Pilgrims of Hope
by Bishop Joensen | December 18, 2024
This Christmas Eve in Rome, Pope Francis will inaugurate the Ordinary Jubilee Year 2025 by opening the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s probably the hottest ticket in Catholicism since the turn of the Millennium in 2000, more so even than the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2015. This Jubilee will carry the theme, “Pilgrims of Hope.”
Out of curiosity, I went through all the proper prayers, including prefaces, of the Christmas Eve and three Christmas Day Masses. Not once is the word ‘hope’ mentioned. What gives? I guess it depends on how we understand hope and the dynamic of our lives. The Holy Father, in his “Bull” declaring this Holy Year, “Hope Does Not Disappoint” (see Romans 5:5), describes the sense of hope that is familiar to everyone: “In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite not knowing what the future may bring” (Spes non confundit/SNC n. 1).
St. Thomas Aquinas specifies a key element of hope is that the good sought is not a sure thing but can be realized only with difficulty—it can become real for us. I don’t hope for a full moon, but I do hope researchers discover a cure for cancer. Further, I’m fond of the definition of hope offered by Lance Morrow, the former essayist for Time Magazine who died recently: “Hope is goodness in a tough spot.”
So when the good we’ve been seeking presents itself, and joy is unleashed, then hope melts away for we’ve realized our long-awaited desires. Hence Christmas, when the Messiah promised for ages finally appears in the lowly Bethlehem stable and is heralded by the angels appearing to the shepherds, adored by the Magi as the destination of their lengthy trek from the East, and pondered by Mary who takes all things said and done by her child to heart, then hope takes a hike and wonder-filled, contemplative celebration assumes it place. Before the Nativity Scene or tabernacle, the Latin American bishops in their Aparecida document urge us, “We stand before Christ, and in his presence, ‘love pauses, contemplates mystery, and enjoys it in silence” (see Dilexit nos/DN n. 57).
But Christmas joy on this side of the vale even for the children of the new Eve, Mary, doesn’t last--for better or worse. How many children and adults, having just opened their Christmas gifts and received the very items that were on their list, experience the thawing of other dormant desires instead of simply abiding in what has been received. Hope seems hollow when it is not founded on deep gratitude for the presence (not presents) God himself bestows on us in his Son.
More virtuously, Jesus, even as he is caressed by Mary, is a child on the move, with a mission to fulfill. From the stable in Bethlehem, off our Infant Lord goes: to be presented in the Temple, where He is acclaimed by Simeon and Anna, who’ve been waiting faithfully for what seems like eternity for this child. Their life’s hope is fulfilled, even as they stir hope for us that the arduous drama of salvation has only begun to unfold.
Jesus flees with his parents to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath. The Holy Family eventually returns to Nazareth, where annually, as observant Jews, they go to Jerusalem for the Passover. It is there that Jesus’s identity as the Son of God is again disclosed by the intimacy he conveys in speaking of his Father’s house.
The ultimate pilgrimage of hope for Jesus and for all Catholics and Christians is our life’s path from entering the world to the Father in heaven. As Pope Francis reminds us, “Jesus wants to bring us to the Father. That is why, from the very beginning, the Church’s preaching does not end with Jesus, but with the Father.” And one of Francis’s predecessors, St. John Paul II, remarks, “The whole of the Christian life is like a great pilgrimage to the house of the Father.” “Jesus’s life among us was a journey of response to the constant call of his human heart to come to the Father” (DN nn. 70-72).
How fitting that the observance of the Jubilee Year in the Diocese of Des Moines will officially commence on Sunday, Dec. 29, the Feast of the Holy Family. We will begin with a “mini-pilgrimage” bearing the relic of the True Cross of Christ from the Catholic Pastoral Center in downtown Des Moines across the street to St. Ambrose Cathedral, where we will celebrate a 3 p.m. Feast day Mass with clergy and laity of the Diocese. Please consider joining us!
And from there, whether as individuals, small groups, or among parishes, the pilgrimages to the five specially designated churches throughout our Diocese will unfold throughout the Jubilee Year. (Please see the accompanying article in this edition of The Catholic Mirror found on page 3 for more details.) These pilgrimages are to be undertaken in hope, and are to be experiences that fortify and intensify our personal hope. They are to be encounters with the infinite divine and human love of Jesus radiating from his Eucharistic heart in the tabernacle, monstrance, and preeminently in Holy Mass.
Other devotions will further “decorate” our hope as we spend time in prayer allowing Jesus to convey his affection for us, his desire to accompany us every step of the way he has charted for us. The third and concluding year of our national Eucharistic Revival converges with this Jubilee in the Revival’s encouragement to “walk with one” by praying for, inviting, and accompanying others as a “moveable feast” migrating to the source and goal of all God’s mercy and life. Again, Pope Francis: “Hope is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross” (SNC n. 3).
“Happiness is our human vocation, a goal to which we all aspire” (SNC n. 21). Our good God wants us to experience the happiness he intends for us. He desires that the seeds of the Spirit sown in our hearts by the grace of baptism and other sacraments, by taking God’s word to heart, take root and flourish as we accompany one another in communion of presence, mutual acceptance, and ever more perfect praise and thanksgiving to our Savior.
It is the encounter with Jesus in the sacrament of reconciliation that is the central moment commended to us by this Jubilee, for we all know the tensions and outright rupture in relationships that weaken hope and thwart the experience of communion. And in our heart of hearts, we know ourselves to be at least the partial cause of these insults to hope. All of us have sinned and are deprived of God’s glory (see Romans 3:23). All will face judgment by God sooner or later. Our hope boldly prompts us to present ourselves as pilgrims before Jesus, the just judge, in the person of a priest confessor.
All of us find ourselves in the toughest of spots until God restores the goodness his love instills, the hope he heals, the friendship he bestows. To go to confession is a gift to ourselves and to those against whom we have sinned, living or now deceased—far beyond the Christmas Season, all the way to eternity.
The sacrament of reconciliation is a recipe for renewed hope. The late Pope Benedict XVI anticipated our present Jubilee as he reflects “On Saving Hope”: “Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine; in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse. So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death.” “It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain. . . . Our hope is always essentially hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me, too” (Spe salvi n. 48).
May God pour out the graces of renewed hope and deepened connection with Jesus and those whom he has placed in your lives as we accompany one another throughout this Jubilee Year!