Each issue of the admirable ecumenical journal, Touchstone, includes a department called “The Suffering Church.” It’s a title that Catholics of a certain age associate with purgatory; in Touchstone’s vocabulary, however, “the Church suffering” is the Church being purified here and now by persecution. It’s a useful reminder of a hard fact.
For that hard fact too rarely impinges on the Christian self-awareness, much less the Christian conscience, of the Church Comfortable, the Church Lax, or the Church of Nice — even though the historical commission created by John Paul II in preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000 made clear that Christians today live in the greatest tribulation-time in Christian history.