His comments were published on Holy Thursday in the Jesuit-run journal La Civiltà Cattolica, two days before Benedict XVI celebrates his 95th birthday.
Pope Francis visited his predecessor on April 13, ahead of the pope emeritus’ birthday on April 16, Holy Saturday.
“As a bishop, Benedict had said: let us prepare ourselves to be a smaller Church. This is one of his most profound intuitions,” Pope Francis said.
The Argentine pope was likely referring to comments made by Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, in a 1969 radio broadcast in Germany, in which the theologian reflected on the Church’s future.
Ratzinger said: “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning … As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.”
He added: “But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. … The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.”
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