A while back I got it in my head to read more from those theologians who were at Vatican II, but who represent the side of orthodoxy, consistency with Tradition, etc. I'm talking about people like Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthazar, etc. Lately I've been reading Henri de Lubac, and he's got a couple books called, Paradoxes of Faith and More Paradoxes - which are really just a collection of his musings, often in the spirit of embracing paradox, or as I like to do, setting the extremes against each other and looking for the balance in the middle. Right now I'm going through More Paradoxes and a lot of it was written soon after Vatican II - and this is my point for bringing it up - when you read it, if you didn't know when it was written, you could easily think it was written this year. All the things you might think of when you read my title for this post: "the current crisis of the Church" - it's as if what de Lubac wrote almost 60 years ago fits and is just as relevant as if it was written yesterday. Which, I suppose, is actually encouraging, because whatever you think of when you hear "the current crisis of the Church" - we've been through it before, we've gotten through it before, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against the Church. In fact, reading about the aftermath of Vatican II, you could make the case that things are even more hopeful now, since a lot of the insanity among the clergy back then is dying away and being replaced by a generation of clergy more committed to the faith.

Having said that, in one of his musings de Lubac raised a point which made me as the reader say, "what's the deal with Germany?" De Lubac refers to the Protestant Reformation, and the subsequent crisis of Biblical scholarship in Germany. He doesn't mention the Nazis and the Holocaust, but that was obviously very much in opposition to Christian faith. And he could not have anticipated the drama unfolding in Germany now, with the possibility of a new schism. So it made me think, what is it about Germany?

Of course, we can't ignore the fact that the homeland of both de Lubac and Congar is now one of the most secular countries, and even in Italy, most people don't actually go to church, but in these countries it all seems more passive.

And then yesterday I was reading a master's thesis by a student, who wrote on the history of the conversion of Scandanavia to Christianity. The story is one which makes you think - so how did these countries get to be so secular that they are now anti-Christian. Especially Iceland, which was not converted at the point of a sword, or even by missionaries - the first mainlanders who went to Iceland found Irish monks there, and although they chased the Irish monks off the island, they VOTED to become Christian.

So maybe the point is that crisis itself is not something that stands out from the time around it as particularly threatening - but rather crisis is something that comes in waves and moves around from one place to another, but never really goes away. I recently finished a lot of research for a historical fiction project in which I was reading a lot of Celtic theology, and I came upon a really interesting phrase: "this year's plague" - now, on one level, there were a lot of plagues back then, but the vibe you get from this phrase in the literature is more like, "oh well, that's just this year's plague." As if to say, every year has its plague, and this current crisis is just the plague for this year. Next year there will be a different one, and no year will be without one.

So, whatever the current crisis of the Church is, it's just this year's plague.