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WHERE DO I FIND HOPE? Introduction As I return here to John Carroll University today, I recall my previous visit in 1996 when I had the honor of substituting for Cardinal Danneels, who was prevented by illness from giving the lecture he had intended to deliver about Cardinal Suenens. I return now with different duties in the Church than I had then as Archbishop of San Francisco, and it is from this particular perspective that I would like to address the topic of this lecture series: “Where do I find hope?” The topic invites a personal, subjective approach: Where do “I” find hope? As one trained in a philosophical and theological perspective, and I suppose as a male, I instinctively turned my thoughts away from the subjective and introspective. You may be pleased to know – or not – that I am not planning to bare my soul to you this afternoon. On the other hand, the challenge of this simple-sounding title drew me into a personal reflection on my current duties that prompted me to turn to Pope Benedict XVI, who called me to serve him and the universal Church in my present duties as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith just two years ago next month, for inspiration for my response. I take as my primary focus for this talk two major intellectual contributions of our Holy Father: his inaugural Encyclical Letter Deus caritas est, dated December 25, 2005, and his much-discussed address given on September 12 of last year at the University of Regensburg on the subject of the relation between religious faith and human reason. That address was recently honored by the theological faculty of the University of Tübingen as the most significant address in the German language given in 2006. Moreover, the encyclical has received an especially warm response across the world for its strong positive message. At the outset I should say that my personal response to the question “Where do I find hope?” focuses on the final article of the Creed which Christians profess as individuals and as Church: “I believe in life everlasting,” says the Apostles’ Creed, which derives from the earliest baptismal liturgy of the Roman Church; or in the formula of the Nicene Creed, deriving from the first two ecumenical councils, “We look for (or hope for) the life of the world to come.” I have chosen this focus because I am convinced that the dulling of this sense of ultimate hope – which occurs for example through the gradual process of secularization (especially in its sense of “desacralization”), and the relentless superficiality of our “mediatized” surroundings – makes it ever more difficult to put into practice daily the invitation of the Letter to the Hebrews, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (10:23). Let me give an example of what I have in mind by looking for a moment at how we – here I mean our modern society – deal with death. Except as a byproduct of conflict and war, or of hyper-technologized violent drama, death is not a theme often given serious reflection in the media world. Both the satire of Evelyn Waugh and the sociology of Gunnar Myrdal have pointed out the difficulty modern American culture has in dealing with death. Even in the realm of the Church, whose funeral liturgies invite meditation on the “life of the world to come” as ultimate meaning of this life, be it long or short, troubled or serene, one can see a gradual change of emphasis by the introduction of practices such as cremation of the body before the funeral liturgy, the “scattering of ashes,” the recasting of the funeral liturgy into a “celebration of life,” at times more reminiscent of a “roast” than a prayer. “Hope is expressed and nourished in prayer,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 1820) reminds us. If we allow the prayer of our Church liturgical tradition – Christ’s prayer in, with and for his Body the Church – to be compromised in favor of contemporary cultural fashions, we risk a great loss, especially that of witnessing and nourishing the great gift of hope in eternal life.
The Specific Nature of Christian Hope Today I intend to address the question of hope in two steps: I want to look briefly at the specific nature of Christian hope, and then show how the Church is the sign of this hope by looking at Pope Benedict’s writings on faith and love. In these two parts of my address my intention is to show how precious, indeed irreplaceable for human existence is the virtue of hope, something we perhaps only come to realize when hope is absent or disappears. In the classic understanding of hope in Christian thought, hope is called a “theological” virtue, together with faith and love. Here I will refer not only to the theological virtue of hope, but also to “natural” hope. It is a given of Catholic theology that “grace builds on nature.” In our dialogue in today’s world, with its many cultures, some highly secularized and others highly religious, it is more necessary than ever to recall how the truths of Christian faith relate to the “saeculum” of living in this passing time and age. This dimension of living in time defines our human existence as a pilgrim journey which we share with our non-Catholic and non-Christian neighbors. For the Christian, hope is not based on any human calculation about how our future will unfold, but only upon the promise of salvation and eternal life given to us by God. What is unique about Christian hope is its trust in the fidelity of God to his promises. As the Catechism teaches (no. 1819), “Christian hope takes up and fulfills the hope of the chosen people which has it origin and model in the hope of Abraham, who was blessed abundantly by the promises of God fulfilled in Isaac, and who was purified by the test of the sacrifice. [As St. Paul observes] “Hoping against hope, he believed, and thus became the father of many nations” (Rom 4:18). Hope finds its place in Christian thought in the context of the “theological” virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Hope has its foundation in faith: in the existence of God, in his revelation of the gift of his Son in whom we can see that “God is love.” Hope underpins the pilgrim journey of the Christian in this life as a life of charity, of love of God and neighbor. Faith, hope and charity are rightly called “theological virtues” because they are based upon God and God’s grace to make them possible. “Love is possible,” Pope Benedict exclaims in his encyclical Deus caritas est (no. 39), “and we are right to practice it because we are created in the image of God,” in the image of a God who has revealed himself as Love itself. Thus the love of neighbor is not only a sign of hope to the world, but is the daily exercise of the virtue of hope by one who is already living and growing in the love of God within that we call grace. Thus hope is grounded in and nourished by faith and charity. This connection among the theological virtues has been unforgettably expressed by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians which concludes, “As it is, there remain: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of them is love” (1 Cor 13:13). In the encyclical Pope Benedict calls this hymn to charity the “magna carta” summing up all the reflections on love which he offers in this teaching (no. 34). I would like to further contextualize the notion of hope by inviting your reflection on “hope” from outside the Christian perspective. From a purely philosophical perspective, one could say that it is common to our human situation to find ourselves here, existing, without knowing from whence we come, except that from our perception we were not existing before. Our existence has a temporal character, which we commonly describe as a journey or pilgrimage of life, or as the philosopher might say, we are in a “state of being on the way” (status viatoris). The temporal nature of our being raises for us daily the question of “tomorrow,” the question of the “not yet.” Josef Pieper, the twentieth-century German Thomistic philosopher, calls the “inherent ‘not yet’ of the finite being” the “innermost structure of created nature.” (1) This “not yet” characteristic that defines the very nature of human temporal existence has a two-fold aspect, in Pieper’s analysis. Its negative aspect he calls the “proximity to nothingness.” This aspect is graphically recalled for us Christians every Ash Wednesday when the ashes are imposed on our heads to the refrain, “You are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” Its positive aspect he calls “the creature’s natural orientation toward fulfillment.” We see this in our daily lives in the desire for happiness, in providing for a better life for our children, in work for the progress of society, and in so many other aspirations for human fulfillment, great or small. This brief presentation of human existence as “being on the way” leads us necessarily to an important question: how will the positive aspect of this “not yet” character, the “orientation toward fulfillment,” be ultimately resolved? Given the certainty of death, will the “proximity of nothingness” prevail? Can the object of our hope ultimately be a return to nothingness? Or is the ultimate fulfillment of hope “for the life of the world to come,” a world whose very existence we can know only through Christian revelation? I think this is the question that prompts Pieper to say, “It would never occur to a philosopher, unless he were also a Christian theologian, to describe hope as a virtue” (p. 99). Here he is using “virtue” in its classic sense as a natural human tendency that can be developed to fulfill our human potential toward the good. In the case of hope, that potential will be fulfilled definitively in the ultimate good of eternal life, or not at all. With these considerations in mind, I want to conclude these preliminary remarks by looking squarely at the objection that is not new but heard with greater insistence both from without and within the Church. Does the hope for eternal life remove us from the “saeculum,” the world and the time in which we live? Does it compromise our commitment to build a better world here and now? Although the history of Christianity may show that some individuals and groups have given a skewed answer to this question, it is the great merit of Pope Benedict’s encyclical to show that Christian faith does not draw us away from the world – the “saeculum” – into what he calls a “parallel universe” (no. 8) but on the contrary provides the vision and strength needed to transform the world. At the same time, the greater risk lies in the substitute “hopes” that a world without faith may fashion in the absence of being able to see “time” in the light of “eternity.” At its inception, for example, the twentieth century just passed was hailed as the century of peace and prosperity. It was thought that anticipated advances in scientific knowledge and economic development would usher in an era such as humanity had never known. Instead the twentieth century goes down in history as a time of failed hopes and false promises, its notable discoveries and developments notwithstanding. It was in that century that the world experienced for the first time total war on a global scale. In that century also there arose the totalitarian systems that enslaved millions as they ruthlessly pursued a false utopia. In his encyclical Pope Benedict rightly calls attention to the sacrifice of generations to the “moloch of the future” whose realization can never come about (cf. no. 31). The new century just begun has need of the message of hope more than ever. And so I turn to the second section of my talk: The Church as a Sign of Hope in the World In its introductory paragraphs the Second Vatican Council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes) uses the phrase “reading the signs of the times” – by now almost a catchword summary of the great Council that began forty-five years ago