“The Church is always threatened with conforming to the pattern of this sinful world. Recognized or not, these processes of conforming to the world were at work in the great ages of the Church and are repeated throughout its history. The Church, considered structurally and not in the concrete actions of its individual members, tends to suffer declines in its internal life and thus to become incapable of giving life to the world.
But it also happens periodically that the risen Lord appears to the Church and restores it to life again. The experience of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus was not limited to the first generation of disciples, but is one that the Church has at privileged moments in its history. Like Paul, the Church is flung headlong out of its past and is given the grace of having its blindness healed, its sight recovered. It is filled with the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 9:1-19).
A denial of these possibilities would be profoundly antichristian. To deny the possibility of a sinful degeneration on the part of the Church and of the Church’s becoming irrelevant would be not only to blind oneself to the evidence but also to deny what Vatican II said about the sinfulness of the Church. To deny that Christ can continue to appear to his Church and renew the miraculous creativity that accompanied the first appearances of the risen Lord would be to deny that Christ is still risen and that his Spirit still breathes where it will by communicating a knowledge of the truth and creating new life.”
Jon Sobrino, The True Church and the Poor, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Markyknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 85.
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