Thomas Bray has a great column in the April 24, 2005 issue in The Detroit News on Pope Benedict XVI. As Bray notes, the task of stabilizing the Catholic Church will require a lot of heavy lifting but has to be done to ensure the survival of Europe and Western Civilization. Just read some of Bray's fine work on this subject:
When you drive out the priest, though, what you get is the witch doctor. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI had close encounters with the great witch doctors of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Ultimately both were overcome, but at horrendous cost. Would a Europe -- or a United States -- bereft of faith find the moral courage today to make similar sacrifices?I hope that Pope Benedict XVI can muster the strength to resuscitate the glory of Christianity in Europe. From reading his writings, I can ensure that he will be able to muster a considerable revival in Europe.
Battling the dictatorship of relativism won't be an easy task, particularly for a 78-year-old pontiff in a church which, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger admitted, has a good deal of "filth" in its own ranks. Among other things, Catholicism may be paying a price for having been the officially established church in many European countries. Thinking it had a monopoly on religion, it grew fat, careless and corrupt, leading to a severe reaction against all religion -- unlike in the United States, where religion has mostly been a private matter and intense competition among churches is the rule.
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