The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.

She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members....

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

~Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, excerpted from his book Faith and the Future.

Dear brothers and sisters! From Tabor, the mountain of the Transfiguration, the Lenten journey leads us to Golgotha, the mountain of supreme sacrifice of love of the one Priest of the new and eternal covenant. In that sacrifice is contained the greatest force for transformation in human history. Taking upon himself every consequence of evil and sin, Jesus rose on the third day as conqueror of death and the Evil One. Lent prepares us to personally participate in this great mystery of faith, which we will celebrate in the Triduum of the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. Let us entrust our Lenten journey and that of the whole Church to the Virgin Mary. May she who followed her Son Jesus to the cross, help us to be faithful disciples of Christ, mature Christians, to be able to participate together with her in the fullness of Easter joy. Amen! ~Pope Benedict XVI, Sunday, March 4, 2012

A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble -- because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out. ~C.S. Lewis

The essential difference between Christian and Pagan asceticism lies in the fact that Paganism in renouncing pleasure gives up something which it does not think desirable; whereas Christianity in giving up pleasure gives up something it thinks very desirable indeed. Thus there is frenzy in Christian asceticism; its follies and renunciations are like those of first love. ~G. F. WATT

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during Word War II [or September 11, 2001]. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted by howls of anger. It is not that people think too high and difficult a virtue; it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. "That sort of talk makes me sick," they say. And half of you already want to ask me, "I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo [or a Muslim terrorists] if you were a Pole or a Jew [or the person who lost a loved one when the World Trade Centers were destroyed]?

 So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it came to that point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do---I can do precious little---I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. ~C. S. Lewis, excerpt from Mere Christianity

The time of Lent is precious, a time to slow down, restrain ourselves, and prepare our hearts for Good Friday and the remembrance of Jesus' death. It is a time to return to the desert where Jesus spent forty trying days readying for his ministry. He allowed himself to be tested, and if we are serious about following him, we will do the same.

"As Lent is the time for greater love, listen to Jesus' thirst...'Repent and believe' Jesus tells us. What are we to repent? Our indifference, our hardness of heart.  What are we to believe?  Jesus thirsts even now, in your heart and in the poor. ... He wants only your love, wants only the chance to love you."  ~ Blessed Teresa of Calcutta