8. Hope and Its Daughters
1. Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), no. 1817.
2. Richard John Neuhaus, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 216.
3. CCC, no. 1818.
4. Romanus Cessario, O.P., “The Theological Virtue of Hope (IIa IIae, qq. 17–22),” in Stephen J. Pope, editor, The Ethics of Aquinas (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 232.
5. Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), 277.
6. Neuhaus, American Babylon, 224.
7. See Hugh of St. Victor’s treatise on the betrothal gift of the soul, in Paul Rorem, Hugh of St. Victor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156.
8. Cessario, in Ethics of Aquinas, 236, 238. Cessario concludes: “In summary, the graced Christian believer possesses the cognitive certitude of faith that a mercifully omnipotent God offers the gift of salvation to all men and women and, as long as one personally appropriates this truth held by faith, the affective certitude of hope enables the believer to live a life of mature confidence in God’s power” (239–40).
9. Spe Salvi, no. 7.
10. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 922.
11. Ibid., 923.
12. Ibid., 294.
13. Neuhaus, American Babylon, 217.
14. Ibid., 218–20. Thomas Aquinas articulates this by saying that despair is “neither a sentiment nor a mood, but an error in faith-judgment that supposes that God will not provide what is required for the wayfarer to reach salvation” (Cessario, in Ethics of Aquinas, 240).
15. Cessario, in Ethics of Aquinas, 240.
16. Ibid., 240.
17. See Summa Theologica II–II.21.4c.
18. CCC, no. 2091.
19. Quoted in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 43.
20. Ibid., 47–48. In a similar way, the French political theorist Pierre Manent describes the way in which we want to be modern but lack a robust conception of what modernity actually entails. This leaves us striving toward a goal that we don’t fully understand and never fully determine. See Manent, “City, Empire, Church, Nation: How the West Created Modernity,” City Journal, Summer 2012.
21. Ibid., 42.
22. Ibid., 45.
23. “Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man’s freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all” (Spe Salvi, no. 24).
24. Spe Salvi, no. 22.
25. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1: Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941).
26. Spe Salvi, no. 44.
27. “For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ’s return and for new life become fully convincing” (Spe Salvi, no. 43).
28. Spe Salvi, no. 10.
29. Spe Salvi, no. 2.
30. Neuhaus, American Babylon, 75.
31. Spe Salvi, no. 35.
32. Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 9–11.
33. Ibid., 62.
34. Ibid., 66.
35. Spe Salvi, no. 12.