Benedict foresees the Catholic future in terms of the Catholic past, a church somewhere between the catacombs of imperial times and the monastic outposts of the Dark Ages. He believes that the beloved parish system, which he points out is only a few centuries old, will be downsized, and that the emergent and other controversial "movements," such as Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ, the Neocatechumenal Way, and Communion and Liberation, are the wave of the future. The church of the future will be more a "church in miniature," as he has put it, "cells" of believers almost like the kibbutzim that dotted the refounded Israel of the 1950s. The history of the Jewish people is a favorite template for Benedict. Like the "saving remnant" of the Hebrew Bible -- the band of Israelites who remained faithful to God's promise to them -- small groups of faithful Catholics will save the church. Similarly, Benedict sees Christians in the modern secularized West as surviving in a kind of Babylonian captivity, a circumstance that demands loyalty and obedience, and a willingness to jettison those people and structures that do not support the mission: "This movement is in full swing. Chaff and wheat must, as always, be separated in a process that involves a struggle, in accordance with the words of the Apostle, 'Do not extinguish the spirit. ... Test everything, retain what is good.'"These views do not necessarily indicate, now that Ratzinger is pope, that some kind of purge is in store for the Catholic Church. For one thing, Benedict and his top aides seem to have revised some of their previous pessimism, arguing that Benedict's rule can usher in a "new springtime" of the faith, especially in Europe, and saying that the crowds attending papal events -- crowds that Cardinal Ratzinger used to dismiss as largely irrelevant to the faith -- show that he is succeeding. (While many of Benedict's supporters trumpeted the size of the crowds attending public events during his first year, they did not mention that John Paul drew much larger crowds during his early years, and at a time when there were far fewer Catholics in the world. Moreover, a sizeable portion of the crowds coming to Rome in 2005 and 2006 were going to visit the tomb of John Paul rather than the audiences of Benedict. The numbers game can be a dangerous one for those trying to bolster Benedict's authority by magnifying his popular appeal.) The seductive power of seeing adoring multitudes at one's feet can understandably blur even a realist's views. Yet it is also a mistake, as Benedict knew before he became pope, to extrapolate universal truths from a narrow window onto reality.
Then again, the organized cleansing feared by many may not be necessary. Catholicism of the postconciliar era has long been afflicted with a bitter polarization that Bernard Lonergan, the distinguished Jesuit theologian and philosophical Thomist, saw coming as far back as 1967: "There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists," Lonergan wrote at the start of the postconciliar tumult. "There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait."
As a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger did his part to fuel the polemical atmosphere, although he could rightly say he did not create that poisonous climate nor, as a matter of conscience, could he avoid expressing his views. Yet it was also clear whose side he was on, and he was perhaps far too willing to cast the debate as one between light and darkness -- between good Catholics, like himself, and bad Catholics of the left, who he blames for both the present crisis and some of the bad behavior of "well-meaning" conservatives. "On the one hand, there are the modern circles, and we all know that for them every reform is insufficient, that they set themselves against the papacy and papal teaching," he once said. "But even the others, the 'good Catholics,' if you want to call them that, find themselves on the whole less and less comfortable in the Church. They no longer feel at home; they suffer and grieve over the fact that now the Church is no longer a place of peace where they can find refuge but is a place of constant conflicts, so that they themselves also become uncertain and begin to protest."
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