Arthur Jones' Adios

Arthur Jones has said goodbye to National Catholic Reporter readers "30 years and 55 countries later" by writing a four-part
reflection that ended today. Here is a paragraph from the middle of part four:

"And so to my ultimate astonishment: observing a self-satisfied church that hasn’t even got enough priests to celebrate the Eucharist. A church’s vitality ebbing, and already a quarter-century into a free-fall Dark Ages of its own devising, a Dark Ages from which it will not emerge until well into the second half of this century. It takes about 60 years for a socio-ideological cycle to wind down, and we are only 27 years into the conservative-fundamentalist revival that began with the rise to power -- all in a four-year period -- of John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah Khomeini."