If it is notoriously difficult to try to forecast how things will be in 2025, and it will be notoriously foolhardy to say how the world will be towards the end of the 21st century, it will be near raving madness to claim to be able to forecast what it will be at the end of the millennium. We can only ask a few questions.

Post-electronic, post-computer, post-fax, post-telephone technology? Weekends for the rich outside the planet earth? Sabbaticals for the not so rich on Mars? Average life expectancy at 110? AIDS, like smallpox today, completely eradicated? Post-AIDS a problem? Abortion for the few who want it as simple as drawing a packet of razor blades from a vending machine and for the many who do not want it the safe period safe and most easy to use? Islam with the most numerous adherents on our planet? Christian and Islamic missionaries go to other planets in the 3rd millennium as they did to Africa and Asia in the 2nd? With the same or a humbler missionary approach? A developed theo-anthropology of human life in other planets?

But are there no fixed points that will be fixed at the end of the millennium, as fixed as they were when human life began on the planet, or as they were a few decades after Jesus of Nazareth died, or at the end of the first millennium, or in 1999? The certainties of faith spring to our minds.

Real, effective, selfless love of one’s fellow human beings - this is the only basic and non-negotiable truth of genuine religio-moral living (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian or any other) at any time past or at any time future in the history of humankind (Mt 25, 34-46; Gal. 5, 14; Jas. 2, 8 etc.).

But there are also historical events that can never be denied the validity of truth: for instance, that Asoka lived, that Gotama the Buddha lived, that Jesus lived. If they not only lived, but also spoke, and left reliable records behind of what they said or did, then as things once said or done these too will remain a thousand or ten thousand years from now.

One of those records says of Jesus:

“So he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and went to synagogue on the Sabbath day as he regularly did. He stood up to read the lesson and was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the scroll and found the passage which says,

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me;
he has sent me to announce good news to the poor,
to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of
sight for the blind;
to let the broken victims go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
He rolled up the scroll, gave it back
to the attendant, and sat down;
and all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him.”

We can with certainty forecast that these words will be read by followers of Jesus as they meet in groups in the year 2999 exactly as they were read by the followers of Jesus in their little groups at the time Jesus first spoke them and as we read them today.

This then is the certainty that we can have now of the faith, the religion and the spirituality of the Church of the Christians during the entirety of this nascent millennium and at its end, because on these words had to be based the faith, the religion and the spirituality of the Church that we knew during our own lifetime, and that Christians at any time in history knew.

It may however be said that by the end of the millennium there will be no poor people anywhere in the world, meaning by this that will be no woman, man or child in the world who will unwillingly go to bed hungry, who will not have a roof to shelter under and medicines to take when sick.

I remember Arlon in Belgium in 1953. I asked some Jesuit novices there, ‘How often do you go out to visit the poor?’ and they answered, ‘The poor? Who are they? There are none in Arlon’. However that may be in 2999 in the matter of economic poverty, we may be sure that there will be many in every clime and country who will be socially and psychologically poor, hungry not for food but for love, feeling unwanted, undesirable, ostracized, there will be millions in jails for offences committed or imputed, in mental hospitals, disabled either in their own homes or in homes set apart for them. And with less certainty we may forecast that there will be a few very rich nations, many less rich nations, and even relatively poor nations.

And to these Jesus will still say, as ever he said, since that first day in the Nazareth synagogue,

I have come to bring good news to you who are poor,
I have come to let the broken victims go free,
I have come to proclaim that God loves you preferentially.

Not only will the words be said and heard in 2999, it will by then be impossible not to understand them as a manifesto for the liberation of the poor. It will then seem most strange that at any time in the hoary past of Christianity they were not taken at their face value and, instead, given all kinds of interpretation or indeed that they made no special impression and so were given no interpretation at all.

This was my fate for the first fifty or so years of my life. During the last thirty of those fifty I must have read them or heard them read several times every year, or indeed, every month. I read then and passed on, just as I still do after reading hundreds of lines in the Bible. Only in the last twenty six did I understand them in the sense that I now hold most strongly to be the obvious one and the only tenable and true one. Jesus has come, comes and will come all through the millennium as the Man-God of the poor, the outcasts, those of little consequence, both nations and individuals.

The God of triumphalist fundamentalism, whether Christian, Islamic, Hindu or any other, will die during the millennium, certainly by the time the millennium reaches its closing centuries. Who is this triumphalist God? - the God who rewards God-believers with the riches of this world, the God who lets the rich keep their riches for themselves, the God of the prosperous, the God of prosperity. It is not insignificant that contemporary Christian fundamentalism appeared first in the prosperous United States of America, Islamic fundamentalism in the newly rich Middle East, while Hindu fundamentalism is a phenomenon of the upper classes and castes in India. Religious people of the future will have cause to rejoice over the death of this God.

Instead, in truly believing Christian communities, no matter their country, God will be believed in as the God of the poor, and as the God of the New Testament, the God who loves and cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, for the little ones, as the God who comes in the person of the carpenter of Gallilee, as the God in Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed I should like to believe that more and more during the millennium - especially in Asia where the Christians will be a small minority - Christians will not need to know not so much that Jesus is God but that God is Jesus of Nazareth. God speaks in the way that Jesus speaks. God acts in the way Jesus acts. He does not condemn except those who are hypocrites and lack honesty and sincerity even in the high places they occupy in the Church; he heals, he has compassion, he knows that sinners are more victims than culprits, he loves people and allows them to love him.

The Church itself will become more and more the Church of the Poor. We may here recall Rahner’s tripartite theological periodization of the history of the Church: the Church of Jesus (and St Paul), lasting until Constantine, the Church of the Church lasting until the middle of the 20th century, and finally the Church of the Poor. It is the vision that John XXIII had when he called the Second Vatican Council: ‘I pray that the Church will be the Church of all, but especially of the poor.’ And his friend, Cardinal Lercaro at the Council, ‘I have seen the draft themes suggested for our Declaration on the Church and am very disappointed. Far it be for me to add yet another theme to this already long list of themes. I suggest that this Council shall have only one theme, the Church of the Poor.’ His speech received rare applause on the floor of the Council. But it ended here. The task of making the Church the Church of the Poor perhaps was left for the Vatican of the next century and millennium. The Vatican itself will have moved to one of the big cities of Africa or Asia.

And so, by the end of the present millennium, believers in God and followers of Jesus will no longer allow themselves to be called Lordship, Grace, Holiness, Eminence, Most Reverend, Right Reverend or Reverend. There will be no Kings and Queens, Lords and Ladies, Majesties, Royal Highnesses. All will be sisters and brothers of the poor in the Church of the Poor.

At least so I hope.