Jubilee 2025: The Hope of the Bride

In Dom Anscar Vonier's book The Spirit and the Bride there is a short chapter entitled "The Bride's Hope". The chapter suggests that, through the living presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, there is a perfection of hope that is intrinsic to the Church and is more than the sum total of the individual hopes of believers or local communities.

What we may truly call the official hope of the Church is an overwhelming reality; there is simply no vestige of hesitation in any acts and movements of the Church concerning her power to obtain eternal life. This is manifested before all men through the Church's way of praying. Ecclesiastical prayer is the visible sign of the Church's hope; she hopes as she prays, and she prays as she hopes.  Now of the Church's prayer there is no end; it is an unceasing stream, unfathomable in its depth, though all eyes can behold its surface. If the Church ceased to pray, her life of hope also would come to an end.... More truly than Moses on the mountain, the Bride is stretching forth her arms in supplication, and she is not in need of any supporters, as she know of no lassitude, for the power of the Spirit is in her.

If you are familiar with Edith Stein's essay "The Prayer of the Church", Anscar Vonier's chapter is a natural jumping off point to a re-reading of that essay. In English translation it is published in the Institute of Carmelite Studies collected works of Edith Stein vol. 4 The Hidden Life. The essay makes some striking comparisons between the Jewish liturgy and the Christian liturgy, reflecting Edith Stein's own lived experience, and is worth reading for those insights alone. 

... it is not a question of placing the inner prayer free of all traditional forms as "subjective" piety in contrast to the liturgy as the "objective" prayer of the Church. All authentic prayer is prayer of the Church. Through every sincere prayer something happens in the Church, and it is the Church itself that is praying therein, for it is the Holy Spirit living in the Church that intercedes for every individual soul "with sighs too deep for words". This is exactly what authentic prayer is, for "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit". What could the prayer of the Church be, if not great lovers giving themselves to God who is love!

Anscar Vonier places the expression of hope within the Church's prayer since that prayer shows an absolute confidence in the ability of the Church to gain eternal life for the persons who are the object of that prayer. A connection can be made to the words of the Jubilee prayer:

May the grace of the Jubilee reawaken in us, Pilgrims of Hope, a yearning for the treasures of heaven.

Jubilee 2025: Therese of Lisieux - today it is important to revive hope.

In 1973, Pope St Paul VI wrote to the Bishop of  Bayeux and Lisieux to mark the centenary of the birth of St Therese of the Child Jesus. In one paragraph of that letter, Paul VI refers to the "little way" in terms of "dependence on the mysterious Love of Christ" in a way that Pope Francis has more recently expressed in terms of "confidence in the merciful love of God". He also casts that confidence in terms of hope, thereby offering an appropriate meditation for the Jubilee 2025.

So today it is important to revive hope.  Many people have experienced harshly the limits of their physical and moral strength.  They feel powerless before the immense problems of the world, with which they rightly feel solidarity.  Their daily work seems to them overwhelming, obscure, and useless.  Also, illness sometimes condemns them to inaction; persecution spreads a suffocating fog over them.  Those who are more lucid are even more aware of their own weakness, their cowardice, their smallness.  The meaning of life can no longer be made clear; the silence of God, as some say, can be oppressive.  Some resign themselves passively; others focus on their selfishness or on their immediate gratification; others become hardened or rebel; still others finally despair.  To each and every one, Thérèse “of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face” proclaims: learn to rely not on yourself, whether on your virtue or on your limitations, but instead to depend upon the mysterious Love of Christ, which is greater than our hearts and which unites us with the offering of his passion and with the power of his Life.  She can teach us all to follow the “royal little way” of the spirit of childhood, which is the opposite of childishness, of passivity, of sadness!  Cruel trials within her family, scruples, fears, and other difficulties seemed very likely to thwart Thérèse’s development; she was not spared severe sickness in her youth; moreover, she experienced profoundly the night of faith.  And yet God made her find, in the midst of this very night, confident abandonment and courage, patience, and joy--in a word, true freedom.  We invite all people of good will, especially the little and the humbled, to meditate on this paradox of hope.

The original text of Pope Paul VI's letter, in French. is available on the website of the Holy See: Lettre du Pape Paul VI. An English translation can be found here: Letter of Pope Paul VI. Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation, written to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of St Therese, is here: C'est La Confiance.