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| CURRENT ISSUE: December 17, 2007 VOL. 45, NO. 21 • Oakland, CA |
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| Pope addresses ‘crisis
of hope’ in new encyclical |
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| The story of St. Josephine Bakhita, a 19th-century
African slave, figures prominently in Pope Benedict’s new encyclical
on Christian hope. CNS PHOTO/CATHOLIC PRESS PHOTO |
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In an encyclical on Christian
hope, Pope Benedict XVI said that, without faith in God, humanity lies
at the mercy of ideologies that can lead to “the greatest forms
of cruelty and violations of justice.”
The pope warned that the modern age has replaced belief in eternal salvation
with faith in progress and technology, which offer opportunities for good
but also open up “appalling possibilities for evil.”
“Let us put it very simply: Man needs God, otherwise he remains
without hope,” he said in the encyclical, “Spe Salvi”
(on Christian hope), released Nov. 30.
The 76-page text explored the essential connection between faith and hope
in early Christianity and addressed what it called a “crisis of
Christian hope” in modern times.
It critiqued philosophical rationalism and Marxism and offered brief but
powerful profiles of Christian saints — ancient and modern —
who embodied hope, even in the face of suffering.
The encyclical also included a criticism of contemporary Christianity,
saying it has largely limited its attention to individual salvation instead
of the wider world, and thus reduced the “horizon of its hope.”
“As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking: How can
I save myself? We should also ask: What can I do in order that others
may be saved?” it said. The pope began and ended his encyclical
with profiles of two women who exemplified Christian hope. The closing
pages praised Mary for never losing hope, even in the darkness of Jesus’
crucifixion.
The encyclical opened by describing a similar sense of hope in a 19th-century
African slave, St. Josephine Bakhita, who after being flogged, sold and
resold, came to discover Christ.
With her conversion, St. Bakhita found the “great hope” that
liberated and redeemed her, the pope said.
The pope emphasized that this was different from political liberation
as a slave. Christianity “did not bring a message of social revolution,”
he said, but something totally different: an encounter with “a hope
stronger than the sufferings of slavery, a hope which therefore transformed
life and the world from within.”
It was the pope’s second encyclical and followed his 2006 meditation
on Christian love. He said the essential aspect of Christian hope is trust
in eternal salvation brought by Christ. In contrast with followers of
mythology and pagan gods, early Christians had a future and could trust
that their lives would not end in emptiness, he said.
Yet today the idea of “eternal life” frightens many people
and strikes them as a monotonous or even unbearable existence, the pope
said. It is important, he said, to understand that eternity is “not
an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like
the supreme moment of satisfaction.”
