The Chair In Rome Is Empty
(ANALYSIS) It’s Bright Monday morning and I am still exhausted, in a good way, by the wild, exhilarating services of Pascha (Easter in the West) here in the hills and mountains here in Northeast Tennessee. And, of course, I need to write something for Rational Sheep.
I also need to prepare for an “On Religion” column tomorrow, to meet my usual Wednesday morning deadline (as I head into year 37).
All of this is happening, of course, while the Internet reacts to the death of Pope Francis. I was not planning on writing about Francis this morning or tomorrow. I was planning on writing about the signs pointing to what I believe is the biggest religion story in Christianity around the world.
I can state this bluntly: Some churches are growing. Many churches are dying. Journalists need to realize that both of these statements are true. Ah, but why is there so much life in some places and death in others?
On one level, this is the answer: Easter follows Good Friday. In a way, that’s the topic that I was working on for this week’s column — focusing on all those headlines about rising numbers of Catholic converts in France and the UK.
However, I was going to start with a flashback in which Pope Francis noted some rather prophetic words from the late Pope Benedict XVI. Here is the top of a Catholic News Agency report from 2022:
Pope Francis has described Benedict XVI as “a prophet” for predicting that the Catholic Church would become a smaller but more faithful institution in the future. …
“Pope Benedict was a prophet of this Church of the future, a Church that will become smaller, lose many privileges, be more humble and authentic and find energy for the essential,” Pope Francis said during the meeting with Jesuits at the apostolic nunciature in Malta on April 3.
“It will be a Church that is more spiritual, poorer, and less political: a Church of the little ones.”
It really helps to read Benedict in his own words, which were drawn from a 1969 German radio broadcast. In 2009 Ignatius Press published Father Joseph Ratzinger’s remarks in a book — “Faith and the Future.”
For some of the crucial material, see this file at the Aleteia website — “When Father Joseph Ratzinger Predicted the Future of the Church.” Here are some quotes that, to say the least, remain relevant:
— “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. …”
— “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.”
— “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 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. …”
— “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.”
Again, that was 1969, after Ratzinger made his way out of the theological liberalism that surrounded him in Europe and, especially, his own Germany. The future pope was moving past postmodernism and returning to ancient realities.
To read the rest of this post, visit Terry Mattingly’s Substack page at Rational Sheep.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.