Without frontiers

Love and hope: the Pope’s second encyclical recalls and renews the first. At its centre is a particular kind of “patristics”, typical of the magisterium of Benedict XVI, that revives the features of the ancient Fathers of the Church who are so dear to him: a teaching rooted in history, but one that is marked by a profound transcendental tension: “We can open ourselves and the world to the entry of God: of truth, love and goodness”. The Pope interprets the distress of contemporary man and his search for conscience and re-directs it to hope. Something finite cannot be enough for man.Two arguments spring from this certainty. First, a firm critique of the utopia that Europe too has known, in all its various declensions. The good news of hope, as a gift that comes from God and that initiates the life eternal in us, is transformed into a kind of boundless trust in the potential of man. But this claim is shown to be fallacious. The great messages of emancipation, the great modern ideologies, have ended up by producing an enormous accumulation of violence and grief. Europe too has been a theatre of them. The Pope bears on his shoulders all the experience of modernity: a modernity that needs to be revived beyond its own corruption. He accepts the challenge of thinking of our time and of opening it to a message of hope: man cannot live without a great horizon of meaning and hope that may inspire commitment and support trust. This horizon of meaning is not something we can create, or give to ourselves, by our own efforts alone. It is given to us.The question of reason and the correlated question of freedom are thus posed anew. When, asks the Pope, does reason really dominate? When it is detached from God, as in the scientific, materialist, Marxist or relativist horizon? His answer, also in this encyclical, is clear: “reason has a need for faith if it is to be totally itself: reason and faith have a need for each other if they are to realize their true nature and their mission”.All the philosophers and thinkers will be found in the eight chapters, in the fifty paragraphs of Benedict’s encyclical on hope and of hope. They include the great men of the Church and the Europeans Lenin, Marx and Engels. In this gallery of men and women, in this dialogue of faith and culture, two figures stand out, one from Africa and the other from Asia: St. Josephine Bakhita, and Cardinal Van Thuan. They suffered the ills of slavery in their flesh: material slavery in the former, the oppression of Communist ideology in the latter. Yet from this condition of bondage they both opened horizons of hope and eternity.In response to the falsity of ideologies, of scientific utopia, of the political utopia of the French Revolution, which generated a political mechanism that was later inflated by Marxism, in response to the Marxist error, and to the ambiguity of progress, the keyword of the encyclical is therefore eternity, the life eternal. “All of us have become witnesses of how progress in the wrong hands can become, and has in fact become, a terrible progress in evil”. The present, underlines the Pope, even an oppressive and painful present, can be lived and accepted if it leads to a goal, if this goal is something we can truly be sure of, and if this goal is so great as to justify all the hardship of the journey. He speaks of judgement, the Pope, to this period that emphasizes the present. It is judgement, the last judgement that projects the life of man into eternity and enables him to glimpse, beyond death, the possibility of a true and just view of the existence of each person and of history. For Europe it’s a message that encourages us to speak with hope both within and without its own frontiers.