Spoiler-Alert!
This article contains spoilers about The Lord of the Rings, especially the third part.
At a conference I attended some time ago, all participants were asked to draw up a picture of the future of the church. Looking back on the conference, whose title was "Women's Power and Men's Power. Potentials and Obstacles of Equal Participation in the Catholic Church" and many other current challenges in the Church and the world, I came up with an image that describes not so much the future as the current situation in which we find ourselves if the future described by other participants is to come to pass.