The urgency of the question about the meaning and justification of human hope

 Many years ago now, I recall being part of a conversation in which we reflected on how, in some Catholic families, the children grew up to continue practicing their faith into adult life whilst in other families this did not happen. A particular issue that came up was that of how an irregular marriage situation would lead to someone ceasing to take part in the life of the Church. It therefore struck me at the time of the Extraordinary and Ordinary meetings of the Synod of Bishops dedicated to the family, and the subsequent Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, that Pope Francis had drawn attention to a very significant question for the life of the Church. The theme of the Extraordinary Synod appeared particularly relevant in this context: The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelisation.

Looking forward to the Jubilee Year 2025, with its theme of hope, I recently dipped into the first section of Josef Pieper's short book Hope and History, first published in German in 1967, the text of lectures delivered the year before, and published in English translation by Ignatius Press in 1994. He opens the first section by referring to Immanuel Kant's three possible answers to the question of whether or not the human race is progressing towards the better.

Considered quite abstractly, he says, there are obviously three possible answers to the question: (1) "constant ascent", (2) "continual decline", and (3) persistence at a given level, advancement on a more or less unvarying plane.

Kant acknowledges that the second of these possibilities exists in the abstract, but excludes it in the concrete reality of human existence as it would at a certain point lead to the human race wiping itself out. In the time of nuclear weapons and the stand-off between East and West that was the Cold War, Pieper points out that the self destruction of the human race that was inconceivable to Kant and his times, was now very much a concrete possibility. 

Confronting the three possible forms of the course of history that were formulated by Kant, we would be simply incapable of excluding the one - the negative one - from the very start.

 Pieper's lectures were dedicated to the theme of hope and history, and so he ends the first section with the following passage:

...here we encounter, with almost provocative effect, the first of the two basic terms that are conceptually linked in the subject of these lectures on "hope and history". No matter what concrete implications might happen to follow from the question thus formulated, it is at least clear from the start that the mere linkage of these two concepts is of unparalleled relevance in our present-day situation. Here, too, we could speak of unprecedentedness - for the first time, never before, it seems, has it been possible to ask the question about the meaning and justification of human hope with such acute urgency.

In 2024 and 2025, with conflicts raging that justify Pope Francis' description of a Third World War being fought piecemeal, the question of hope for the future is raised once again with an acute urgency. Pope Francis, with the keen pastoral sense shown earlier in his addressing of the challenges to the family, draws the attention of the Church to this question as he asks us to be pilgrims of hope in the coming Jubilee Year.