A smaller Catholic Church?
It is a story not completely played out yet.
It’s a question on my mind and perhaps yours?
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.
The above from:
Pope Benedict XVI
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
All of it below:
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. . . .
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. — from Faith and the Future (2009)
Is the above true?
The following from the webmaster
As a catholic please note ( did not say a good one) the above needs to be considered as something coming true, My confusion started in Vatican II. What was written there was OK, but what happened in the church was unfounded.
Flocks of religious people left the church. Communion was taken in the hand (like handing out potato chips) and communion rails where one must kneel to take communion were destroyed, and in some churches it became hard to even know if they were Catholic. Then they turned the altars around, and then the new liturgy. As a young Altar Boy learning Latin this confused me as how as beautiful as the Latin Mass could be it is being almost eliminated today (2023).
What has happened over the last few years leaves me even more confused in the direction of the church is going.
It seem that Rome has become some social play ground for new ideas which are mostly worldly.
It wants to bring in everyone no matter what their views are (The Catholic Church can never be that way.) It seem to have lost it compass that points to spreading the good news of the redemption of Jesus and focuses on climate change and divorced Catholics receiving communion etc..
Below is a picture of Our Lady of Lourdes church. Looks newer but then I was a server in the Third grade and I am 80 now!
As a very young boy in a black and white cassock kneeling on the left side steps leading up to the altar, God one day at mass told me that He loved me. I said I love You too! That I love you has stuck with me to this very moment as I type this. Aug. 6th. 2023 at 6:43PM.
