My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Pope Benedict XVI has given the world a Christmas present in his new encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” or “In Hope We Are Saved.” I mentioned it briefly in last week’s article. This week I would like to give my own overview so that you might be encouraged to read it. Advent certainly is a season of hope. We await with hopefulness the birth of the Redeemer, knowing that our world, unfortunately, lives without hope in many circumstances. Advent each year gives us the opportunity to restore our hope in the Savior who has come and will come at the end of time.

The concept of faith-based hope is found in the New Testament and in the history of the early Church. The Holy Father helps us understand that Christianity did not bring the world a hopeful message of social revolution or political liberation, but rather it was a message of hope based in the life and death of the person of Jesus Christ, who overcame sin and restored hope to a world.

Because faith provides us the substance of what we hope for, life with God, Christians no longer based their lives on the substance of the world. Faith gives life a new basis, a new foundation on which we can stand, one which revitalizes the habitual foundation of the goods and pleasures of this world. The Holy Father goes on to give many examples of the substance of this in the lives of the saints, those who have lived hope in sometimes desperate situations.

As I explained last week, one of the most striking paragraphs in the encyclical talks about eternal life and what it is, not something boring, but rather something that begins here and now for each person and continues through all eternity.

The Holy Father, however, recognizes that hope is not simply about individualistic salvation, but rather something that as Christians we seek as the Church and God-people.

This important fact reminds us that Christian faith and hope have the ability to transform the modern age. There have been so many philosophical attempts to try to understand the hopeless world in which we live, to confront the problem of evil and to find a way around it. None can be found, except by belief in Jesus Christ who is the Savior of mankind.

The Holy Father goes on to give certain settings or places and conditions where we can learn and practice hope, the first of which is prayer as the school of hope. He said: “A first essential setting for learning hope is prayer. . . . When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God.” How important is the source of our hope. Our common prayer enables us to communicate with God Himself and to understand His will for us, which in turn allows us to keep on hoping.

The second setting for learning and practicing hope is to understand suffering. Suffering certainly tries our hope. Human suffering has never been fully comprehended by humanity. The first instinct, as the Holy Father says, is to try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot eliminate it. So it is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through human crises. To suffer with infinite love is the reason for our hope.

Sometimes we find it easier to accept suffering in our own lives, and find it more difficult to accept it in the lives of others whom we love, especially those whom we consider innocent. The Holy Father instructs us, indeed, to accept the other’s suffering. This means that I take up his suffering in such a way that it becomes mine also, because it has now become a shared suffering, and though another person is present this suffering has been penetrated by the light of love. We can ease each other’s burdens by sharing in our common suffering, by finding the meaning that Christ has given to it, and by supporting one another. At the same time, we try to eliminate as much suffering as possible in the world, because in itself suffering is not good. It is a consequence of evil and only by accepting it can we overcome it.

The third setting for learning and practicing hope is the proper understanding of the Last Judgment. Although the idea of the Last Judgment has faded into the background in the modern world, the fundamental content of awaiting a final judgment has not disappeared, but has only taken a different form. We can see this in the atheism of the 19th and 20th centuries, which has its own type of moralism and protest against the world and world history.

Each political and philosophical system has tried somehow to justify that good must be rewarded and evil punished, but unfortunately we do not see that in this world. Only if we understand the concept of Divine Providence will we understand that eventually good and evil are rewarded and punished. The Holy Father uses examples from modern philosophy and novels to help us see how the world understands, and sometimes misunderstands, the issue of judgment.

In the encyclical, Pope Benedict gives an interesting insight into the practice of praying for the dead. He says the practice of praying for the dead reveals another important element of the Christian concept of hope: “Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too. 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 and that for them too the star of hope may rise? Then I will have done my utmost for my own personal salvation as well.”

He concludes with a tribute to Mary, Mother of the Redeemer and Star of Hope. “Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her ‘yes’ she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us” (cf. Jn 1:14).

It is this event that we prepare to celebrate at Christmas. Truly, the word of God “put out into the deep” and became flesh for us. We can do no less but to become that living word in the world by witnessing our hopefulness in a world desperately needing witnesses to hope.

I encourage you to read the full text of the encyclical at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html.