Sep 25, 2011 / 14:23 pm
Troubled times in the Catholic Church and increasing secularization can be an opportunity for renewal, Pope Benedict XVI said in Germany.
The Pope looked back on the history of the Church during Sept. 25 remarks to a group of Catholics involved in German civil society. He observed that times of persecution and difficulty have often contributed “significantly” to the Church’s “purification and inner reform.”
“Secularizing trends – whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like – have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness, for in the process she has set aside her worldly wealth and has once again completely embraced her worldly poverty,” he said.
The Pope suggested that once freed from her “material and political burdens,” the Church can “reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world.”
Thus the Church avoids giving greater weight to “organization and institutionalization (rather) than to her vocation” which is to be “a tool of salvation, in filling the world with God’s word and in transforming the world by bringing it into loving unity with God.”