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These guys never fail to be thoughtful<\/a>.<\/p>\n From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge \u2014 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 (\u2026) And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI)<\/p>\n \u201cA smaller Church\u201d; Faith and Future<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The above quote is an all-time favorite of a certain catastrophist mindset at the root of much of the current dissent against Pope Francis. People who criticize our pontiff often share memes with this prophecy from then Joseph Ratzinger, predicting the collapse of the Church (at least in the West) under the weight of an increasingly materialistic and relativistic society. They interpret the dwindling numbers of practicing Catholics as a confirmation of this ratzingerian forecast.<\/p>\n However, there is more to this than merely acknowledging the accuracy of Ratzinger\u2019s prophecy. The quote is usually disseminated without any context whatsoever, besides the interpretation given by the person itself doing the quoting. And this interpretation usually has an ulterior motive: to advance a narrative.<\/p>\n According to this narrative, the \u201csmall Church\u201d prophecy refers to the current crisis. As a ratzingerian myself, I agree with this. So far, so good. The problem is that these people view\u00a0themselves<\/strong>\u00a0as part of the reduced Church. There is no doubt in their minds that they are this smaller Church. It is incumbent upon them, therefore, to preserve the traditions and doctrines of the Church intact until the ecclesiastical renaissance comes again. They are\u2026 the remnant (a name they are very fond of, for various reasons.)<\/p>\n Enter Pope Francis, who in their minds has sacrificed the purity of unadulterated doctrine and tradition in order to appease modern-day sensitivities and become more inclusive to sinners. Since they dogmatically view themselves as part of the small Church, if Francis goes against their opinions, it must mean that Francis himself is outside of this small Church.<\/p>\n I can understand the idea of having a smaller Church, but I can\u2019t grasp the concept of a Church so small that it doesn\u2019t include the Pope. So, taking for granted Benedict\u2019s prediction, one must wonder: if there is indeed a remnant, how can we identify who belongs to that remnant? And how should the remnant act?<\/p>\n The idea of a \u201cremnant\u201d in the midst of a perverse generation is so \u201ctraditional\u201d that it is older than the papacy itself. It goes way back, right into Old Testament times. Before becoming a papal critic, notable conservative apologist Taylor Marshall published an excellent book about the Jewish roots of Catholicism, named \u201cThe Crucified Rabbi<\/em>.\u201d In it, he wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to an ancient Jewish tradition, the universe is sustained by the presence of at least thirty-six tzaddikim, or \u201crighteous ones\u201d, in every generation. However, no one knows the identity of those tzadikim. They are humble souls who quietly pray and perform good deeds for the benefit of the world. It is believed that God does not judge the world on account of these saintly souls.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As Taylor Marshall himself notes, this notion is rooted in Scripture. When Abraham, the father of our faith, found out that God was planning to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, he tried to plead clemency for these cities by asking if God would destroy them if fifty righteous people lived there. Since God answered him that He would spare the cities on account of fifty righteous, Abraham progressively lowers the number, until we find out that God would spare those heavily populated metropolises if as little as ten righteous lived there (Gen 18:16-33).<\/p>\n In his book \u201cSalvation is from the Jews<\/em>\u201c, Roy Schoeman, another conservative author, cites other examples in Scripture of biblical characters acting on a\u00a0tzadik<\/em>-like fashion. In Ex 32:7-14, God says that He will destroy the Israelites for having succumbed to the idolatry of the golden calf, and will rebuild a great nation solely out of Moses\u2019 offspring. But Moses rejects this offer, and instead intercedes for the rest of Israel, who is thus saved from God\u2019s wrath. Later on, in 1 Kings 18:41-45, God saves Israel from a drought for the sake of Prophet Elijah.<\/p>\n But let us not think that this tradition was broken once the Old Testament was finished. Roy Schoeman goes on to enumerate some examples from private revelations where the same logic seems to apply. At Fatima, the three little shepherds are asked to pray and offer sacrifices for the sinners of the world, so as to draw peace upon Portugal during World War One. And Jesus would\u2019ve promised Saint Faustina too, that on account of her, He would bless her entire home country of Poland.<\/p>\n In fact, we need not go to private revelations to prove the compatibility of this idea with our religion. Christianity itself is rooted on the idea of vicarious atonement. Jesus Christ, all holy and without any trace of sin, died for the salvation of sinners. While hanging on the cross, He said of those who were torturing Him: \u201cGod, forgive them, they know not what they\u2019re doing.