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.