Feature
A Hope of Collapsing Churches
The Present Malaise & Future Hope of the Mainline Churches
From a distance, the castle’s towers rise high above the countryside, its flags snapping in the wind. Its walls stand massive and secure, and the life inside continues much as it always has. And yet its foundation is cracking and sinking, the walls are beginning here and there to crumble, its flags are tattered, the roofs are full of holes, and many of the windows are broken.
Such, certainly, are the mainline churches. Such also is Rome, seen as a whole; that is, as including Hans Küng and Rosemary Radford Ruether as well as Pope John Paul II. Such will be Orthodoxy as well, when those churches have more fully been infected by modernity and the cultural ghetto that has so far protected them has finally turned into a suburb.
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David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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