Question 4.63

4.63 Can the “crisis of God”, so to speak, cause a crisis in the very notion of Church? In The Ratzinger Report,¹ Joseph Ratzinger saw at the root of the crisis of faith a defective understanding of the idea of Church.

If the tie between God and Christians is weakened, the Church becomes simply a human structure, one society among others. With that, the Church becomes trivial; she makes herself worldly and is corrupted to the point of losing her original nature. Indeed, without God we create a Church in our own image, for our little needs, likes, and dislikes. Fashion takes hold of the Church, and the illusion of sacredness becomes perishable, a sort of outdated medication. To return to our earlier discussion, the same goes for the liturgy. If man claims to adapt the liturgy to his era, to transform it to suit the circumstances, divine worship dies. The development of some liturgical symbols is necessary sometimes; however, if man goes so far as to confuse the temporal and the eternal, he turns his back on the essential justification for the liturgy. The Church is the people of God that becomes the Body of Christ. She is born from the opened side of Christ, for our salvation. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega of the Church. Without God, the Church is nothing but a storm-tossed boat. History shows that the crisis of the Church can never be separated from a crisis of God. Without God, she is eclipsed, like a body separated from the light that illuminates it. Today there is a serious problem because we are no longer aware of the supernatural bond that exists between Christ and his Church. For example, those who are so bold as to criticize the bishops or to pit some of them against others just because they do not agree with their own petty, more or less opportunistic inspirations forget that they are the successors of the apostles chosen by Christ. We must continue to build up the Church willed by the Son of God, and not a Church modeled on our incidental desires. . .