith,” Pope Benedict XVI told a gathering of lay Catholics on Sept. 24.

“We see that in our affluent Western world much is lacking. Many people lack experience of God’s goodness,” the pope said to the Central Committee of German Catholics on the third day of his state visit to Germany. “They no longer find any point of contact with the mainstream churches and their traditional structures.”

The rest of the article:
calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=37f878d7-e639-4ed0-884d-90304b886046

Dear prettiefly,

What a great gift this Pope is to the Church and to the world! In the same article he goes on to say:

…Hence the need for new places where those who lack experience of God’s goodness can encounter it, said the pope. He suggested that small communities could be one such path where “friendships are lived and deepened in regular communal adoration before God…

It seems to me that we are called to be “new places”; that is, by God’s Grace each of us must earnestly undergo daily, ongoing conversion of heart, so that those who lack experience of God’s goodness can find Him through us. The Church is called to evangelize, but we cannot give what we do not have ourselves.