this year. Rereading that phrase in context, I think we can readily apply it to today’s topic. The Council states, “In every age, the Church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. In language intelligible to every generation, it should be able to answer the ever recurring questions which people ask about the meaning of this present life and of the life to come, and how one is related to the other” (no. 4). In presenting the two above-mentioned texts of Pope Benedict XVI, I want to show how he has accepted this perennial task of reading the signs of the times, and has done so in a way that can give new hope not only to the Church but to the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century his is a much-needed message. As he says in the introduction to his encyclical Deus caritas est, “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant” (no. 1). In his address at Regensburg he returned to this theme as a contemporary example to emphasize his point that not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature and our own. The Encyclical “Deus caritas est” Deus caritas est has a two-part structure: the first part describes the nature of love, human and divine; the second addresses the ministry of charity, in and for the world. The encyclical opens with the following thematic citation from the First Epistle of John: “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). The pope finds in these stirring words three declarations that are at the heart of the faith: “the Christian image of God, the resulting image of mankind and of its destiny” (N.1). Together these three express the startling newness of the Christian revelation. That newness becomes evident in the way that Jesus for the first time combines the commandment to love God above all as contained in the Book of Deuteronomy (Dt 6:4-5) with the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves as found in the Book of Leviticus (Lv 19:18). This is Jesus’ “new commandment” in which he says is contained all the Law and the prophets (Mk 12:29-31). Pope Benedict describes the nature of love as a single reality with three dimensions: erotic love, the love of friendship, and self-sacrificing love – the love that seeks only the good of the other. These three in Greek are called eros, philia and agape. Such love is our destiny by the power of God and this is what gives us hope. Being loved by God is also part of our present experience, not just a future hope. The love that God has for us is sacramentally manifested in every Eucharistic celebration for which the early Church used the word agape. In the Eucharist, the Holy Father continues, “Love of God and love of neighbor are now truly united … Eucharistic communion includes the reality of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented” (N. 14). The Holy Father then concludes, “Faith, hope and charity go together. Hope is practiced through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failures and through the virtue of humility which accepts God’s mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and given us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that, as the dramatic imagery of the end of the Book of Revelations points out, in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory” (N. 39). “Being a Christian”, the Holy Father points out, “is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but an encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (N. 1). That new horizon and decisive direction is our hope of eternal life with God who is love. But that sure hope in eternal life is also the motivation and the energy to work here and now for the transformation of the world. I would like to turn now to the second part of the Encyclical in which the pope shows how the Church is to be an agent of hope in the world as it puts love into practice. The Church’s deepest nature, according to Pope Benedict, is constituted by three elements: proclaiming God’s Word, celebrating the sacraments, and exercising the ministry of charity. He declares strongly: “The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the sacraments and the Word” (N. 22). The Holy Father offers as an example of how this has characterized the Church from its very beginning by referring to the life and ministry (“diakonia”) of St. Lawrence, deacon and martyr of the Church of Rome in the third century. I was personally touched by this example because, as it happens, St. Lawrence carried out his diakonia on behalf of the poor from the very place which is now my titular church in Rome, Santa Maria in Domnica, whose sanctuary frescoes provide a striking visual portrait of this Roman martyr, a great witness to the love of God put into practice in the love of neighbor. There are, fortunately, many charitable organizations in the world, public and private. The Church can and does cooperate with these agencies to the benefit of humanity. “For this reason”, the Holy Father states, “it is very important that the Church’s charitable activity maintain all its splendor and does not become just another form of social assistance” (N. 31). Otherwise, her charitable works risk losing their vitality as Christian agents of hope. The pope lists what he terms the “essential elements of Christian and ecclesial charity.” The following is a summary in five points. I suggest it might well serve as a mission statement for any service agency that calls itself Catholic: 1. “Christian charity is first of all the simple response to immediate needs and specific situations: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for and healing the sick, visiting those in prison, etc.” These activities for a Christian should arise out of heartfelt personal concern. Thus even professionals who do this work need to undergo what the pope calls a “formation of the heart” which starts with the experience of God’s personal love for them that becomes the deepest motivation for helping others (N. 31). 