Reddit reviews The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

There are projections that show that, at the rate priests are aging and retiring, and at the rate fewer and fewer people are joining the priesthood, there will be only 1000 priests active in France in 20 years.

So in other words, in at least one Western country, the number of priests, masses offered, parishes able to remain active, ect, will be reduced by about 90%. For a sense of what that is like, just imagine, if 90% of priests in your state disappeared tomorrow, or if 9 out of ten Catholic Churches near you closed.

And this is in 20 years. To put that in perspective, 20 years ago from the present was 1998.

So yeah, the Church is pretty screwed. I think our only real option is to retreat, regroup, and focus on the fundmentals of the faith. Eventually, the time to reevangalize society will come but that's many decades, maybe a century away. Basically, that's our children's job. Our job is to preserve as much of the Church as we can and rebuild her to weather the coming storm.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/the-benedict-option/

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/

Here's the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Benedict-Option-Strategy-Christians-Post-Christian/dp/0735213291

Bsp Barron says that during times of hardship we should “hunker down,” to keep the faith alive. He cites John Paul II as an example of this where, as a younger man, Wojtyla kept himself hidden from Communist oppression, studying the faith intensively, thus allowing him to bring it back to people later in life as Pope. Without that period of hiding, Wojtyla may never have become Pope.

We may be so inclined to do the same again. In this period of modern spiritual and social anxiety, an “Anxious Age” in a Post-Protestant America, we may indeed again might have to hunker-down to keep the faith alive, allowing us to bring it back to the world when time permits. Or perhaps we could take the “Benedict Option” approach by simply retreating into our own self-sustaining communities of faith - something the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and even Mormons have accomplished quite well. In self-isolation, these groups are able to maintain identity against a hyper-liberalized consumer culture which tells us that religion “can be whatever you want.” They maintain their sense of purpose by leaving those who have none.

Of course, that’s an extreme. But it’s something to consider.

That being said, we must remember that this spiritual anxiety has very much been caused not because we, as a society, have intellectually “outgrown God,” as many modern secular thinkers posit, like Steven Pinker or Yuval Harari. Rather, it is that a sense of language, a language that allowed us to discuss and believe in the transcendent. has been lost in the wake of modernity. Hyper-liberalism, with its mixing of a consumer lead culture and a focus on the needs of the individual above all else, along with the denial of the value of authority (especially so as it relates to the church) has bred an extreme relativism that would be unthinkable several decades ago.

When we read the words of the spiritually drifting Nones who make up so much of our generation, we do not find individuals who are extremely well educated about religion, philosophy, history or science. They are in many respects simply basic with their understanding of the world in that they are not extraordinarily well educated about any particular subject as it relates to the faith. Many millennial Christians themselves espouse outright heresy, though it’s usually inadvertent.

We are not dealing with some sort of grand atheistic intellectual movement in the halls of American high schools and colleges. It’s not as though such students are all huddling together sharing essays from David Hume, since the majority don’t even know his name. They are spiritually lost because of ignorance, and because of cultural reasons, like the increasing rates of religious and ethnic diversity which pressure us when it comes to stating objective truths (since sharing the Gospel as a factual reality would make our non-Christian neighbor uncomfortable). It is our job to “re-educate” our peers on Mere Christianity. No one else will do it.

It’ll be hard struggle.

Reminds me of the premise of the book The Benedict Option, which I haven't gotten around to reading yet.

M8, I totally understand where you're coming from. If we would have followed the teachings of the Church, we would have raised good, modest, humble children who would grow up to have respectable jobs, marry young, and have a lot of children. None of this would be happening because we would already have a large, youthful, virtuous population. But we have lost the faith and become utterly degenerate. We have reverted to our barbarian roots. We deserve this. We deserve to perish unless we repent of our ways. God is the only one who can save us at this point. It is only by His grace that the West will be delivered. We need a massive revival of and rebirth of Christendom, a Second Renaissance if you will.

BTW, if you haven't already, I highly recommend picking up [The Benedict Option.] (https://www.amazon.com/Benedict-Option-Strategy-Christians-Post-Christian/dp/0735213291) Rod Dreher talks about how the West has fallen to the new barbarians, and how we need to band together in a grassroots movements to restart Western Civilization by forming small, exclusive communities. According to Dreher, we are on the verge of the Second Dark Ages.