A Smaller, Purer Church?

 Fr. Ratzinger

 "It seems a good time to take a break from all the culture war stuff."  So I said in the introduction to my last post.  The Lord knows we could all use a break, and yet the hits keep on coming, don't they? Well, as that witty old atheist Leon Trotsky might have said, "You may not be interested in the Culture War, but the Culture War is interested in you".  The forces pushing culture war don't seem to feel the need for a break at all, and they're coming right at us.

     But the Culture War, you might recall, is only one front in the larger war.  In some earlier posts (here and here) I used the image of a pyramid to illustrate the different levels upon which our society is built, with politics the top (and least important), with culture underlying politics, and religion as the bottom level, the basis for the whole structure. I've touched previously on the political and cultural fronts of the war (which is, at root, a spiritual conflict); today we're going to look at the religious front . . .

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