Q. – It is often part of the “bon ton,” among Catholics conscious of tradition, to speak of a crisis of faith in the Church. But hasn’t it always been that way?
A. – First of all, I would like to agree with you. The faith of the individual believer has always had its difficulties and its problems, its limits and its measure. On this we cannot judge. But, in the underlying spiritual situation, so to speak, something different happened. Up until the Enlightenment, and even beyond, there was no doubt that God shone through the world; it was somehow evident that behind this world there stands a higher intelligence, that the world, with all that it contains – creation with its richness, reasonableness, and beauty – reflects a creator Spirit. And there was also, beyond all the divisions, the fundamental evidence that in the Bible God himself speaks to us, that in it he has revealed his face to us, that God comes to meet us in Christ. Whereas at that time there was, let us say, a collective presupposition of some sort of adherence to the faith – always with all the human limitations and weaknesses – and it really took a conscious rebellion to oppose it, after the Enlightenment everything changed: today the image of the world is exactly upside down.
Everything, it seems, is explained at the material level; the hypothesis of God, as Laplace already said, is no longer necessary; everything is explained by material factors. Evolution has become, let us say, the new divinity. There is no step for which a Creator is needed. Indeed, introducing one seems to oppose scientific certainty, and is therefore something untenable. Likewise, the Bible has been snatched away, because it is considered a product whose origin can be explained historically, which reflects historical situations and in no way tells us what it was believed could be drawn from it, which instead must have been something entirely different.
In such a general situation, where the new authority – what is called “science” – intervenes and speaks the last word to us, and where even scientific popularization declares itself to be “science,” it is much more difficult to take notice of God and above all to adhere to the biblical God, to God in Jesus Christ, to accept him and to see in the Church the living community of faith. In this sense I would say, on the basis of the objective situation of conscience, that there is another starting point, on account of which faith requires a much greater commitment and also the courage to resist apparent certainties. Going to God has become much more difficult.
–Cdl Ratzinger, 2003.