ROME — Joseph Ratzinger, as a theologian and cardinal, returned to the question often over the years. And now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his paper trail on the issue provokes skepticism about him among more liberal Roman Catholics.
The question, in his own words: "Is the church really going to get smaller?"
At another point, in an interview published in 1997 in "Salt of the Earth" (Ignatius Press), he explained it this way: "Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the church's history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intense struggle against evil and bring good into the world — that let God in."
The standard argument is that Benedict "wants a more fervent, orthodox, evangelical church — even if it drives people away," as a New Yorker headline put it recently.
But as with much around this new pope, the whole story is complicated. He has yet to announce an overall program, having been in office just five weeks, but both critics and supporters alike say that it is unlikely that he would plan to prune back the church intentionally — or that he could.
"I don't get any sense of him wanting to purge or anything," said Christopher Ruddy, an assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. "But I think he is willing to say what he thinks are hard truths, or unpopular truths."
The question is whether those hard truths — on sexuality, on the proper celebration of Mass, on standards for receiving communion — will scare off Catholics who disagree.
From its first days, the church struggled with sects and schisms and later with the Reformation, and in modern times it is torn by scores of local interests, sex scandals and dissent on contraception and the role of women in the church.
Perhaps of more interest to Pope Benedict is that the church is also bombarded by a secular culture that he believes offers no fixed values. And the eternal question for the church remains: What do Catholics need to do and believe, in order truly to belong?
"There are those who argue that the best way for the church to spread its message is to embrace the largest number of people and to work with them where they are," said John-Peter Pham, a professor at James Madison University and a former Vatican envoy. "And at the opposite end are those who would argue that actually the same message is much more credible when it's propounded by a smaller group of individuals who live it more intensely."
Some experts question whether there is much that any pope can do — apart from some seismic, and highly unlikely, reorientation of the church — to scare off large numbers of worshipers.
"The theory and the practice are very different," said Dr. Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religion at Pennsylvania State University. People tend to belong first to their local parish, then their national church. Local priests and bishops, Jenkins said, often act as buffers against unpopular decisions from the hierarchy.
An example is the resistance from Asian bishops to a Vatican document, "Dominus Jesus," overseen by Ratzinger in 2000, which referred to faiths other than Christianity as "deficient." Peter C. Phan, a professor of Catholic thought at Georgetown, noted that the Asian bishops, surrounded by other religions, responded by stressing less the truth of Catholicism and more the need "to listen to the teachings and practices of these religions respectfully."
Pope Benedict's own record on the idea of a smaller church is layered. On one hand, he has issued documents like "Dominus Jesus"; has condemned Catholics who choose the teachings they like; and has spoken of cutting down the church bureaucracy and free universities and hospitals that are Catholic in name only.
But he does not seem to speak happily about the prospect of a smaller church. "Most people admit that at the present stage of things in Europe, the number of baptized Christians is simply dwindling," he said in a 2002 book of interviews, "God and the World" (Ignatius Press). "We simply have to face up to it."
In that book, in fact, he strongly opposes the idea of being a "closed club."
"I have nothing against it, then, if people who all year long never visit a church go there at least on Christmas Night or New Year's Eve or on special occasions, because this is another way of belonging to the blessing of the sacred, to the light," he said.
For Pope Benedict, fundamentally a man of Europe, the issue of a smaller church seems mostly to be defined by the losses in the developed world, since growth in the Third World has pushed church membership to more than 1 billion.
And his approach to re-evangelize Europe, some think, is likely to differ from that of Pope John Paul II and his stadium rallies. Many experts expect a greater focus on small groups, based on the model of his namesake, St. Benedict, who inspired the monastic order that spread Christianity and Western culture in Europe in the Dark Ages.
Pope Benedict XVI has spoken favorably of Catholic lay groups, especially the more conservative Communion and Liberation, in Italy, but has also worked with the more liberal St. Egidio, also in Italy. Critics of the idea say these small groups risk creating local church elites with less loyalty to the hierarchy than to the groups' founders.
But Jenkins said he believed emphasizing smaller associations had "some real merit to it." He added: "The Christian concept is 'leaven' and that's a very strong idea — which is, you have these activist groups and by pursuing their own religious ideas they tend to revive the whole community."
Some day, Ratzinger once wrote, the West will tire of secularism and spiritual loneliness. "And they will discover the little community of believers as something quite new," he wrote. "As a hope that is there for them, as the answer they have always been looking for."