All peoples, religions, and cultures celebrate the beginning of a new year with hope. It is a time for evaluation and a new beginning. Time to remember the great challenges and uncertainties that we all have, that humanity has. Time to make new and better resolutions, renew intentions, and share good wishes.
In these lines, I want to wish everyone, for this 2025 that begins: WISDOM and HOPE, or better yet, wisdom so that we have hope.
Wisdom has always been the most desired and longed-for virtue by human beings: “More precious than pearls, and nothing your love can match it” (Prov 3:15). It is the virtue most praised in a human being by cultures, philosophies, and theologies and is synonymous with good sense and prudence, to succeed in the fundamentals of human existence and in the daily task of living and coexisting, to find the truth in the laws of nature, but – especially – in the deepest and most certain desires and tendencies of the human being, always in search of happiness.
The wise man is a lamp that guides his steps and our steps towards the truth, to build better human beings, healthy and fraternal relationships, and a better world. In contrast, if a blind man guides another blind man, both will fall into the pit (Mt 15:14). And wisdom is opposed to foolishness, clumsiness, and senselessness. Wise man and human communities build their life and destiny on rock while clumsy and foolish human beings and communities build – or, better, destroy – their present and future on sand (Cf. Mt 7:26).
The postmodern and “light” culture in which we live today – for reasons that would be too extensive to explain in the brevity of this article – has been taking us down paths other than those of wisdom and truth. We are traveling, living, sharing and relating with half-truths that – therefore – are lies. All of which has led to meaningless lives, empty, emptied and directionless existences. Because we have been privileging cunning and the ability to lie over truth and honesty, corruption, profit, pleasure, waste and power that crushes the common sense and dignity of the human being.
So, the ability to deceive and the capacity for falsehood, evil and personal and social harm are gaining ground. But, we have to say, truth and lies are opposite terms, truth and falsehood are opposite and contradictory realities. The truth makes us free, while lies, dishonesty and corruption – on the other hand – lead us towards slavery, towards the precipice, towards the human and social abyss. Corruption bleeds and destroys institutions, generates injustice, inequity, violence and death and is the cause of the failure of men and peoples.
I speak of common sense and wisdom because our current reality, national and global, is in crisis, plagued by conflicts and evil, plagued by cries and pain and in need of truth, authority, wise, honest men and women who are coherent between deeds and words and, especially, in need of wise rulers, leaders and civil and religious guides.
At the beginning of this new year 2025, in a world fed up with wars and injustices, with politicians and opportunists on duty and corruption in government agencies; In a society that seems adrift, lacking leaders committed to the common good and, yes, eager to pursue personal and selfish interests, whims and achievements; in the midst of a world map in which autocracies and dictators are emerging and in which human rights are being postponed or definitively trampled and annihilated, we need wisdom to build a world with space and opportunity for hope to be possible, to live with hope.
Because hope is the engine of human existence. It is the hope of better days that drives us to live and fight every day. No one can live without reasons to hope. No one can live without hope.
A few days ago we celebrated Christmas as the arrival of the Light in the midst of darkness, “to the people who walked in the shadow of death a light has shone” (Mt 4.16). We all need a new and better year, a new and different year. A year in which, over the threats and shadows of death and the culture of death, wisdom triumphs over hope, life triumphs over death, over any form of death.
Pope Francis, with the proclamation of a jubilee year, also invites us to celebrate 2025 as a year of hope. Hope that – through wisdom – will be possible, if we take up the path again, if our relationships, our civic coexistence and our social structures are based on social friendship, which springs from compassionate and supportive love between human beings. If we all begin to live daily “the best politics”, that of thinking and acting together in function of the collective good instead of seeking sectarian, partisan, particular, dishonest and petty interests. (Cf. Pope Francis – Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti).
The political task cannot be limited to the dirty and deceitful game of advertising, to the dance of millions, to insults and disqualification or to the regurgitation of promises that are never fulfilled. It is urgent – in our nation and in the leadership that the United States has at a global level – that the professional political task, the partisan politics, that of those who elect and those who are elected to govern, be a task for the benefit of the best and noblest human causes: for the benefit of peace as an abundance of justice and abundant life for all, especially for the weakest and most discarded in society.
Happy New Year 2025 to all, Happy New Year with wisdom for hope!
