After the bloody events in Paris and now in San Bernardino, California, many people are afraid. There are tears in the fabric of our civil order. A quiet co-worker leaves a Christmas party after an argument and then comes back with assault rifles and starts killing people he worked with. Then, we find out he and his wife lived in an arsenal, complete with thousands of rounds, assault rifles, pipe bombs and explosives which could have been used for future assaults.

It’s understandable that people are afraid. Christians shouldn’t be. Fearlessness should be one of our gifts to the world. In the seventh chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples: “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.”

The House Built on the Rock

Our life together in the Lord is a place of shelter, not only for us, but for others who seek stability as the shaking continues.

But we’re not supposed to stay at home where we’re safe. We’re called to go out into the world with the gospel it needs to hear. From that house built upon the rock we can wage war together against the world, the flesh and the devil. From there we can reach out to all men and women with the love of God which is fully manifested in Jesus Christ.The Apostle Paul tells Timothy to fight the “good fight of faith” (1 Tim. 6:12).

Christians used to talk a lot about “the Church militant.” We need to start talking about it again. In 1953, Pope Pius XII, who had led the Catholic Church through two decades of darkness in a world besieged by war, explained: “We belong to the Church militant; and she is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass her destruction.”

The phrase refers to a spiritual reality. As Paul tells the Ephesians: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood; but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:11, 12).

The Future of the Church

In our age, when so many in political and cultural leadership are so hostile to Christianity, what will being the Church militant look like? In 1969, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Emeritus Benedict, wrote a small book entitled Faith and the Future. In it he spoke of what might be ahead for the Church. I offer a few excerpts for our reflection.

About the future of the Church:

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, she will lose many of her social 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.

On believers as the answer to man’s loneliness:

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.

The Church after the struggles:

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.

The truth that will sustain the Church:

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.

In This Struggle

On his 85th birthday, Pope Benedict spoke of the Church militant. The term is “somewhat out of fashion,” he said, “but in reality we can understand ever better that it is true, that it bears truth in itself. We see how evil wishes to dominate the world and that it is necessary to enter into battle with evil.”

Then he said something very encouraging. “We are in this struggle and in this struggle it is very important to have friends,” he said. Those of us who’ve built our houses on the rock aren’t just neighbors or even fellow soldiers. We’re friends in Christ. Across all the differences that still divide Christians, we’re friends.

The pope thanked the people with him for their friendship and finished his short talk: “Thank you for the communion of joys and sorrows. Let’s go forward. The Lord said: ‘[Have] courage, I have overcome the world.’ We are in the Lord’s squad, hence in the victorious squad.”