ABSTRACT
This chapter takes us into a community of faith and looks at ways in which that community responds to its own decline and to increasing atheism. It focuses on Karl Rahner’s attitude in the 1970s to the contemporary and prospective on-going diminishment of the Roman Catholic Church. With Rahner, the author resists the notion that if only we get our theology right, all be well. This puts ourselves too much at the centre of the story. The author turns instead to notions of providence and hope, thus giving us a reasoned example of how these concepts can work, or why they may be rejected, in a community of faith.
