I have come across this interview conducted with the then Fr Ratzinger in 1969. His leading of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and papacy as Pope Benedict XVI lay years in the future. He had been a peritus (expert) at Vatican II and was in the process of falling out with a number of theologians with whom he had founded the periodical Concilium. He would go on the found, with others, another called Communio. His thoughts on the future are amazing although what he says about priests being ordained and then working in a profession (worker priests) has not come to pass. Otherwise, it is seems like a premonition and we can expect the accuracy of his prophecy to continue to be worked out in the decades to come:
"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; nor will
it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of
faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes
demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To
put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will
be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the
slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a
wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through
the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which
alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this
daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to
the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any
longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade
ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of
some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it
is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
How does all this affect the
problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a
Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a
Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly
superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church
of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and
promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social
worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the
priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching
the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the
disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their
hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.
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. As a small
society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual
members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to
the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller
congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally
be provided in this fashion. Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the
priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. 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 made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the
end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments
as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
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."
