Cardinal Joachim Meisner was a doctrinal conservative, and one of the four cardinals who signed the dubia questioning the orthodoxy of parts of Pope Francis’s encyclical Amoris Laetitia. Hours after the conservative Cardinal Gerhard Müller phoned to let the older German cardinal know that Francis had cashiered him at the CDF, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Cardinal Meisner died. As Ross Douthat writes in his column this week, the death of Meisner was one of several events that removed significant opposition to Francis’s agenda among conservatives at the senior level of the Catholic Church.

At Cardinal Meisner’s funeral in Cologne today, a representative of the retired Pope Benedict XVI read a short message from him. (The original German statement is here.) It included this stunning paragraph:

We know that this passionate pastor and shepherd found it particularly difficult to leave his post, especially at a time in which the Church stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age [Zeitgeistes] and who live and think the faith with determination. However, what moved me all the more was that, in this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon his church, even when the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.

Keep in mind that Catholics think of the Church as the “barque of Peter” — a boat, captained by Peter. Benedict XVI is saying here that the Church appears to be going down, capitulating to the Zeitgeist. He is praising Cardinal Meisner for living with serenity, confident that come what may, Jesus will not abandon the Church.

I had to re-read that statement from Benedict several times to quite believe it. This is a staggering remark, one whose power is amplified by the fact that it was delivered at the requiem mass for a cardinal who challenged Pope Francis directly. I cannot read it as other than Benedict’s judgment of the state of the Catholic Church under Francis. If you have a more plausible reading, let’s hear it.

If I’m correct, contained within these few lines is Benedict’s counsel to the Catholic faithful who wish to resist this dictatorship of the Zeitgeist: you are not wrong; things really are as bad as they seem — but stand fast in the faith, and fear not.

What’s interesting too is that things may not seem that bad far from Rome. But Benedict XVI is at the summit of the Church, and has been for most of his long clerical career. He knows what’s going on in the Vatican. He knows what has been going on in the Vatican. He sees what few people outside of Rome can.

(By the way, Christians in the West outside the Roman fold who think this is purely a Catholic problem are whistling past the graveyard. We all live under the dictatorship of the Zeitgeist. There is no place completely safe from it.)

In the opening chapter to The Benedict Option, I characterized the contemporary situation as a catastrophe for Western civilization in general and faithful Christians in particular. I cited Benedict XVI’s likening of our time to that of the West in the fall of the Roman Empire (the then-pope was speaking specifically of Europe, but Europe is only slightly ahead of the United States in these matters). It is indeed an alarming scenario, one that some critics have derided as “alarmist”. I wonder if those same people would criticize Joseph Ratzinger for being “alarmist” in his statement today.

The thing is, Father Joseph Ratzinger, in 1969, predicted all of this would happen. “The real crisis has scarcely begun,” he said then. And here we are today. We are not nearly at the bottom. Ratzinger predicted a great trial and a winnowing. And after that:

The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

Again, we non-Catholic Christians are by no means free from these trials. Any non-Catholic Christian who sees the agonies of the Catholic Church and feels a surge of triumphalism is a fool — as is any Catholic who feels triumphalistic over the rest of us. Open your eyes! Look around! All of us Christians who refuse to submit to the post-Christian Zeitgeist are in this together. This crisis is why I wrote The Benedict Option. But there is hope, real hope, not happy-clappy optimism. As I write in the book:

In this book, you will meet men and women who are today’s Benedicts. Some live in the countryside. Others live in the city. Still others make their homes in the suburbs. All of them are faithful orthodox Christians—that is, theological conservatives within the three main branches of historic Christianity—who know that if believers don’t come out of Babylon and be separate, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally, their faith will not survive for another generation or two in this culture of death. They recognize an unpopular truth: politics will not save us. Instead of looking to prop up the current order, they have recognized that the kingdom of which they are citizens is not of this world and have decided not to compromise that citizenship. What these orthodox Christians are doing now are the seeds of what I call the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church to embrace “exile in place” and form a vibrant counterculture. Recognizing the toxins of modern secularism, as well as the fragmentation caused by relativism, Benedict Option Christians look to Scripture and to Benedict’s Rule for ways to cultivate practices and communities. Rather than panicking or remaining complacent, they recognize that the new order is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived with. It will be those who learn how to endure with faith and creativity, to deepen their own prayer lives and adopting practices, focusing on families and communities instead of on partisan politics, and building churches, schools, and other institutions within which the orthodox Christian faith, can survive and prosper through the flood.