“Today the Church and society are affected by a crisis of faith” and the Church risks becoming “ordinary administration”, a “frame for life rather than the expression of its plenitude”. The warning was made by one of Germany’s greatest theologians, Johan Baptist Metz. In an interview published in the last number of the Croatian Catholic weekly Glas Koncilia, Metz remarks on the “widespread crisis of God” which results in “no one posing questions about Him any more”. The world appears “devoid of emotions, not exactly atheist in the traditional sense, but indifferent, rather”. “No religion can support so much indifference he points out -: when real atheism existed in the past, Christianity knew at least where she stood”. According to the theologian, “many things are changing in the Church, but passively, under the anonymous impact of vague and incomprehensible relations”. But what’s really needed are “genuine reforms”. A further threat is posed by the “consolidation” of what Metz calls the “Church of ordinary administration” which would lead “to a diminution of those who abandon it, but an increase of indifference within it”. Hence the urgent need for the Church to recover the “sensibility of spirit” from which to draw “strength and guidance”. The key, in the theologian’s view, is contained in a “Church of compassion, a Church able to respond to and participate in the sufferings of others, genuine expression of the Passion of Christ”.
