Excerpts from "Spe Salvi"
Pope Benedict XVI's Encyclical on Hope
Pope Benedict XVI's Encyclical on Hope
To Listen to Audio of Encyclical, go to:
Boston Catholic Journal
"Here too
we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians
the fact that they have a future:
It is not that they know the details of what awaits them,
but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness."
* * *
the fact that they have a future:
It is not that they know the details of what awaits them,
but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness."
* * *
"The one
who has hope lives differently;
the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life."
the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life."
* * *
"Yet at this point a question arises: in
what does this hope consist which, as hope, is “redemption”? The essence of
the answer is given in the phrase from the Letter to the Ephesians quoted
above: the Ephesians, before their encounter with Christ, were without hope
because they were “without God in the world”. To come to know God—the true
God—means to receive hope. We who have always lived with the Christian
concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to
notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this
God. The example of a St. of our time can to some degree help us understand
what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I
am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul
II. She was born around 1869—she herself did not know the precise date—in
Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders,
beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan.
Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife
of a general, and there she was flogged every day till 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. She too was loved, and
by none other than the supreme “Paron”, before whom all other masters are
themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was
awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being
flogged and now he was waiting for her “at the Father's right hand”. Now she
had “hope” —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be
less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever
happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” 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. Hence, when she was about to be taken back to
Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her “Paron”.
On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first
Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December
1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian
Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in
the porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in
order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through
her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it
had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people.
The hope born in her which had “redeemed” her she could not keep to herself;
this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody."
Our Lady of Hope
(Novena)
(Novena)
