It is no secret that the Church finds herself in crisis, and the awareness of such a fact is ‘pessimism’ only in the eyes of those for whom all change is necessarily a tragedy. It would seem more realistic to follow the example of Pope John (and of Pope Paul after him) and to envisage courageously the challenges of an unknown future in which the Christian can find security not, perhaps, in the lasting strength of familiar human structures but certainly in the promises of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. After all, Christian hope itself would be meaningless if there were no risks to face and if the future were definitively mortgaged to an unchanging present. Christian hope is confident not in metaphysical immobility but in the dynamism of unfailing love. ‘Crisis’ means ‘judgment’, and the present is always being judged as it gives way to what was, yesterday, the future. Only when we try to drag yesterday bodily with us into the future does ‘crisis’ become ‘cataclysm’. An ‘optimism’ that insists on denying evident realities is hardly inspired by Christian truth, and true hope is that which finds motives for confidence precisely in the ‘crisis’ which seems to threaten that which is dearest to us: for it is here above all that the power of God will break through the meaningless impasse of prejudices and cruelties in which we always tend to become entrapped. It is in the crises of history most of all that the Church knows, from experience, that the truth shall make her free.