privileges. As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members."

"It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution - when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church."

"Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret."

"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. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death."

"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, the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world." 

We all have a need to belong because we are not solitary by nature. We were fashioned out of and created for relationship. The heart of the Christian Revelation is that God is not solitary either. God is a Trinity of Divine Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who, in perfect love, is one.

Through the saving Incarnation, Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity and the Incarnate Word, we are now capacitated to participate in that Trinitarian Communion beginning now and opening up into eternity. It is in the gift of self to God and to one another that we actually find ourselves. The Christian claim is that we were made for God, and as St. Augustine said so well, "our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." It is there that we find our true home. That home is the Church.

The Church is fundamentally a relational reality, an ongoing encounter, a participation in the Trinitarian communion in and through Jesus Christ. Perhaps one of the most often quoted sayings of the early fathers is from Cyprian of Carthage who wrote, "He cannot have God for his father who has not the church for his mother". The early Christians believed that to belong to Jesus was to belong to His Church. They believed that just as we were all born from our mother's womb - so we are invited by God, in and through Jesus Christ, to be "born again" into the Church, the new humanity being re-created in Him.

Catholics still believe this. The process of redemption begins when we pass through the Sacramental Waters of the font of Holy Baptism. It continues as we cooperate with the Grace given to us in our life within the Church. It will only be fully completed when the Lord Returns and we are raised in Resurrected Bodies and live in a new heaven and a new earth! This understanding of the Church as a real participation in Christ and entry into the Trinitarian Communion runs throughout the writings of the early Church Fathers.

First, some words from  Origen: "Christ has flooded the universe with divine and sanctifying waves. For the thirsty he sends a spring of living water from the wound which the spear opened in His side. From the wound in Christ's side has come forth the Church, and He has made her His bride" Then, a few words from Bishop Ireneaeus of Lyons, a disciple of Polycarp who was himself a disciple of the Apostle John: "We need to take refuge with the Church, to drink milk at her breast, to be fed with the scriptures of the Lord. For the Church has been planted in the world as a paradise" The early Christians did not see the Church as something onerous or optional, they saw it as normative for every Christian and life giving.

The Church is a seed of the Kingdom to come. The Church is the vine into which we are grafted. The Church is the Risen Jesus Sacramentally present in the world. The Church is the new family begun at the Cross. The Church is where we learn to love as we enter into the very communion of the Love of the Godhead revealed in the total gift of the Son of God on the second tree of the Cross. Birthed from the wounded side of the Savior, who is the "New Adam", on the altar of the Cross, the Church is His Body continuing His redemptive mission on the earth.

We do not make the Church in our image, the Church re-makes us into Christ's Image through the grace which is mediated through the Sacraments, revealed in His Word and experienced in our ecclesial life together. Let me conclude with some inspiring words from one of my favorite contemporary theologians, an Orthodox layman named Olivier Clement. He writes of the Church:

"In the Risen Christ, in his glorified body, in the very opening of His wounds, it is no longer death that reigns but the Spirit, the Breath of Life. And the cross of victory and of light, which is the pattern of our baptism, can henceforth transform the most desperate situation into a death-and-resurrection, a 'Passover', a crossing-point on the way to eternity. And that is what the Church, this profoundly holy institution is: it is the baptismal womb, the Eucharistic chalice, the breach made for eternity by the Resurrection in the hellish lid of the fallen world.

"The Church is the Mystery of the Risen Lord, the place, and the only one, where separation is completely overcome; where paschal joy, the 'feast of feasts', the triumph over death and hell are offered to our freedom, enabling it to become creative and work towards the final manifestation of that triumph, the final transfiguration of history and the universe. .In its deepest understanding the Church is nothing other than the world in the course of transfiguration"

Let us build our lives on the Rock of the Catholic Church and open our doors to the men and women of our age who seek stability as the world is being shaken.