Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: “The Church of tomorrow”

“Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the Church’s history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world — that let God in. . . . [I]f society in its totality is no longer a Christian environment, just as it was not in the first four or five centuries, the Church herself must form cells in which mutual support and a common journey, and thus the great vital milieu of the church in miniature, can be experienced and put into practice. . . . The Church of tomorrow . . . will be a Church of minority.”

– Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), in a1995 interview