In the Freiburg Concert Hall, Benedict frankly told the German leaders: \u201cFor some time now we have been experiencing a decline in religious practice and we have been seeing substantial numbers of the baptized drifting away from church life.\u201d\u009d Benedict is a realist. So demands for change arise, changes almost always modeled on secular institutions and not on the sources of the original founding of the Church. Such radical changes would never work. The Church is of divine, not human law, in its essence.<\/p>\n
Here, Benedict recalls that someone once asked Mother Teresa this same question about what needs to be changed in the Church. Her answer was \u201cyou and I.\u201d\u009d Chesterton was once asked a similar question. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with the world?” He answered with wonderful brevity and profundity, \u201cI am.\u201d\u009d Mother Teresa meant by this response that the Church is not \u201cother people.\u201d\u009d \u201cEvery Christian and the whole community of the faithful are called to constant change,\u201d\u009d change away from sin, change to accept what is revealed, to accept what is true. What sort of change? \u201cThe fundamental motive for change is the apostolic mission of the disciples and the Church herself.\u201d\u009d Why is this? It is because ultimately this mission is not of our own making and arises from God\u2019s presence in the world.<\/p>\n
The Church is to keep its mission in mind. Christians are told: \u201cYou are witnesses.\u201d\u009d They are not, at bottom, originators. They are to pass along what is heard, what is witnessed to every age and place. All nations, all times, and all places are in the original intention of the Church\u2019s founding. This means that we must not think as the world, for something less than what we are. The Church must be rather in a way \u201cunworldly.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n