After the nationalization of the press and the audio-visual means of the religious confessions around the 1970's, the Catholic Church lost most of its means for social communication: the radio, the television, the films, the newspapers and the magazines. Today, we are trying to climb back, with difficulty, up the slope in a still uncertain social, economic and political environment. Despite the enormous challenges which we must face, the possibilities are still huge.

... we have labored under Modernism for these sixty years, and have watched with horror the disintegration of everything that made our Faith beautiful: Catholic doctrine, good and holy priests, an abundance of devout and zealous religious brothers and nuns, Catholic schools, Catholic universities, Catholic seminaries teeming with holy seminarians aspiring to the priesthood, the traditional Latin Mass, traditional sacraments, the Legion of Decency, religious habits, priests in cassocks and Roman collars, magnificent churches, elaborate ceremonies, Gregorian chant and other beautiful church music, discipline, orthodoxy, modest dress, good morals. I could go on. What I describe is the world of my childhood which, at the time, I took for granted, but which I loved and cherished.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

I hear from other Bishops, he says, that there is a failure of Catechesis, that things are not sticking, that kids are going to Catholic Schools and then they are graduating from the Catholic Church, not just from school. It’s not a marketing question! It’s a question of how are we going to express the deep questions in their heart? How are we going to help them find answers?

The church is still alive. There may be institutional decline, but it is not a decline in the Gospel or in the Eucharist or the Lord himself, right? That is all well and good and alive, and will be as long as there are people who will surrender themselves and trust in his grace.

If today the Middle Ages are retiring into the thick shadows of convents, it is due to triumphant skepticism; and if the epidemic disease of religion no longer appears with the terrible intensity of former times, it is due to the diminution of the political power of the Church.

In 1955, it was not fashionable to believe in God. To the philosophical avant garde, God was dead. Science laughed at the superstitious beliefs of the ignorant; many of the college-educated turned away from religion. Those who still went to church or synagogue did so more to maintain a tradition than from a sincerely felt need for intercourse with the divine. (Chapter Nineteen)

The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.

Catholics are against abortions. Catholics are against homosexuals. But, I can’t think of anyone who has less abortions than homosexuals!

Amid the general anarchy, against the coarse vice and brutality of the barbarians, herself harried by the rapacity of the nobles and weakened by the ignorance and barbarism of her own clergy, the Church did what she could, but a thorough social reconstruction was impossible. In modern life her power is broken by the prevalent doubt and apostasy, and the current of materialism and mammonism is now too great to be stemmed.

In dioceses of secular countries with a network of Catholic schools and Colleges, the primary community of faith has become the school. There the majority of the baptized encounter for the first time, in any systematic way, the person of Jesus Christ, prayer, liturgy and the Church's sacramental life. Teachers rather than parents have become in many instances the first formators in faith of our young. Catholic schools are not products but agents of the Church's mission.

Never in the history of the Church has there been such a frightening concentration of prophecies that foretell a catastrophic time for Christendom and the world. And they are Catholic prophecies, i.e., related to saints, pontiffs and mystics or messages from Marian apparitions recognized by the Church.

My great surprise is that the crisis in the Church has been so long. We had prayed that the good Lord would send us a truly Catholic Pope, a holy Catholic Pope, just a few years after my consecration, and here we are, 19 years, and it is the same. It is a great disappointment. The crisis lags, and we have to continue to fight. That is the great difficulty – not for me, but for the faithful especially. The faithful have to be heartened, they must be encouraged not to be fatigued, to be tired. We must continue to fight.

As the parish goes, so goes the faith of the people.