By Rev. Benedict Nwachukwu-Udaku
The Papal Bull proclaiming the Jubilee Year 2025 is culled from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 5:5, Spes non confundit (Hope does not disappoint). One of the spiritual purposes of this event is to make Jubilee Year 2025 a moment of genuine personal encounter with the Lord Jesus, who is the Door, and to proclaim Him as the Hope of all the Nations (1 Tim 1:1). Through the Jubilee, Pope Francis aims to rekindle confident trust in the Church, in society, in interpersonal relationships, and in the mission of promoting the dignity of all persons while respecting for God’s gift of creation. He calls us to be pilgrims of hope. Hope is a theological virtue, alongside faith and love. St. Paul, the first theologian of the Church, scholarly and spiritually intuited in his First Letter to the Corinthians: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). The Church teaches that faith, hope, and love are theological virtues because they form the foundation of the spiritual life. Becoming pilgrims of hope as the Holy Father Francis enunciated can be considered as a matching order of the spiritual life, intellectual prowess, and pastoral diligence for the Church as we navigate the turbulent waters of the present world and its evolving worldview.
Hope in a theological sense is not a kind of unrooted optimism, it is not a naiveté or a wishful thinking. It is not a naiveté belief that God will eliminate all suffering. Hope is a conviction that God is a sovereign Lord of all creation. He is the Lord of the visible and the invisible. God presides in love over the totality of the created reality. God is the one who is commanding, guiding, and leading this universe. He is not only ens summum (highest being) but rather ipsum esse (the sheer act of Being itself). God is the unconditioned cause of the conditioned universe (St. Thomas Aquinas). Hope in God is reconcilable with the existence of all forms of darkness in our world. The Christian hope empowers us to know that God is in control. It is an invitation to trust in the ultimate sovereignty of our God. This resounding theological meaning of hope is seen in the life and piety of Julian Norwich (1343-1416) the great English mystic, who said, “All will be well, all manner of things will be well.” This means ultimately that God oversees His world and in Him we ought to put our trust. Bishop Simeon’s task and job description is to be a herald of hope among us as Prophet Isaiah was to his people when he revealed to them this message of hope, “Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand” (Isaiah 41:10).
This understanding of the virtue of hope provides a spiritual framework and pastoral insights for interpreting the pontificates of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. In his 2007 encyclical titled, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI explores the essence of Christian hope, through the testimony of St. Josephine Bakhita. Born in Darfur, Sudan. Bakhita was kidnapped by slave-traders at the age of nine, brutally beaten and sold five times in Sudanese slave-markets. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she flogged every day until she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying “masters” who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of “master”—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name “paron” for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a “paron” above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her... Through the knowledge of this hope she was “redeemed,” no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world—without hope because without God” (Spe Salvi, 3).
Pope Francis, in the Spe non Confundit (Romans 5:5), emphasized that hope is indeed born of love and rooted in the love that flows from the Heart of Jesus, pierced on the Cross (n.3). This divine love invites us to share in His very life (Romans 5:10), beginning with baptism and sustained through grace as work of the Holy Spirit. Thus, hope does not disappoint because it is founded upon and nourished by this unfailing divine love for us.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam
Rev. Benedict Nwachukwu-Udaku is the Director of Academic Formation at St. Junipero Serra House of Formation