No Lasting City: A Pilgrim Church After Christendom

“After Christendom, no church in the West can any longer claim to be a monolithic structure of
systematic authority. The declining cultural cache of Christianity limits the church's influence in
society and in politics (whether in the debate on austerity or abortion) and erodes many of its
traditional missional avenues. If a (or, perhaps, the) church desires to survive and thrive in a
changed world, it must assay some answers to these challenges.

Theological interpretation of Scripture offers one potential line of enquiry towards a solution. This
paper will offer a theological interpretation of Hebrews 11, where the heroes of faith are said to
have accepted a status as “strangers and exiles on this earth”, who had “no lasting city” but
looked forward to a “heavenly country”. The eschatological emphasis of this passage will be
interpreted in conversation with the sermons of the martyred Roman Catholic Archbishop, Oscar
Romero, whose theology coupled an eschatological hope with self-sacrificing social and political
action. The results of this discussion will show that the lineage of the Heroes of Faith continues
now – most encouragingly, particularly where the church responds to a situation apparently
antipathetic to its ecclesial mission.”

Christendom has fallen. You've probably heard, but it bears saying. And because Christendom is
fallen, it seems inevitable to me that a major item for reflection amongst theologians in the Church
is the fallout of that event. A theologian in service to the Church draws part of their stimulus from
the life and situation of the Church, and hopes in turn to resource the Church with their work. So
my own little contribution to that project today is a theological interpretation of Hebrews 11 in
conversation with the homilies of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

But first, given our dialogue partner was a liberation theologian, I will take a page from his school
and begin by explaining very briefly my position and biases, so that those of you who are inclined
to agree with me can begin vigorously nodding, and those who would dismiss me a priori may catch
a quick nap in this, the graveyard slot.

I co-lead a charismatic evangelical church plant in rural County Durham, in a post-industrial

village. I do a part-time PhD in Biblical Studies with a strong interest in how people have read and
do read the Bible. On top of fundraising for the church plant, I am self-employed as a gardener to
keep the books ticking over. The reason that my topic energizes me and seems significant to me is
because out there, on the raggedy edge, the problems and opportunities of post-Christian Britain are
very stark, as is the enormous gulf between what we might, if we were Marxists, call bourgeois
society on the one hand – including Parliament, most churches, the hubs of wealth and influence in
this country – and a significant proportion of our population. So, as a good charismatic evangelical,
it is natural that I turn to the Bible as a theological resource with which to answer this situation –
but perhaps you also might see why the example of other relatively contemporary Christians in
trying circumstances is of comfort to me. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Oscar Romero stands out as
a prime candidate to be a hero of the faith in this situation.

But what I've just said requires qualification. It is all too easy to offer a simplistic narrative of
Christian “persecution” in modern Britain which simply doesn't measure up to the facts. What we
are talking about is, rather, trying circumstances. These trying circumstances have varied
enormously, but their chief characteristic involves the social and cultural marginalization of church
groups and opinions. The most obvious examples to many relate to formal legislation and informal
pressures relating to equality, which has led to the closure of, for example, Christian orphanages and
bed and breakfasts. But it's not simply conservatives with apparently outmoded social theology who
are being marginalized – note the savage response of the Prime Minister and his allies in the right-
wing media to both Archbishop Rowan and Archbishop Justin calling out injustices in government
policy. Or again, I refer to Bishop Christopher's paper this morning, and the mention therein of the
delicate renegotiations between Church and State over faith education. That's particularly close to
the bone for me, living in the North-East, where Oftsed snap inspected three Christian schools in
December in very controversial circumstances.

I'm not trying to be apocalyptic here. There are many exciting new things happening in the
churches, new opportunities arise all the time, and for those of us who care for such things, the new
evangelization seems to be having its effect, alongside the growth of immigrant Christian
communities – according to the statistician Peter Brierley, church attendance in England has at least
briefly stabilized1.

Now these various components – the end of Christendom, a legal and social pressure upon churches
which tends to marginalization, a seeming alienation between the mission field and the corridors of
institutional power – can easily form a dispiriting narrative, but in fact if we take resource from
Scripture, we may find a narrative in which God is still present in alienation. If you'll permit me, I'll
read a very brief section from the Letter to the Hebrews (11.13-16 and 13.14).