2. Since Christian charity is done by what the pope calls “a heart that sees,” after the model of the Good Samaritan, it must function with great independence from all parties and ideologies. Charity is done simply by “personally doing good now” (N. 31). 3. Christian charity is done because this is what Christ commands, not in order to proselytize. In this regard the pope makes the following comment: “It is the responsibility of the Church’s charitable organizations to reinforce this awareness in their members, so that by their activity as well as by their words, their silence, their example, they can be credible witnesses to Christ” (N. 31). 4. Practical help offered to others is never enough by itself unless, the Pope says, “my deep personal sharing in the needs and suffering of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them” (N. 34). 5. The ministry of charity is also characterized by its humility and by its prayerfulness. We are only humble instruments in God’s hands, offering the service we can and for as long as he gives us the strength. In prayer we learn we cannot by ourselves solve the world’s problems but through praying faithfully we can receive the strength necessary to do God’s work. In a timely analysis, the pope also addresses the relation between charity and justice. The just ordering of society pertains to the realm of politics and falls within the competency of the State. “Yet, at the same time,” the Encyclical states, the Church “cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice” (N. 28). The Church’s contribution to justice can take three forms: by its social doctrine which illuminates human reasoning by pointing out its blind spots and providing greater insight into the requirements of justice (N. 28), by reawakening the moral forces in society necessary for justice’s achievement through the committed action of the lay faithful and others, and by the generous practice of the ministry of charity (N. 29). The Regensburg Lecture If the choice of “love” as the theme of Pope Benedict’s first Encyclical surprised many, his choice of theme for the Regensburg lecture was no surprise at all. I refer here not to the explosive passing reference to the Prophet Mohammed, but to the principal theme of the address, the relation of faith and reason. This is a classic theme that runs through Josef Ratzinger’s theological work, and necessarily so, since it is part of the perennial debate in German universities where faculties of science, history, literature and so forth, coexist with theological faculties, both Protestant and Catholic. The theme was one that the Pope knew was familiar to his university audience. His own description of it in this Lecture recalled his first professor’s chair in the theological faculty at the University of Bonn. “The university was … proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the universitas scientiarum [the universe of knowledge], even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.” His address traces the evolution of western thought about the relation of faith and reason, and about the “scientific” turn in western thought, which sees as “rational” only what results from “the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements.” Even the human sciences have had to conform more and more to this criterion of the “scientific.” But such a method necessarily excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. If religion is reduced to mere subjective experience, in the Pope’s view, “It is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place.” A recent example of this mentality came to my attention in an essay by Mark C. Taylor of Williams College about the unexpected tenacity of religious beliefs: “Until recently, many influential analysts argued that religion, a vestige of an earlier stage of human development, would wither away as people became more sophisticated and rational. Obviously, things have not turned out that way.” (2) Pope Benedict’s analysis was not an abstract exercise. Rather, his point was to challenge this “self-imposed limitation of reason” to what is empirically verifiable, with its resulting exclusion of the religious questions from the university, or from the public square. Such a limitation would exclude the genuine possibility of a dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. It was this challenge to a mentality prevalent in western and European society that he intended to illustrate by his reference to a fifteenth-century Orthodox Christian emperor of Constantinople, who appealed to “logos” - reason - as the interpretative key in his interreligious dialogue with his Persian Islamic interlocutor. Pope Benedict’s challenge seems to me to be realistic and important, given a world situation of increasing “globalization,” and hence of the necessary intersection – if not clash – of civilizations and cultures, which almost always contains a foundational religious element. One does not have to look far to find examples of this “self-imposed limitation of reason” about which the pope speaks. The best-seller The God Delusion, by the renowned British scientist Richard Dawkins, is just such an example. Many of his reviewers have not been kind to this scientist-apologist for atheism. His scorn of religion, his bursts of anger, his overly simplistic “straw man” arguments against faith have been critiqued by several reviewers and I need not rehearse them here. What I do want to call attention to, however, is Dawkins’ “belief” that only scientific, empirically verifiable data are “rational” or reasonable. Hence he critiques any and all religion as irrational and fundamentalistic. It is a classic example of what Pope Benedict calls the “self-imposed limitation” on knowledge: The whole history of philosophical thought, of discussions of beauty and goodness and truth, for example, have no place in such thinking. By its a priori exclusion of the deepest human values, including religious values, Dawkins displays exactly the