"The form of the Church ... is the form of the Cross"

From a lecture given by Archbishop Chaput in Slovakia last year, addressing the challenges facing the Church in an age of de-christianisation:

So what does this mean for us as individual disciples? Let me offer a few suggestions by way of a conclusion.

My first suggestion comes again from the great witness against the paganism of the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The renewal of the Western world lies solely in the divine renewal of the Church, which leads her to the fellowship of the risen and living Jesus Christ.”

The world urgently needs a re-awakening of the Church in our actions and in our public and private witness.  The world needs each of us to come to a deeper experience of our Risen Lord in the company of our fellow believers. The renewal of the West depends overwhelmingly on our faithfulness to Jesus Christ and his Church.

We need to really believe what we say we believe. Then we need to prove it by the witness of our lives. We need to be so convinced of the truths of the Creed that we are on fire to live by these truths, to love by these truths, and to defend these truths, even to the point of our own discomfort and suffering.

We are ambassadors of the living God to a world that is on the verge of forgetting him. Our work is to make God real; to be the face of his love; to propose once more to the men and women of our day, the dialogue of salvation.

The lesson of the 20th century is that there is no cheap grace. This God whom we believe in, this God who loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to suffer and die for it, demands that we live the same bold, sacrificial pattern of life shown to us by Jesus Christ.

The form of the Church, and the form of every Christian life, is the form of the cross. Our lives must become a liturgy, a self-offering that embodies the love of God and the renewal of the world.

Chaput's words address the context in which the Ordinariates are coming into being.  Beyond all the institutional challenges facing the Ordinariates (see Damian Thompson on this), the defining challenge will be how the Ordinariates respond to the call to share in the new evangelisation.  What does it mean for the form of the Ordinariates to be the form of the Cross?  What does it mean for the Ordinariates to lead people in our secularised societies to what Archbishop Chaput termed "a deeper experience of our Risen Lord" in the communion of the Catholic Church?  What can the Ordinariates contribute to the Church's public witness?  Such questions, it is to be hoped, will be at the heart of the life of the Ordinariates.