Pope Francis opens the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica to inaugurate the Jubilee Year of Mercy at the Vatican in this file photo from Dec. 8, 2015. CNS photo/Vatican Media

Becoming Pilgrims of Hope

On the threshold of the Holy Year, we need to be an instrument of hope to others

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Some biographers of Pope St. John Paul II have said he was a pessimist by nature and temperament. If true, we’d be hard-pressed to find any indications of such pessimism in the life and pastoral ministry of the saintly pope. He often spoke of “a new springtime” of the Church and lived in constant hope that good would triumph over evil and truth would be victorious over lies. And so, was John Paul II a pessimist? If so, why was it never seen?

The proposed answer to such questions can be a great help to all of us as we walk amid a fallen world. It’s been argued that whatever pessimism John Paul II might have had, he filled and elevated it with a robust exercise of theological hope. He was — and lived always — as a witness to hope. Pessimism never got the best of him or his pastoral ministry.

In terms of hope, here’s how the beloved pontiff explained it during one of his visits to the United Nations: “Hope is not empty optimism springing from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past. Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God’ and he thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the Creator!”

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The Catechism on Hope

Here’s how the Church explains hope in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. ‘Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.’ ‘The Holy Spirit … he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life.’

“The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity” (Nos. 1817-18).

Also: “We can therefore hope in the glory of heaven promised by God to those who love him and do his will. In every circumstance, each one of us should hope, with the grace of God, to persevere ‘to the end’ and to obtain the joy of heaven, as God’s eternal reward for the good works accomplished with the grace of Christ. In hope, the Church prays for ‘all men to be saved.’ She longs to be united with Christ, her Bridegroom, in the glory of heaven” (No. 1821).

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The pope declared at the United Nations: “Ladies and Gentlemen! … I come before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence.”

In John Paul II’s comments, we see an example of hope overcoming pessimism. Hope is not a reliance or trust in the things of this fallen world. Even as hope battles pessimism, it does not become optimism. Hope is a trust in God and in his providential care for humanity.

Such a witness to hope can be a challenge to all Christians, and especially to us priests. It’s easy to fall into pessimism. Wars, pandemics and natural disasters can be overwhelming. Cases of cancer, heart disease, dementia and numerous emotional and mental disorders in our society and parishes can weigh heavy on our hearts. And the findings of Pew Research on Mass attendance, belief in the Real Presence, admittance into seminaries and religious life, and the stance of many believers on core moral issues do not provide a lot of encouragement or inspiration. And yet, amid all the sufferings and heartaches, God offers us hope. It is a hope that points us to the things above.

The Virtue of Hope

Hope is a God-centered virtue, a theological virtue, which is infused in us by the Holy Spirit at baptism, strengthened by the gifts of the Holy Spirit in confirmation and fanned into flame by the graces of priestly ordination. We have all that we need to walk confidently amid the brokenness and faithlessness of our fallen world.

Hope, however, is a virtue, and virtues need to be exercised. Virtues are not nouns — objects to be owned — but action verbs, called to be in constant movement. If a virtue is not exercised, it becomes limp and weak. It’s precisely by exercising hope in the throes of pessimism or desolation that we grow in this virtue.

Hope is looking at the real state of affairs of our fallen world, however dire or disappointing, and trusting in God through them all. Hope turns to divine providence and surrenders to it. Hope struggles to see God in all things — the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful!

Pope Francis is pointing us to hope. The ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025 has been designated as the Jubilee Year of Hope. Yes, we all need hope. It’s an eclipsed virtue that has become rare in our society, rare even among believers. We need to retrieve this virtue, vigorously exercise it and seek to be an instrument of hope to others.

To fully understand the life-giving and theological virtue of hope, we need to turn to salvation history and the theological tradition that flows from it. We need to see hope from the perspective of God’s revelation — his deeds and words — through the epochs of salvation history.

Fall from Grace

At the beginning of time, in response to the kindness of our heavenly Father and in reaction to his paternal guidance, our first parents staged a revolt. Rather than accepting the invitation into a loving relationship, Adam and Eve turned against our loving Father and followed a path of selfishness, wayward power and unbridled pride. They abused the freedom given to them, a freedom that was to be oriented to the love of God and neighbor. They betrayed this freedom and chose a love of themselves over a love of God and others.

In this original sin, a clashing discord was brought to bear upon human nature and all creation. The bond of charity between God and his children was weakened, chaos was introduced to the human soul, tension was brought to bear between husband and wife, and creation became a slave to the self-centered goals of our fallen race.

Adam and Eve
Adam and Even mosaic from an Orthodox church in Kirovograd, Ukraine. AdobeStock

The Second Vatican Council taught in Gaudium et Spes: “Although he was made by God in a state of holiness, from the very onset of his history man abused his liberty, at the urging of the Evil One. Man set himself against God and sought to attain his goal apart from God. Although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, but their senseless minds were darkened and they served the creature rather than the Creator” (No. 13).

With the revolt of our first parents, human nature and all creation fell from grace. It was a disastrous blow. The goodness of creation became marred with fallenness. The grenade had been thrown and the beautiful temple of our human nature, while still standing, was put in shambles and disarray.