How marvellous is God's provision that as we read this afresh in our time it can provide as much
comfort to an apparently “dying” rural Methodist congregation as it did to those first Christians
whose identity was in such flux as they left the synagogue in a storm. Now part of what I'm doing
here is what's called theological interpretation of Scripture, but I'm afraid that's a bit of a numinous
term, with as many definitions as individual interpreters. To sum up the wide variety of theologians
who either explicitly identify as theological interpreters or are associated informally with the
movement, one could name Kevin Vanhoozer, John Webster, Walter Moberley, Daniel Treier – or
indeed our own David Ford, because the Westminster John Knox Belief series is explicitly a
theological commentary on Scripture. And that's the core that unites all theological interpretations
of Scripture – that they elevate the theology of a text, as an ongoing speech act, to at least the level
of the historical or social readings of a text. To theological interpreters, part of Biblical and
Theological scholarship is the theological reading of the Bible afresh in our time.

Now, part of the process is often recognizing the canonical readings and wider reception history of a
text. This would certainly be an interesting exercise for us, but time is a limitation. On that basis, I'll
take a representative sample from an interesting figure for our discussion, John Calvin.

He says as to our passage from chapter 11: Since Jacob confessed himself a pilgrim in the land,
which had been promised to him as a perpetual inheritance, it is quite evident that his mind was by
no means fixed on this world, but that he raised it up above the heavens. Hence the Apostle
concludes, that the fathers, by speaking thus, openly showed that they had a better country in
heaven; for as they were pilgrims here, they had a country and an abiding habitation elsewhere.

And he says this on our verse from chapter 13: Whenever, therefore, we are driven from place to
place, or whenever any change happens to us, let us think of what the Apostle teaches us here, that
we have no certain shade on earth, for heaven is our inheritance; and when more and more tried,
let us ever prepare ourselves for our last end

Now Calvin had in fact been driven from place to place – from Paris to Geneva and from Geneva to
Strasbourg. So he has some cognisance of the existential crisis the passage seems to refer to – the
need to make a decision between earthly profit and heavenly treasure. And we see that plainly in his
exegesis of the passages. But I cannot help but feel the comfort of his study in these passages.
Calvin was building a Protestant Christendom as he exegeted and preached these passages. I would
be far more interested in his reflections on this passage on the road to Strasbourg. Now, I don't
intend any slur there, but Calvin had always existed in one form of Christendom, and once his

1 http://www.brierleyconsultancy.com/images/csintro.pdf
position in Geneva was secured, was ascendant in his attempts to build another form.

But what happens when the choice is not between Christendoms, but, apparently, between the
compromised survival or the honourable extinction of Christian witness? Well, our passages plainly
tend to an eschatological turn, to a genuine and deep and sincere hope consisting in turning our eyes
– individually and corporately as the church – beyond this penumbral realm, towards a more solid
place of rest. But our passages do not assay an answer to the ongoing challenge of fighting for
social justice or of evangelization. So we must turn elsewhere. Now, we could read them by
reference to other passages and create the beautiful mosaic of a systematic theology of pilgrimage;
but I will go for the other mode of theological interpretation, and speak in conversation with another
part of the reception history. That reception is a less explicit but more immediate and prophetic
reception than Calvin's. It is the reception of Oscar Romero.

Now for those who do not know the personality of Oscar Romero, a comparison to the present
Bishop of Rome is instructive. Francis does not allow for easy analyses. You perhaps saw the furore
caused by his comments regarding the inclusive love the church ought to offer to LGBT folk. You
perhaps also saw the news about a week later the defrocking of several priests for, variously, the
celebration of gay marriages and the marriage of the priests themselves. Hyper-conservative
Catholics speak openly of schism whilst liberals clamour to the Pope, but in fact he is a troubling
theological presence for both, permitting no easy answers. Romero is similar.

