B16 on movements and monasteries

A Christian environment is an essential factor. I would put it like this: No one can be a Christian alone; being a Christian means a communion of wayfarers. Even a hermit belongs to a wayfaring community and is sustained by it. For this reason it must be the Church’s concern to create pilgrim communities. The social culture of Europe and America no longer offers these wayfaring communities…(the Church)…will have to form new ways of pilgrim fellowship; communities will have to shape each other more intensely by supporting each other and living in the faith.

The mere social environment is no longer sufficient today; we can no longer take for granted a universal Christian atmosphere. Christians must therefore really support one another. And here there are, in fact, already other forms, “movements” of various kinds, which help to form pilgrim communities....Close association with monastic communities will certainly be one way to have an experience of the Christian reality. In other words, if society in its totality is no longer a Christian environment, just as it was not in the first four or five centuries, the Church herself must form cells in which mutual support and a common journey, and thus the great vital milieu of the Church in miniature, can be experienced and put into practice.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, pgs. 264-5