Like sheep among wolves

     "So seen, 'Catholic Action' is at the same time—through the strange [but] providential enchainment of an act of love to the pressure [imposed] by a world that slips again and again into the [posture of an] Anti-Church—the only form of the work of the Church in the world possible today.  Thanks to the accelerating disentanglement of the interpenetration and mutually supportive reinforcement of Church and State that grew up historically, [the Church] has now only as much indirect power over the individual as he in freedom confers upon it.   Despite all [of the] concordats, there remain to it almost no public legal means of holding him, with the help of the State, to even the merely external fulfillment of its requirements.  [If] the Church must release the faithful, as those strengthened—confirmed!—by the Holy Spirit for their world-sanctifying office, into the world [just] as it did in its first times, [then] it can no longer, by [an] indirect influence over the shape of the public temporal order, protect [them] from the most extreme of trials in the here and now."

     Ignaz Zangerle, "Zur situation der Kirche," Der Brenner 14 (1933/34): 46.  Bio here and here.