Hope & Pope Benedict

The path to faith takes many forms, even intellectual, but in the end it is the child-like wonder at discovery of something that your entire being resonates with as supremely good—total love—and it is that we strive for, though striving too hard renders the search meaningless.

Tracy Rowland, writing on the theme of hope in Communio (requires subscription), notes:

“This notion of the need for childlike receptivity to the work of the Holy Spirit steers the Catholic faith away from the tendency, so strong in pre-conciliar Thomism, to present the faith as an intellectual system requiring mostly sound philosophical foundations for its comprehension. While not dismissing the need for sound philosophy, in both of his encyclicals Pope Benedict has emphasized the more personalist or affective dimensions of the act of comprehension. In Spe salvi he adds to this accent on the response of the human heart to God, the theme that love transcends time: the saints’ “way of acting and living is de facto a ‘proof’ that the things to come, the promise of Christ, are not only a reality that we await, but a real presence.” (#8) We believe not only because something is logically coherent but because we have seen the beliefs embodied in the practices of the lives of the saints whose love for others is what makes belief plausible and persuasive and even compelling.”

(Variations on the Theme of Christian Hope in the Work of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, Communio International Catholic Review, Volume XXXV Number 2, Summer 2008, p. 206.)