Romero was a Salvadorean Roman Catholic priest in the middle of the 20th century. He spent most
of his life and career in some form of academic employment, though he also served for much of that
time as a parish priest. However, it's fair to say his reputation within El Salvador was as a socially
conservative academic bureaucrat and academic. His appointment as Archbishop in February 1977
pleased the repressive Salvadorean government but not the broader church in that place. The next
month a liberationist priest, Rutilio Grande, was murdered for his activities in community
organization. Romero – the socially awkward academic – was changed in an instant. He said of that
moment: "When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, 'If they have killed him for doing
what he did, then I too have to walk the same path'”. He then acted in frankly the most remarkable
way, taking the option for the poor, encouraging community organization, and then finally, on the
23rd March 1980, using his regular radio programme to order the Salvadorean army to disobey
orders to repress the people, implying, indeed, that open mutiny was an option. The next day whilst
celebrating Mass at a hospital, he was shot to death by government operatives. His last words were
“God forgive the assassins”. Romero is an obvious interlocutor for us because he models in his own
life a turn from expecting something like church establishment and social cache to accepting there
was no lasting city here. But he does this – most impressively, I think – by holding an
eschatological emphasis in tension with a social and political agenda. Indeed, tension is not the
word – the two do not accidentally coincide, but are thoroughly integrated and inform each other.
His vibrant eschatology drives his desire for temporal justice. His honesty about the nature of
temporal justice requires him to take an eschatological perspective.

The idea of being a pilgrim church – one alienated from its geographical home – comes up time and
again, in different contexts, from who we expect to be a member of the pilgrim church to what
earthly possessions the pilgrim church seeks. But I'll offer one example of his reference to the idea
of the pilgrim church – which so heavily draws on Hebrews 11 and 13 – so as to demonstrate
Romero's interaction of eschatology and earthly action. He is speaking of the importance of patronal
feasts at churches:

The patron also is a proclamation of transcendence. Amid the church’s temporal concerns, the
patron is a Christian reminder of its eschatological destiny. But this is not disincarnate eschatology
or disincarnate transcendence. As a voice and message from beyond history, the patron is a
reminder that what is beyond is fashioned in the here and now of one’s own duties. The patron was
generally a pilgrim on this earth and, as patron, keeps on accompanying, from eternity, all the ups
and downs of God’s kingdom, which makes its home and finds its way in history and in the world.
(p83)

Though I am not the sort of focus too much on patronal feasts, I think that's really a remarkable
piece of exegesis in reception. What is beyond is fashioned in the here and now of one's own duties.
An interesting parallel could be made here to the reward-oriented ethics of C.S. Lewis. Romero
reminds his struggling congregants across the country – whose priests and nuns are being murdered,
whose churches are being burned down – that their eschatological hope is their best hope but it is a
hope which forbids a turning away from this world. It is a hope that requires looking at eternity
through the dirtied glass of the present.

What duties must the Christian fulfil, then? Romero says:

“The church’s social teaching tells everyone that the Christian religion does not have a merely
horizontal meaning, or a merely spiritualized meaning that overlooks the wretchedness that
surrounds it. It is a looking at God, and from God at one’s neighbour as a brother or sister, and an
awareness that “whatever you did to one of these, you did to me.”

Would that social movements knew this social teaching! They would not expose themselves to
failures, to shortsightedness, to a nearsightedness that sees no more than temporal things, the
structures of time. As long as one does not live a conversion in one’s heart, a teaching enlightened
by faith to organize life according to the heart of God, all will be feeble, revolutionary, passing,
violent. None of these is Christian.
MARCH 14, 1977 (pp14-15)”

So Romero's critique is not simply of disincarnate spirituality. It is also of fleshly liberationism that
is obsessed by the passing structures of this world and so fails to make any lasting impact. As he
says in a different sermon:
“Even though working for liberation along with those who hold other ideologies, Christians must
cling to their original liberation.
JUNE 19, 1977 (p15)”
What is clear when you dip into the breadth of his work is that the later Romero was intensely
focussed on social organization, on the reform and change of government and of the liberation of
the oppressed. He argues in one place that the church cannot critique violent revolutionary
movements until it proves itself willing to fight for social change – albeit with the violence not of
revolution but of love, that beats swords into ploughshares.

But the duty of the Christian is not just to fight for economic or social liberation whilst retaining a
Christian emphasis. The Jeremiac proclamation of the church is not just aimed against institutional
sin but against personal sin, too. Two brief quotes:

“It’s always the same. The prophet has to speak of society’s sin and
call to conversion, as the church is doing today in San Salvador:
pointing out whatever would enthrone sin in El Salvador’s history
and calling sinners to be converted, just as Jeremiah did.
AUGUST 14, 1977 (pp18-19)”

“It would be worthless to have an economic liberation in which all the poor had their own houses,
their own money, but were all sinners, their hearts estranged from God. What good would it be?
There are nations at present that are economically and socially quite advanced, for example those
of northern Europe, and yet how much vice and excess (p21)”.