mindset that impedes the kind of intercultural and interreligious dialogue so important in today’s world. Catholics have been reared from catechism to university on the maxim that faith and science are different paths to the knowledge of God and his creation, and that they are therefore not in conflict. The Second Vatican Council expressed this classic understanding in forthright terms when it stated, “Many of our contemporaries seem to fear that a close association between human activity and religion will endanger the autonomy of humanity, of organizations and of science. … Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God” (GS 36). But Dawkins will have none of this. He rejects fellow atheist Michael Ruse’s critique: “Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins’s response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist.” In reply to Ruse Dawkins says “I finally come down on the side of my colleague the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne, who wrote that Ruse ‘fails to grasp the real nature of the conflict. It’s not just about evolution versus creationism. To scientists like Dawkins and Wilson [E.O. Wilson, the celebrated Harvard biologist], the real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition’.” (3) Reading Dawkins, for whom evolution is the clinching argument in favor of atheism, makes one more sympathetic to Cardinal Schoenborn’s recent essays proposing a reevaluation of overly benign Catholic positions on evolution. The Cardinal is no fundamentalist or creationist, but he has called attention to the radical views on evolution held by not a few in the scientific community, views that are inimical to the Biblical doctrine of Catholic faith that God is “Creator of heaven and earth.” This excursus into Dawkins’ The God Delusion may seem to have taken me far afield from Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture. Its purpose was to highlight the actuality of the thought of this theologian pope for today’s question about the possibility of reason’s ability to build bridges of dialogue, whether cultural, religious, political or scientific, and the importance of understanding correctly the relation between human reason and religious faith. Conclusion: The Reason for our Hope Such hope can only be received as God’s gift, and while it is offered to everyone, many people are hesitant: they are filled with doubt, distracted by immediate cares and concerns, unable to see their way clearly to put their trust in the One who has shown himself as “the way, and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). For many of our neighbors, the pilgrimage of life attracts so much of their daily attention and energy that they seem to have no time left to consider life’s purpose. For some, sadly, the very idea of a transcendent purpose is resented and rejected. For the Christian, on the other hand, the encounter with the Risen Christ of Easter continues to remain vivid in the witness of the Lord’s disciples, in the Church: “I have seen the Lord,” said Mary Magdalen to the apostles (John 20:18). And they in turn proclaimed to the disciples who returned from Emmaus, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!” (Lk 24:34). Those very disciples who encountered the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus – still hidden from their eyes and their understanding – have shown the way for every generation of Christians since: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” they said, and told “how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24: 32,35). Early in this talk I quoted the Catechism: “Hope is expressed and nourished in prayer.” This is above all so in the Eucharist, in which the Risen Lord continues to nourish his people at the banquet of his Word and his Body and Blood. It was, after all, at the first Eucharist, the Last Supper, that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, telling them: “Do you understand what I just did for you? … If I washed your feet – I who am Teacher and Lord – then you must wash each other’s feet. What I just did was to give you an example: as I have done, so you must do” (Jn 13:12-15). The Church becomes a sign of hope in the world only through us, who are nourished by the grace of his love abiding in us, and are moved to follow his example by loving our neighbor. And this is God’s great sign of hope for the world. How can we not want to share the gift of such great hope by our faith and our love: God himself has loved us first by giving us life, and then, in spite of our rebellion and sin, by promising the gift of eternal life to all who believe in his Son, Jesus Christ. I will close these remarks by telling you a personal story. A prominent woman whose husband was dying of cancer held a dinner party in my honor as the new Archbishop in town. She sat at one end of the table, her husband at the other. She placed me at her right hand. At one point during the meal she grabbed my arm and asked me this direct question: “Archbishop, do you really believe that there is a life hereafter?” I confess I was startled to hear such a question, especially in the midst of a dinner conversation. But I reflected on it, and I replied, “Yes, I do believe it; I am convinced of it.” She said in reply, “I wish I too could believe it.” As I have thought about that brief exchange over the years, I have nourished the idea that my hope in the life of the world to come may somehow have sustained her own doubtful, pilgrim hope as well. I suggest that those of us here who have received the gift of hope, and faith, and love from God have not only received a great blessing, but also a great responsibility to be witnesses of that hope in the world in which we live. Thank you for the double kindness of your invitation and attention. God bless you. Notes (1) Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love. San Francisco: Ignatius Press (1997), p. 93.
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