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n A pattern seems to emerge here, and it\u2019s as traditional as we can get. A 4,000 year-old tradition. The remnant does not delight in God\u2019s wrath. Quite the contrary: the remnant exists to appease it. They never take advantage of their status as righteous ones in the eyes of the Lord to call fire and brimstone to rain on the sinners\u2019 heads, but they pity the sinners and sacrifice themselves for them, even the unrepentant ones. They are not harbingers of God\u2019s justice, rather they are the emissaries of His mercy. Through them, God\u2019s mercy becomes manifest to all humankind.<\/p>\n It is, therefore, extremely ironic that those who so often misappropriate the title of \u201cthe remnant,\u201d would decry Pope Francis on account of his emphasis on mercy. It seems like they didn\u2019t understand what being a remnant actually entails. They entertain the exclusivity of the remnant, but not the essence of the remnant. In a most non-traditional way, they view themselves as the remnant all the while eschewing mercy, or imposing conditions on God\u2019s mercy that the Vicar of Christ himself does not impose. Was there ever a remnant so disgusted with mercy? I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n However, if we take Ratzinger\u2019s prophecy seriously (as I do) that the Church will get smaller, then isn\u2019t it fitting that the Holy Spirit would send a Vicar of Christ that would guide the Church when that happens? In other words, if the Church is going to shrink (at least in the West) so much that only a remnant will remain, shouldn\u2019t there be a Pope emphasizing mercy to those who remain loyal? So that the remnant may be able to fulfill its age-old function?<\/p>\n If we define the size of the Church \u2014 as papal critics often do \u2014 on the basis of those who are fully orthodox (something I am not in agreement with), then it is true that the Church has taken a huge down-sizing. In the West, only a residual percentage of Catholics adhere to all of the Church\u2019s Social and Sexual Doctrines. Dissent from\u00a0Humanae Vitae<\/em>\u00a0is so widespread that many Catholics have turned assent to this encyclical into a litmus test for \u201ctrue Catholicity<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n However, since there are so few who remain faithful to sexual doctrine, isn\u2019t it only logical that something like\u00a0Amoris Laetitia<\/em>\u00a0would come along, so that those who remain faithful would be able to understand the best way to deal with the multitudes who have deviated from Catholic teaching on sexuality? Isn\u2019t it necessary that the remnant must remain faithful while showing mercy to the masses who have turned away from God?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, many of those who have remained faithful to the teaching of\u00a0Humanae Vitae<\/em>\u00a0dissent from the teachings of\u00a0Amoris Laetitia<\/em>. These new dissenters don\u2019t understand that (based on their definition of Catholicism as including only those who adhere to the fullness of doctrine) they are now in fact fulfilling Ratzinger\u2019s prophecy. They are making the Church smaller by putting themselves outside the boundaries of the Church as they define it. For they have become dissenters, and dissenters (in their book) are outside the Church! But they don\u2019t have enough discernment to understand that. Instead, they just wrestle authority away from the Vicar of Christ, while claiming that they themselves are the remnant. This is so tragic that it can only be described as a diabolical trap.<\/p>\n In the meantime, those who have remained loyal to the fullness of doctrine have become rarer and rarer. It is very difficult to find someone who has a positive idea of both\u00a0Humanae Vitae<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Amoris Laetitia<\/em>\u00a0in the current landscape. Someone who finds Catholic Social Doctrine and Catholic Sexual Doctrine equally convincing, without any caveats. Someone who respects and follows every pope, from Francis to Benedict XVI, to St. John XXIII and St. John Paul II.<\/p>\n Those few who do have found themselves, suddenly, in isolation. After the promulgation of\u00a0Amoris Laetitia<\/em>, they watched helplessly as a great number of their friends, family members, and public figures they once admired descended into the spiral of dissent and anti-papal hatred. Blog sites and news media they once trusted suddenly became vessels of anti-papal propaganda as bad as any secular outlet. People who they viewed as profoundly Catholic simply fell away, showing the fragility of their apparently vigorous faith.<\/p>\n These isolated few have watched this unfurl before their very eyes with a sense of confusion, sadness, loneliness, and bewilderment in their hearts. We read about it everyday in our comboxes, when new readers discover our blog in the midst of so much anti-papal criticism in the once Catholic social media. Theirs is not a triumphalistic attitude, a sense of belonging to an elite, or an identitarian defensiveness. Theirs is a sense of smallness, weakness and powerlessness, the kind of attitude that lets God act, because they let themselves be guided instead of thinking they have everything figured out.<\/p>\n We need more people who are faithful to both\u00a0Humanae Vitae<\/em>\u00a0and to\u00a0Amoris Laetitia<\/em>. As St. John Chrysostom urges, we need people who are strict with themselves and lenient with others, as a true remnant should be. Not the other way around, as the false remnant purports to be. Only then may the lapsed ones feel not judged and, shedding their natural distrust against established religion, start opening up their hearts to the life testimony given by faithful Catholics. Only then will our religion expand; not by proselytism, but by attraction, as both Francis and Benedict have told us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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