Such chaos ripples through the ages and causes us to create distorted images of God and present him as an angry, vengeful deity, one who seeks punishment and our destruction.

We came to fear God, hide from him and rebel against his goodness. The moral law, meant for our good, is now falsely seen in terms of an external imposition upon us and as a means of raw divine control. Consequently, in our fallenness, we distrust God and any notion of absolute truth. We doubt concepts such as “truth,” “good” and “evil” and question our own capacity for goodness.

The human soul lost its internal harmony and the mastery it once held over the body. And while created good, human persons now have an inclination toward evil and darkness. As a result, we are now inclined to seek our own comfort and place our interests over those of our neighbors. We see the world as a means of conquest and profit rather than a place calling for care and stewardship.

Our ability to believe and discern moral goodness through the natural light of reason has become more difficult and strenuous. Our fallenness has clouded our capacity for moral discernment and darkened our ability to acknowledge moral truth.

Pope St. John Paul II
Pope St. John Paul II waves to well-wishers in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican in 1978. CNS photo/Arturo Mari, L’Osservatore Romano

Suffering and Illness

Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris: “Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he ought — in the normal order of things — to have a share in this good and does not have it” (No. 7).

Since our first parents were the priestly stewards of creation, and the created world relied on them for a connection with our heavenly Father, creation itself shared in the Fall. As human nature fell, so did creation. The order of the material world was thrown into chaos. What was meant to be a safe and comforting place for God’s children has instead become a place marked by natural disasters, danger and threats to human life and safety. Creation has lost its internal order. It is groaning in its fallenness and waiting for its restoration at the end of time (cf. Rom 8:19–23).

Christian belief, therefore, sees suffering and illness within the theological context of the fall from grace and acknowledges them as evils within human existence. They are not seen as the consequences of the actual sins of any one person after the Fall but as a dark inheritance from the original sin of our first parents and the subsequent, universal fall within both human nature and all of creation.

Because of the Fall, human history includes the sorrow and drama of suffering and death. The human story is marked by questions of evil, anguish over natural disasters, inquiries about suffering, debates over human dignity, medical battles to preserve life, the urgent task of caring for the sick, heartfelt struggles with faith and existential discernment about the purpose, meaning and value of life.

For the Christian believer, the answer to human suffering and death in our world begins with the fall of human nature and all of creation. This original and disastrous fall is the cause of our suffering in this life. It is the stark and restless answer to why we suffer.

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An Examination of Conscience on Hope

Here’s an examination of conscience that helps us explore our own abandonment to divine providence and our exercise of supernatural hope.

• Do I see God’s providence as governing and guiding all the things in the world today?

• Do I accept that all things have been so arranged in my life so that I might work out my salvation in Jesus Christ?

• In times of difficulty and heartache, do I ask God to give me a greater abundance of hope?

• Do I have a belief that the human spirit or the general benevolence of humanity will somehow solve the world’s ills and sufferings?

• In health scares, do I put my hope in medical doctors and the advances of medical science?

• In financial struggles, do I place my hope in money and the material things of this world?

• In times of loneliness, do I put my hope in friendships and hobbies?

• When there are problems in my ministry, do I hope for human solutions and machinations to solve them?

• Do I place my efforts and the fulfillment of my duties within the context of a robust hope in God?

• Do I see all the things of this life in the light of eternity?

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Hoping Against Hope

If our first parents had been left in the dire consequences of the Fall, they would certainly have been overwhelmed by desolation and despair. But God is a loving Father. He knows his children. Even when he disciplines and allows the results of our rebellion to play themselves out, he does so to bring about our good. And so, as God permitted the consequences of the Fall to occur, he did not abandon humanity nor let us sit in darkness.

Even as our human nature fell and creation with it, God bestowed upon us an unmerited but redeeming promise: a Savior will come to restore what was lost. As the Book of Genesis tells us, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, / and between your seed and her seed; / he shall bruise your head, / and you shall bruise his heel” (3:15, RSV).

It was the blessing of this promise that filled our first parents with the inspiring and life-changing virtue of hope, and it is essential that we fully understand the virtue of hope within the biblical worldview.

Hope is not a trust in our own powers, abilities or capacities to change things or to make them better or make them into what we want them to be. This type of understanding of hope is more akin to that of the Greek mindset and the pagan approach to life. It perpetuates bleakness, as human actions alone are constantly seen to be impotent and barren in bringing about such things. We are oftentimes stuck in failure or disappointment when we rely only on our own efforts and our hope only anticipates the things brought about by human affairs.

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Hope the Central Message of Jubilee Year

In the bull of indiction for the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025, Pope Francis emphasizes hope from Romans 5:5: “Hope does not disappoint.”

In the bull of indiction, Pope Francis said: “By his perennial presence in the life of the pilgrim Church, the Holy Spirit illumines all believers with the light of hope. He keeps that light burning, like an ever-burning lamp, to sustain and invigorate our lives. Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom 8:35,37-39). Here we see the reason why this hope perseveres in the midst of trials: founded on faith and nurtured by charity, it enables us to press forward in life. As St. Augustine observes, ‘Whatever our state of life, we cannot live without these three dispositions of the soul — namely, to believe, to hope and to love’” (No. 3).

