A Pastor’s Thoughts: Christians of Heroic Hope

Fr. Jim Muscatella, Blessed Trinity/St. Patrick Parishes —

A young Irish priest once found himself being sent on a mission to the balmy islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Upon his arrival, he was quickly scandalized by what seemed to his Irish sensibilities to be a culture overwhelmed by carnal sinfulness. It was his duty, he began to think, to preach zealously about nothing other than the dangers and errors of the Islanders’ sinful ways.

Every time he would take to the pulpit, however, a woman of poise and dignity would stand straight up from the midst of the native congregation and glare sternly at our young preacher. Sunday after Sunday, her defiant presence quickly ended his planned denunciations and reduced his Irish brogue to silence.

After some time and many frustrated sermons, he finally resolved that this Sunday he would gather his nerve and continue undeterred; even if the woman would rise and leer at him the whole time he spoke. This week, he assured himself, she would not stop him. This week, he would righteously cry out about the island’s evils.

The priest thus rose on that fateful Sunday and, even more boldly than before, began his usual denunciations of sin and vice. The woman, first standing in stern silence for a time, ultimately interjected, and in her strong Caribbean accent she definitively broke off our Irishman’s moralizing invectives, “Father, we know we are sinners – tell us something we don’t know!”

In a fallen world, it is easy to point out all that is unideal and decry apparent sins. Wars, injustices, and moral failings abound in every age of man’s history. The reality of The Fall is on display all around us. To merely focus on what’s wrong is more than just easy, however – it is often lazy, uninspired, and uninspiring. Our hearts long for something greater than sundry complaints and bland criticisms – we are a people who long for hope.

With the declaration “Hope Does Not Disappoint,” Pope Francis has declared the year 2025 as a year specially dedicated to the virtue of hope. This declaration reflects a strong assertion about the truth of our human condition: in the midst of a world still struggling with darkness and failings, we are called to live heroically in view of what is right, good, and beautiful. We are meant to be reminders of hope to the world.

This hope does not mean turning a blind eye to the realities of worldly troubles, pains, and sin. In this declaration, Pope Francis writes, “Hope finds its supreme witness in the Mother of God. In the Blessed Virgin, we see that hope is not naive optimism but a gift of grace amid the realities of life. At the foot of the cross. Overwhelmed with grief, she nonetheless renewed her ‘fiat,’ never abandoning her hope and trust in God.” (SPES NON CONFUNDIT, #24)

While we certainly are not meant to ignore evil and sin at work in the world, we are neither meant to succumb to it nor allow it to consume our thoughts and lives. Rather, as Pope Francis asserts, we are meant to live with a view towards the ways God. He who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, is certainly at work to bring forth good from all moments and circumstances, even those which we do not yet fully understand. If we are to appreciate this, and all the more live accordingly, we can only do so with hearts and minds that accept the true gift of hope – a hope that does not abide in those places where we let boilerplate complaints, cheap criticisms, and reflexive negativity reign.

This year of Hope is a rallying cry to journey through life with truly critical eyes and a discerning heart – eyes which look keenly for the grace of God at work in a still-fallen world, and a heart which anticipates His call. The same Savior Who came amongst a broken, fallen world in Galilee is at work in the broken, fallen world of today. Will we Christians live our lives as if this were true – will the gift of hope which He extends to us be on our lips as we speak and in our hearts as we journey through this year?