The Plight of the Church

The Lord told us that the Church will always be suffering in various ways, up to the end of the world. The important point is that the message, the answer of Fatima, it not substantially addressed to particular devotions, but is the fundamental response: permanent conversion, penance, prayer, and the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope and charity.

Here we see the true, fundamental response the Church must give, which each of us individually must give, in this situation.

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church.

This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church, the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice.

Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In short, we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues.

That is how we respond, and we need to be realistic in expecting that evil will always attack, from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the LORD is STRONGER THAN EVIL, and the Virgin Mary is for us the visible maternal guarantee that the WILL of GOD is always the LAST WORD in HISTORY.

Pope Benedict XVI, May11, 2010 (in flight interview)

No matter how bad things seem to be now, we must remember BXVI's end note, "finally the LORD is STRONGER THAN EVIL, and the Virgin Mary is for us the visible maternal guarantee that the WILL of GOD is always the LAST WORD in HISTORY". This must be his source of strength in his service to the Lord. I, so thank God for giving us Benedict XVI for eight years.