We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous. Therefore it will collapse of its own accord. From today’s crisis this time too a church of tomorrow will rise, which will have lost much. It will become small, and to a large extent it will have to start again from the beginning. It will no longer be able to fill many of its buildings that were built in times of prosperity. Because of the number of its adherents it will lose many of its privileges in society. Unlike in the past, it will present itself much more strongly as an optional community, which can only be joined through a decision to do so. It will surely find new forms of office and ordain reliable Christians as priests, who also have other jobs. But, as before, full-time priests will be essential too.
The future of the church will not come from those who just follow recipes. It will not come from those who just want to choose the easy way. Those who avoid the passion of the faith and call anything demanding false and obsolete, tyrannical and legalistic. To put it positively: the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.
But despite all these changes which we can imagine, the church will again decisively find its essential being in what has always been its heart: faith in the triune God and in Jesus Christ. It will be an inward church, which does not bang on about its political mandate and flirts as little with the left as with the right. It will rediscover its own core in faith and prayer and experience the sacraments again as divine service, not a problem of liturgical design. The church will find it hard-going. For the process of crystallization and clarification will cost it much labour. It will become poor, a church of the little people.
The process will be long and difficult. But after the test of this letting go, great power will stream from a church that has been taken to heart and become simplified. For the people of a wholly planned world will become unutterably lonely. When God has disappeared from them, they will feel all their terrible destitution. And then they will discover the little community of believers as something completely new. As a hope that takes root in them, as an answer, which they have always secretly been seeking – as a home which gives them life and hope beyond death.
Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube und Zukunft (Munich, 1970) (quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life (Volume 2), p.70)
Deep Church 