In this connection Romero proves himself the troubling figure I mentioned him to be – he mentions
the seeking of sexual gratification irrespective of the Church's teaching of the Bible, he mentions
abortion, he mentions individualism. Romero's concern for the eschatological reality of the Gospel
means that no stone can be left unturned. The Army must be ordered to stand down. The poor must
self-organize with assistance from the church to be educated and to gain economic equity. But the
culture of the people must also be spoken to – the pilgrim church of God, because it cannot lose –
because, as he said, the redemption of the Church is certain, those who have been disappeared by
the Government will reappear – the pilgrim church can afford to take risks, to cling to unpopular
truths. I wonder how many of us have suddenly found very good reasons not to read Oscar Romero.

But what of our text? How do we act as if we have no lasting city? How do we join with those
chapter 11 later calls “of whom the world was not worthy”? Well, and it's a banal point in some
ways, but when the church – that is, all of those of us who are believers united by baptism and in
communion – sets aside a need for social cache and security and sides with those God has a special
care for (the poor, the destitute, the vulnerable), when it witnesses for God in a hostile environment
– in an environment like post-Christendom Europe, where it is marginalized – we are not less
ourselves, but more ourselves. When the church is forced to choose between an earthly homeland or
a lasting city, it reaches the true crisis of its existence and has the opportunity to bloom to full
flower as the delight of an alien and yet intimate God.

…..
that's all fairly banal and obvious, perhaps...but when we come to the task of understanding the
place of the church in society today – part of “thinking the church today” - we are left with certain
observations and certain challenges:

1) if we are to be a pilgrim people whose city is not here, we have to consider our ties to power
– for instance, the Church of England has a great deal of public access and some non-
Christians still look to the Archbishops for moral guidance – but can it function as a
“loudspeaker for Christ”, as Romero put it, when its practices can still be changed by an
often hostile Parliament? Or again – how do Christian business leaders in the City toss over
tables – and at what cost?
2) Mainline churches obviously generally have the longest records of evangelistic and
humanitarian service, as well as the greatest social cache – but with declining memberships
and social cache, various questions must be asked and indeed are being asked. But I would
look particularly at the issue of being a pilgrim people, united with other pilgrim people who
share the same joy and struggle, and say we need to think what unity in the Body of Christ
means today: what does a theologically diverse, and tending to liberal, Church of Scotland
or Methodist Church, have to teach to and learn from booming African Pentecostal or
British Charismatic churches, given the significant theological divides and denominational
focusses?
3) Do newer church movements risk repeating the mistakes Romero warns against – measuring
success solely by buildings or numbers, as opposed to sincerity?
4) Where our heart is, there our treasure will be too – whether we are making disciples in old
churches or new, or serving the poor, a pilgrim people has to assess its financial and time
resources. Romero never stopped being a man of academic mind – but he threw that mind
into proclaiming the good news of God til they killed him for it. Costly building projects –
whether it's a parish church repairing its roof or a charismatic church building a conference
centre – do not look very much like the “church” of Rutilio Grande.
If some day they take the radio station away from us,
if they close down our newspaper,
if they don’t let us speak,
if they kill all the priests and the bishop too,
and you are left, a people without priests,
each one of you must be God’s microphone,
each one of you must be a messenger,
a prophet.
The church will always exist
as long as there is one baptized person.
And that one baptized person who is left in the world
is responsible before the world for holding aloft
the banner of the Lord’s truth
and of his divine justice.
JULY 8, 1979 (p157)

The church’s social teaching tells everyone that the Christian

religion does not have a merely horizontal meaning, or a merely
spiritualized meaning that overlooks the wretchedness that
surrounds it. It is a looking at God, and from God at one’s neighbor
as a brother or sister, and an awareness that “whatever you did to
one of these, you did to me.”
Would that social movements knew this social teaching! They
would not expose themselves to failures, to shortsightedness, to a
nearsightedness that sees no more than temporal things, the
structures of time. As long as one does not live a conversion in one’s
heart, a teaching enlightened by faith to organize life according to
the heart of God, all will be feeble, revolutionary, passing, violent.
None of these is Christian.
MARCH 14, 1977 (pp14-15)

