Fr Tristan Writes 16th February 2025
2025 is a Jubilee Year in the Church, with the theme “Pilgrims of Hope”. During this year, we can reflect that we as Christians are the bearers of hope to the world par excellence, because we have received the Good News. The Catechism reminds us that hope is “the theological virtue by which we desire....eternal life as our happiness” (CCC 1817). It is not just any hope, then, but one that looks beyond this world subject to sin, death and decay, to the renewing of true life and joy in the Resurrection.
Because of this hope, Christianity can never be reduced to a merely earthly project of good will and good works. St Paul puts that truth to us starkly in the Second Reading: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor 15:19) The Beatitudes which we hear in the Gospel echo this too, promising blessings not in this world, but in the next. In his Bull inaugurating the Jubilee Year, Pope Francis emphasises the importance of these Beatitude values: “What is the happiness that we await and desire? Not some fleeting pleasure, a momentary satisfaction, that once experienced, keeps us longing for more... We aspire to a happiness that is definitively found in the one thing that can bring us fulfilment, which is love. Thus we will be able to say even now: I am loved, therefore I exist; and I will live forever in the love that does not disappoint, the love from which nothing can ever separate me (Spes non confudit, 23; cf Rm 8:38-39)”
