By James Day
James Day’s work has appeared in Crisis, Catholic World Report, and Catholic Exchange. He is the author of Father Benedict: The Spiritual and Intellectual Legacy of Pope Benedict XVI (November 2016, Sophia Institute Press).
Just as we yearn to share joyful moments and occurrences with another, so too is the intention of the ultimate fulfillment of the Kingdom of God: everlasting union in the light of love that Dante described and that Benedict seeks to reintroduce to us. He dares us to raise our eyes from the ground to the heights of eternal possibility. But it does not come without a price. While on the Cross, Christ reached down into the depths of human existence so as to lift it up. This “descent into hell” leads us to ponder Benedict’s next encyclical, Spe Salvi, “in hope we were saved” (Rom. 8:24). In Spe Salvi, Benedict chose not to lament the passing of the old way of “ghettoized Catholicism” or to cower from secularism’s agendas as mere signs of the times, or to dream of a utopian future apart from worldly problems. “Christian faith is not just a look back at what has happened in the past, an anchorage in an origin that lies behind us in time; nor is it just an outlook on the eternal; it is above all things a looking forward, a reaching-out of hope.”
Benedict points out that the concept of hope is not lacking in our time but is misplaced. The result is like Babel, where sin is not overcome but festers and each individual vies for his own idea of hope and his own desires. Hope cannot be properly contemplated without returning to the Cross. To defy death, God in the person of Jesus took on the whole of human suffering. To each person who finds himself alone, suffering, abandoned, desperate, or proud and presumptuous, Jesus says: I am with you, and will raise you up.
One of Joseph Ratzinger’s favorite themes, “com-passion,” which means “to suffer with,” is applied here. Citing Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and reflecting on the Passion of Christ, Pope Benedict said: “God is love, and the deeper one’s union with God, the more full one is of love. And though God cannot endure pain, he is not without compassion for those who do.”
Benedict then leaps beyond the theological into our everyday realities: “The true measure of humanity is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer.” The reality and lasting significance of faith, hope, and love are meaningful only if they are lived. This message inevitably clashes with the temptation today to dispose of any person across life’s spectrum considered unable to contribute to society, irrespective of how such contribution is defined or who defines it—relativism at its finest. “A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through ‘com-passion’ is a cruel and inhuman society.”
Here in Spe Salvi, Benedict makes it clear that our hope must not be individualistic. Rather, our priority must be the dignity and care for the body and soul of each individual. “A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.” The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme.
Benedict introduces the meaning of con-solatio—consolation—as “being with” the other. Con-solatio and com-passion form our life’s purpose, which is to renounce self-love in order to see the essence of others.
*ARTICLE originally published at catholicexchange.com. Reproduced with permission.
Image: A view of the text of the “Spe Salvi” (Saved by Hope) encyclical letter, signed by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, Friday Nov. 30, 2007. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