As Christians formed in the gospel

you have the right to organize
and, inspired by the gospel,
to make concrete decisions.
But be careful not to betray
those evangelical, Christian, supernatural convictions
in the company of those who seek other liberations
that can be merely economic, temporal, political.
Even though working for liberation
along with those who hold other ideologies,
Christians must cling to their original liberation.
JUNE 19, 1977 (p15)

You heard today in the first reading the accusations: “Death to that
Jeremiah! He’s demoralizing the soldiers and all of the people with
those speeches. That man doesn’t promote the people’s good, but
their harm.”
See how the accusations against the prophets of all times are the
same. When the prophet bothers the consciences of the selfish, or
of those who are not building with God’s plans, he is a nuisance and
must be eliminated, murdered, thrown into a pit, persecuted, not
allowed to speak the word that annoys.
But the prophet could not tell them anything else. Read in the
Bible how Jeremiah often prays to God, “Lord, take this cross away
from me. I don’t want to be a prophet. I feel my insides burning
because I have to say things even I don’t like.”
It’s always the same. The prophet has to speak of society’s sin and
call to conversion, as the church is doing today in San Salvador:
pointing out whatever would enthrone sin in El Salvador’s history
and calling sinners to be converted, just as Jeremiah did.
AUGUST 14, 1977 (pp18-19)

Let us not tire of preaching love;

it is the force that will overcome the world.
Let us not tire of preaching love.
Though we see that waves of violence
succeed in drowning the fire of Christian love,
love must win out; it is the only thing that can.
SEPTEMBER 25, 1977 (p20)

It would be worthless to have an economic liberation

in which all the poor had their own houses,
their own money,
but were all sinners,
their hearts estranged from God.
What good would it be?
There are nations at present
that are economically and socially quite advanced,
for example those of northern Europe,
and yet how much vice and excess!
The church will always have its word to say:
conversion.
Progress will not be completed
even if we organize ideally the economy
and the political and social order of our people.
It won’t be entire with that.
That will be the basis,
so that it can be completed
by what the church pursues and proclaims:
God adored by all,
Christ acknowledged as only Savior,
deep joy of spirit
in being at peace with God
and with our brothers and sisters.
OCTOBER 9, 1977 (p21)

Do you want to know if your Christianity is genuine?

Here is the touchstone:
Whom do you get along with?
Who are those who criticize you?
Who are those who do not accept you?
Who are those who flatter you?
Know from that what Christ said once:
“I have come not to bring peace, but division.”
There will be division even in the same family,
because some want to live more comfortably
by the world’s principles,
those of power and money.
But others have embraced the call of Christ
and must reject all that cannot be just in the world.
NOVEMBER 13, 1977 (p22)

When we preach the Lord’s word,

we decry not only the injustices of the social order.
We decry every sin that is night, that is darkness:
drunkenness, gluttony, lust, adultery, abortion,
everything that is the reign of iniquity and sin.
Let them all disappear from our society.
NOVEMBER 27, 1977 (pp24-25)

We have never preached violence,

except the violence of love,
which left Christ nailed to a cross,
the violence that we must each do to ourselves
to overcome our selfishness
and such cruel inequalities among us.
The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword,
the violence of hatred.
It is the violence of love,
of brotherhood,
the violence that wills to beat weapons
into sickles for work.
NOVEMBER 27, 1977 (p25)

Brothers and sisters, the church is not mistaken.

The church awaits with certainty the hour of redemption.
Those who have disappeared will reappear.
The sorrows of these mothers will be turned into Easter.
The affliction of this people,
which knows not where it goes amid so much affliction,
will become Easter resurrection
if we join ourselves to Christ
and hope in him.
DECEMBER 1, 1977 (p27)

One day, there will be no more Masses,

no more need of temporal priests,
because all of us,
through the labours of priests, of bishops,
of catechists, of lay ministers of the word,
of all God’s priestly people,
will have achieved humanity’s incorporation into Christ,
and Christ will be the one priest,
formed in his historical and eternal fullness
by all of us who in the course of history
have made with him one sole priesthood,
one sole offertory, one sole Mass
that will last eternally to sing God’s glory.
This is the destiny, the objective
for which we priests work in history.
There, my brother priests, in everlasting glory
along with all of our people, our people glorified,
we shall feel the boundless satisfaction
of having worked with Christ
to make humanity God’s living temple,
the living image of God’s Spirit in eternity.
DECEMBER 10, 1977 (p32)

