Christoph OhlyRatzinger is one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church"."Ratzinger's theology is symphonic," says Pablo BlancoWhile NASA was finalizing preparations for man to set foot on the moon for the first time, a young theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, was asking himself similar questions. "What will the Church look like in the year 2000?" was the title of one of his radio addresses that would later be collected in the book "Faith and future". The future Pope Benedict XVI was convinced that the Church was living through an epoch similar to the one it experienced after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. "We find ourselves at an enormous turning point," he explained, "in the evolution of the human race. A moment with respect to which the passage from the Middle Ages to modern times seems almost insignificant."
The year 2000 was then far away. It appeared on the horizon as a symbolic line. In the same year that the young German theologian gave this lecture, Stanley Kubrick presented his masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey," in which he also wanted to express his intuitions about the future of humanity. Today, well past that time, we can see how many of those prophecies are coming true. It is dizzying to see the progress of artificial intelligence and its possible approach to a supposed self-awareness, as happened to the computer HAL-9000 in the visionary film. And it is shocking to read the words of that young German theologian. Because he did not believe that the Church was going to have a great influence on society, nor that it was going to mark this new epoch of history. Rather, he thought just the opposite, that it was facing a great crisis and a total loss of influence:
From the present crisis," he said, "will emerge a Church that will have lost much. It will become small, it will have to start everything from the beginning. It will no longer be able to inhabit the buildings it built in times of prosperity. With the decrease of its faithful, it will also lose a large part of its social privileges".
How many of our empty churches, of the huge seminaries now converted into hotels or retirement homes, bear witness to the fulfillment of these words! In our own homeland we observe the decline of Catholics as a generation takes over - precisely those of us who were born in those years - for whom faith is no longer relevant to life. We were baptized, but that faith that our parents wanted to give us, we have no longer passed on to our children. Thus, slowly but inexorably, the Church has ceased to have active members and, as a result, it is less and less relevant in our society.
This crude vision of the future of the Church did not provoke in Joseph Ratzinger a negative experience. Quite the contrary. He believed that this situation would lead to a time of purification that would help the Church to become more authentic and free:
"It [the Church] will be presented in a much more intense way than hitherto, as the community of free will, which can only be accessed through a decision. Let us say it positively: the future of the Church, also on this occasion, as always, will again be marked with the seal of the saints. It will be a more spiritual Church, which will not subscribe to a political mandate, flirting either with the left or with the right. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.
His successor in the See of Peter, Francis, at the beginning of his pontificate, would exclaim precisely: "How I would like a poor Church for the poor". It is not the path of power, of influence, of the strategies of the world that will mark the future of the Church. Nor will its adaptation to the criteria of society make us more influential. On the contrary, denounces the future Pope Benedict XVI, this would make us completely irrelevant. The path we must rediscover is simply, as the "poverello" of Assisi lived it, that of the radicality of the Gospel. This is the path that Pope Francis has taken when he took the helm of Peter's boat. It is a path that will provoke internal contradictions and tensions, as we can see today in our Church. This was also indicated by the young Joseph Ratzinger in his speech:
"The process will prove even more difficult because both sectarian narrow-mindedness and emboldened wilfulness will have to be eliminated. One can foresee that all this will take time. The process will be long and laborious. But after the test of these divisions there will emerge from an internalized and simplified Church a great strength, because human beings will be unspeakably lonely in a fully planned world. They will experience, when God has totally disappeared for them, their absolute and horrible poverty. And then they will discover the small community of believers as something totally new. As an important hope for them, as an answer they have always groped for."
The young German theologian foresaw that the Church would suffer internal and external tensions. This seems to be the moment we are living. Christ is crucified once again by sectarian ideologies coming from the world that want to colonize the Church and a current of new voluntarist Pelagianism. We do not have to go very far to perceive this tension. It seems certain to me that very difficult times await the Church," Ratzinger insisted in that radio conference. Its real crisis has barely begun. Strong shocks are to be expected.
Peter's boat is tossed again and again. Today's apostles again cry out in fear that it will sink. But, once again, there is a small flock, a remnant of Israel, that remains faithful. And which, in its simplicity, living the Gospel without torn pages, without the need for explanatory glosses, will be a true light for a world drowning in darkness. The Church, small and poor, with its empty hands, with fewer works, will be the answer to what his heart longed for. It is the last part of Joseph Ratzinger's prophecy that opens the door to the most genuinely Christian hope.
"It [the Church] will flourish again and become visible to human beings as the homeland that gives them life and hope beyond death."
Teaching Delegate in the Diocese of Getafe since the 2010-2011 academic year, he has previously exercised this service in the Archbishopric of Pamplona and Tudela, for seven years (2003-2009). He currently combines this work with his dedication to youth ministry directing the Public Association of the Faithful 'Milicia de Santa Maria' and the educational association 'VEN Y VERÁS. EDUCATION', of which he is President.
