Milestones: A Simple Faith

Continuing my series of excerpts from Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones:

I have often reflect since then on this remarkable disposition of Providence: that, in this century of progress and faith in science, the Church should have found herself represented most clearly in very simple people, in a Bernadette of Lourdes, for instance, or even in a Brother Konrad [of Parzham], who hardly seemed to be touched by the currents of the time. Is this a sign that the Church has lost her power to shape culture and can take root only outside the real current of history? Or is it a sign that the clear view of the essential, which is so often lacking in the "wise and prudent" (See Mt 11:25), is given in our days, too, to little ones? I do this that precisely these "little" saints are a great sign to our time, a sign that moves me ever more deeply, the more I live with and in our time. (p. 9)