The Jubilee of 2025, a Holy Year that I wanted to dedicate to the theme “Pilgrims of hope,” is a propitious occasion to reflect on this fundamental and decisive Christian virtue, especially in times like those we are living in, in which the Third World War in pieces unfolding before our eyes can lead us to assume attitudes of gloomy discouragement and ill-disguised cynicism.
On the other hand, hope is a gift and a task for every Christian. It is a gift because it is God who offers it to us. To hope is not a mere act of optimism, like when we sometimes hope to pass an exam at university (“Let’s hope we get it”) or hope for good weather so we can go on a trip on a Sunday in spring (“Let’s hope the weather is good”). No, to hope is to hope for something that has already been given to us: salvation in God’s eternal and infinite love. That love, that salvation that gives flavour to our life and that constitutes the hinge on which the world stands, despite all the evils and nefariousness caused by the sins of men and women. To hope, then, is to welcome this gift that God offers us every day. To hope is to savour the wonder of being loved, sought, and desired by a God who has not shut himself up in his impenetrable heavens, but has become flesh and blood, history and days, to share our fate.
Hope is also a task that Christians have to cultivate and enhance for the good of all their brothers and sisters. The task is to remain faithful to the gift received, as Madeleine Delbrêl, a twentieth-century French woman, rightly observed. She was able to bring the Gospel to the peripheries, both geographical and existential, of mid-century Paris, marked by de-Christianization. Madeleine Delbrêl wrote: “Christian hope assigns us as a place on that narrow ridge, that frontier where our vocation demands that we choose, every day and every hour, to be faithful to God’s fidelity to us.” God is faithful to us, our task is to respond to that fidelity. But be careful: it is not we who generate this fidelity, it is a gift from God who acts in us if we allow ourselves to be shaped by his power of love, the Holy Spirit who acts as a breath of inspiration in our hearts. It is up to us, then, to invoke this gift: “Lord, grant me to be faithful to you in hope!”
I have said that waiting is a gift from God and a task for Christians. And living hope requires a “mysticism with open eyes,” as the great theologian Joseph-Baptist Metz called it: knowing how to discern, everywhere, the evidence of hope, the irruption of the possible in the impossible, grace where it would seem that sin has eroded all trust. Some time ago I had the opportunity to speak with two exceptional witnesses of hope, two fathers: one Israeli, Rami, and the other Palestinian, Bassam. Both have lost their daughters in the conflict that has bloodied the Holy Land for too many decades now. But, nevertheless, in the name of their pain, of the suffering they felt at the death of their two little daughters – Smadar and Abir – they have become friends, indeed, brothers: they live forgiveness and reconciliation as a concrete, prophetic and authentic gesture. Meeting them gave me so much hope. Their friendship and fraternity taught me that hatred, in particular, may not have the last word. The reconciliation that you experience as individuals, a prophecy of a greater and broader reconciliation, is an invincible sign of hope. And hope opens us to unthinkable horizons.
I invite each reader of this text to make a simple but concrete gesture: at night, before going to bed, reviewing the events you have experienced and the encounters you have had, go in search of a sign of hope in the day that has just ended. A smile from someone from whom you did not expect it, an act of gratuity observed at school, a kindness found in the workplace, a gesture of help, even if small: hope is, in fact, a “childlike virtue”, as Charles Péguy wrote. And we must become children again, with our eyes wondering at the world, in order to find it, know it and appreciate it. Let us train ourselves to recognize hope. Then we will be able to marvel at all the good that exists in the world. And our hearts will be illuminated with hope. Then we will be able to be beacons of the future for those around us.
Vatican City, October 2, 2024
