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| from a recent CARA study |
“The Church will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges.” It will start off with small groups and movements and a minority that will make faith central to experience again. “It will be a more spiritual Church, and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the Right one minute and the Left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute. But when all the suffering is past, a great power will emerge from a more spiritual and simple Church”
- Pope Benedict XVI, 40 years ago
Of course it's getting smaller and smaller. What else could be expected when you practice bigotry? The vast majority don't want to go to a Church and listen to a priest talk a bunch of BS about how straight people people have marriage rights and but gay people don't. Less and less want to listen to a priest talk about morality when he belongs to a club of men filled with immorality. Very few want to be told they need to chance having 15 kids by not using contraceptives when they can barely afford to have 2. Only a minority accepts that even a victim of rape can't have an abortion.
ReplyDeleteChurches that were built and paid for by our impoverished ,immigrant great grandparents have been sold one after the other all over the country and the money didn't come back to us, their rightful heirs, but kept for the Church in order to pay for the countless lawsuits for immoral pedophile priests. Shameful . More and more of us are disappointed, hurt, and horrified by it all....and we no longer want any part of it. Oh we still have Jesus, we just don't want you.
The Church will just get smaller and smaller until it finally disappears.
do polyamorists and/or polygamists want to listen to you talk about how men can marry men but 8 people can't get married? How discriminatory of you!
DeleteAll Catholics understand that priests are immoral people - our Church never has said anywhere that the Church makes people sinless...the Church helps people who WANT to live a better life learn how to do so.
Obviously a lot of people don't want to be called to be open to life. We know that.
It will get smaller and smaller for a time, but it will never disappear. You may remember Jesus saying "The gates of Hell shall not prevail against it."
Thanks for the fuller quote as I usually only hear a snippit of it from the usual suspects trying to paint B16 as a big ol' meanie who just wanted to eject Catholics from the Church on the smallest pretext. What he really meant is the parable of the sower. That is, as our nihilistic culture with its zealous commitment to legal fictions and its welter of exotic methods devised to preserve profligacy from its natural consequences turns the screws on the faithful, fewer and fewer will be willing to pay the cost of discipleship, but the ones that do will have great faith indeed.
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