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As the sacred Scriptures teach us: “Unless the LORD build the house, / they labor in vain who build. / Unless the LORD guard the city, / in vain does the guard keep watch” (Ps 127:1).

The bankruptcy of such a self-focused hope is epitomized in the Greek myth about Prometheus and Pandora’s box. In the fable, Prometheus stole fire from the heavens and Zeus sought to punish him. He presented Pandora to Prometheus’ brother. While in his care, she opened a box that was given by the gods. As she opened the box, death, suffering, sickness and all the evils of the world poured out and were unleashed upon the world. After such an onslaught, the only thing left in the box was “hope.” Western people, influenced by the Christian faith, perceive this as a moment of encouragement. But that is not how the Greek mind saw it.

According to the myth, hope was the worst curse of all, which is why it sat below all the other horrors. Hope was hubris, pride and arrogance. It taught humanity that it had the sole power to change things when, in reality, humanity held no such power by itself.

Hope was a false expectation in the sovereignty of human skill and an absolute trust in the things of this world. It was a bloated sense of self, a universal deception that misled humanity at every step. Hope made human beings the enemies of the gods, as they constantly sought to use hope to overthrow, circumvent or manipulate the divinities. In short, hope was a self-curse. It was the final touch of Zeus’ hatred for humanity.

And yet this same sense of hope is perpetuated in our world today. We are falsely told that we have the strength and wherewithal to change the world by ourselves.

With this distinction, how are we supposed to understand hope? How do the sacred Scriptures define this virtue? How is it related to the promise of a Savior?

There are some in the academic world who try to equate the myth of Pandora’s box with the Genesis account of the Fall. Some have blithely described the fable as “the Greek version of the Garden of Eden.”

Properly understood, however, the two stories could not be more different. With Pandora, Zeus is seeking to harm humanity, break its spirit and inflict every kind of evil upon it. The worst and greatest evil is hope, since it gives an internal drive for something that cannot be accomplished. In contrast, the Genesis account shows a loving Father who disciplines his children for their own good. His permissive will allows for death and suffering, but he gives a promise of redemption. This promise gives hope, and it is a hope in God himself, who alone can change the world and convert hearts.

In looking at the sorrows and sufferings of the world, therefore, hope is the virtue that helps us realize our limitations, restrictions, weaknesses and brokenness. It shows us the marks and bruises of a fallen world and a sinful humanity. Hope calls us outside of ourselves and points us to the power and wisdom of God.

Rather than setting us up for frustration and failure, hope compels us to look for God’s providence, implore the help of his grace and pine for his workings in our world today. Hope edifies us, enlarges our efforts and elevates our spirits.

The promise of a Savior gave the human family true hope. Amid the struggles and sorrows of the fallen world, hope breaks free and reorients us to yearn for a happiness with God, to an eternity that heals our fallenness, redeems suffering, allows us to be fully alive and empowers us to yearn for a perpetual dwelling place with God.

The contrast between these two versions of hope was referenced by St. Paul, who lived and studied in the Greco-Roman world, when he wrote about the great patriarch Abraham: “The promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they should inherit the world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations; as he had been told, ‘So shall your descendants be’” (Rom 4:13,18, RSV).

Abraham, we are told, hoped against hope. This is not a literary device or paradoxical poetics.

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Adobe Stock

The great patriarch hoped in God. As such, he hoped against the false “hope” of the fallen world. He knew that he did not have the power to change his state of affairs. He was an old man and his wife was biologically barren. There was nothing — in his own power — that he could do. He denounced any wayward hope. In its place, he hoped in God and trusted in his fatherly care. He literally hoped against hope.

This is the inheritance of those who live within the promise of a Savior. It is the province of the children of God. It was a promise that was fulfilled in an extraordinarily unimaginable way. It was a fulfillment that ensured the reliability and perpetuity of a true and lasting hope in God.

Our Summons to Hope

It is the theological virtue of hope that is being highlighted by the forthcoming Jubilee Year. In contrast to the fallen, worldly sense of hope, which only leads us to greater desolation and despair, we are called to lift our minds and hearts and to have true hope, which is a hope in God.

As we walk the way of the Lord Jesus as his disciples and as his priests, we are summoned to exercise theological, supernatural hope. We are to live a life of authentic hope, which points us to God and the things of God. We are to model for those under our pastoral care what a life of hope looks like, what it values and what it prioritizes. We are to show our reliance and trust in our Savior’s goodness and in the gracious providence of our heavenly Father who loves us and cares for us in good times and bad.

The struggle for supernatural hope is our struggle in the arena of a fallen world. But it is also our victory in Jesus Christ. For hope in God does not disappoint. The call to hope is our call as Catholic Christians. It’s our call specifically as priests and shepherds of the new and everlasting Covenant.

FATHER JEFFREY KIRBY, STD, is the pastor of Our Lady of Grace Parish in Indian Land, South Carolina, and the author of the book “Manual for Suffering” (TAN Books, 2021).

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