Building Material
Ida Görres wrote Bread Grows in Winter in 1970. She affirmed the ‘great and promising sowing’ that had taken place at the Second Vatican Council, yet was shaken by the amount of sheer deconstruction going on in the Church. In the middle of it all, and in her own perplexity, she determinedly looked out for those trying to build on the Council’s true foundations. ‘It is for them that we, the elderly, the ones bowing out, must preserve the ground plans and seeds that now have been all but forgotten. Who knows, we might see a generation after this that will be tired of their fathers’ delight in pulling down and will look for material with which to construct time-bridges between what has gone before and what will be their own today. Development does not happen in straight lines or on a single track, the way we would like; it zigzags and spirals. At the next great turning point, the old and the true must be at hand for those who seek it. It must not have been ground to smithereens in a waste truck.’ This task, said Görres, is entrusted to two groups above all: ‘the bishops and the little ones in the people of God’.
