«Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life»

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Go and Evangelizad 142  “The Hope that save us”

Hope is the structuring principle of Christian life.

Editorial

Pope Francis has called for a Jubilee centered on hope. Every Jubilee since the Middle Ages has been linked to hope. Hope: trust (faith) in the love of God who forgives us, frees us, and saves us. It is a holy year, that is, a time of grace during which the faithful can receive plenary indulgences: the total remission of temporal punishment for sins. Jubilees in the Catholic Church, as in the Old Testament, are linked to penance, reconciliation, and conversion, leading to a renewal of faith and increased communion with God.

In short, it is an expression of trust in God’s love that manifests itself in tangible acts to build his Kingdom in this world. However, how to speak of a God who reveals himself as love in the face of a reality marked by hatred, oppression, and war? How to speak of the God of life to those who experience the premature, violent, and unjust death of friends and family? With what words to tell those who see their dignity crushed that they are children of God? With what arguments to announce the truth to people immersed in the era of ideologies and the dictatorship of relativism, with the certain horizon of a meaningless death?

 

“…There is only true service to the poor if there is true identification with them, with their mentality, with their lifestyle and, above all, with their pain.

Guillermo Rovirosa

 

Faced with this reality, the neo-pagan proposal consists in falsifying hope in the lives of all people, especially among the most impoverished. This social and spiritual engineering, has a demonic root and its executing arms are capitalism and communism: the first, promoting the primacy of money over human dignity, egocentrism, and the culture of well-being as an answer to the yearnings of humanity, turning a deaf ear to the suffering of millions of brothers and sisters; the second, promoting class struggle as a way to achieve justice and submission to the State as a new hope of salvation. Both converge in a rethinking of the spiritual life of man; from an immanentist anthropology that, denying the supernatural vocation of man, reduces everything to mere solipsism, with proposals of pseudo-spiritualities centered on the self, without any commitment to the other; with the manipulation of language, seeking to replace the virtue of hope with modern optimism, which is the positive attitude to the uncertainty from voluntarism; promoting the lack of solidarity, which denies the associated life, making a social approach from the struggle for existence and establishing skepticism and pessimism.

However, the lives of the millions of Christians who have traversed the history of humanity, especially the saints and martyrs, continue to actualize the affirmation of the Apostle Peter: Christ alone has the words of eternal life. Therefore, for Christians hope is not an emotion, a concept, an ideology, or a political or economic system present (capitalism) or future (communism); it is radically a person: Jesus Christ, true God and true man. He not only grants hope, He is therefore a theological virtue because it comes from God and is a virtue in man because, made in the image of God, he is called to Him. In this sense, faith in God grants the believer a new worldview, that allows him to have a theological view of existence, constantly seeing the signs of hope where the Lord manifests his will; it also grants a corvision, that is, a theological way of loving, making one’s own the joys, anxieties, and joys of one’s neighbor; together with an action, that follows the logic of the incarnate Word, that is, to assume to redeem, understanding that history is not the mere repetition of meaningless events, but the history of salvation, the perennial actualization of the salvific work of God throughout  the centuries.

This hope, nourished by faith and charity, inspires and sustains the building of the Kingdom of God, showing the absolute novelty of the Christian message in the face of human idols. It thus reveals: a theological novelty, because Jesus reveals the incarnate, merciful, and redeeming God; a moral novelty, structured based on the commandment of love, loving God and neighbor, as a pattern of behavior; a socio-political novelty, because it is a call to denounce and fight against the causes of the injustices suffered by our brothers and sisters; and an eschatological novelty, because it reveals the true meaning of history, called to be consummated in the Lord.

 

In the photo of the solidarity of the church in Paiporta (Valencia), solidarity generates hope. Photo: Archdiocese of Valencia

 

In the presence of the heart of Christ, I once more ask the Lord to have mercy on this suffering world in which he chose to dwell as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and love, so that our world, which presses forward despite wars, socio-economic disparities, and uses of technology that threaten our humanity, may regain the most important and necessary thing of all: its heart.

Encyclical  letter “Dilexit nos” of the Holy Father Francis on the Humane and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