When Father Joseph Ratzinger Predicted the Future of the Church

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In 1969 Father Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, predicted the Church’s future.
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“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods…To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints”

“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.”

“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… 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.”
 
Amen. So be it. Come Lord Jesus and enkindle Thy Divine Love in the hearts of the faithful.
 
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Much love and respect to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
May God protect and guide him on this Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
 
He wasn’t so much predicting the future as he was telling what was already happening. And I seriously doubt he was thinking of sexual abuse scandals.
 
Here is another take on this quote, that proposes some more context for this quote and some issues with it. Essentially, this article argues that the ideology of Ratzinger in 1969 was a lot different than later in his life–and this quote actually represents certain “progressive” ideals of the late 60s that were actually destructive to the Church and her mission.

 
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