Let us not measure the church by the number of its members

or by its material buildings.
The church has built many houses of worship,
many seminaries,
many buildings that have been taken from her.
They have been stolen
and turned into libraries
and barracks
and markets
and other things.
That doesn’t matter.
The material walls here will be left behind in history.
What matters is you, the people,
your hearts.
God’s grace giving you God’s truth and life.
Don’t measure yourselves by your numbers.
Measure yourselves by the sincerity of heart
with which you follow the truth and light
of our divine Redeemer.
DECEMBER 19, 1977 (pp37-38)

I am glad that a serious examination of living the gospel

is being made among Protestants.
There is conflict – God be blessed.
When a sore spot is touched,
there is conflict, there is pain.
And Protestantism is putting its hand on the sore spot.
It is saying that one cannot be a true Protestant,
a true follower of the gospel,
if one does not draw from the gospel
all the conclusions it contains for this earth,
that one cannot live a gospel that is too angelical,
a gospel of compliance,
a gospel that is not dynamic peace,
a gospel that is not of demanding dimensions
in regard to temporal matters also.
DECEMBER 31, 1977 (p40)

A preaching that does not point out sin

is not the preaching of the gospel.
A preaching that makes sinners feel good,
so that they become entrenched in their sinful state,
betrays the gospel’s call.

A preaching that does not discomfit sinners

but lulls them in their sin
leaves Zebulun and Naphtali
in the shadow of death.
A preaching that awakens,
a preaching that enlightens –
as when a light turned on
awakens and of course annoys a sleeper –
that is the preaching of Christ, calling:
Wake up! Be converted!
That is the church’s authentic preaching.
Naturally, such preaching must meet conflict,
must spoil what is miscalled prestige,
must disturb,
must be persecuted.
It cannot get along with the powers of darkness and sin.
JANUARY 22, 1978 (pp45-46)

The parable of the wheat and the weeds should lead us,
brothers and sisters,
to understand the mystery of iniquity,
which is also operative in the church.
The church is not just the wheat crop.
Bishops, priests, nuns, lay people,
families, youths, Catholic schools –
should they not all be holy?
Indeed they should.
Are they?
Sadly, we must say no.
Then the church is false?
No.
If a church wants to pride itself on having only holy members,
it won’t be the true church,
for Christ has said that his church is like a field
where wheat and weeds bear fruit.
While we live in this pilgrim church,
we have to be together,
wheat and weeds.
JULY 23, 1978 (pp77-78)

The patron also is a proclamation of transcendence. Amid the church’s temporal concerns, the
patron is a Christian reminder of its eschatological destiny. But this is not disincarnate
eschatology or disincarnate transcendence. As a voice and message from beyond history, the
patron is a reminder that what is beyond is fashioned in the here and now of one’s own duties.
The patron was generally a pilgrim on this earth and, as patron, keeps on accompanying,
from eternity, all the ups and downs of God’s kingdom, which makes its home and finds its
way in history and in the world. (p83)
It moves one’s heart to think:
Nine months before I was born
there was a woman who loved me deeply.
She did not know what I was going to be like,
but she loved me
because she carried me in her womb.
And when she gave me birth,
she took me in her arms
because her love was not just beginning –
she conceived it along with me.
A mother loves –
and that is why abortion is so abhorrent:
A mother who aborts
is unfaithful to the love that she should have
(like God in eternity)
before her child is born.
God is the exquisite likeness
of a mother with child.
God bore me in his womb
and loved me and destined me
and already thought of my days
and of my death.
(p84)

Even the chains of the prison make him joyful,

says St. Paul,
because “I am making Christ known here
to all the praetorian guardsmen.”69
It’s as though someone were to say,
“Here in the quarters of the Guardia,
shackled,
I am making known this Christ in whom I believe
to whoever wants to listen.”
Many praetorians were converted,
for God calls everyone.
God is calling even the torturer.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1978 (p105)

If some day they take the radio station away from us,
if they close down our newspaper,
if they don’t let us speak,
if they kill all the priests and the bishop too,
and you are left, a people without priests,
each one of you must be God’s microphone,
each one of you must be a messenger,
a prophet.
The church will always exist
as long as there is one baptized person.
And that one baptized person who is left in the world
is responsible before the world for holding aloft
the banner of the Lord’s truth
and of his divine justice.
JULY 8, 1979 (p157)