Pope Benedict XVI has completed his second encyclical, a meditation on Christian hope, Vatican sources said.
The text, tentatively titled “Spe Salvi” (“Saved by Hope”), is about 65 pages, sources said Oct. 16. No release date has been set for the document.
The working title comes from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he wrote: “For in hope we have been saved.” The encyclical is said to explore the Christian understanding of hope, with reference to modern philosophy and the challenges of disbelief.
The pope worked on the encyclical this summer, when he had time to write during his sojourns in northern Italy and at his villa outside Rome. At the same time, he was working on a third encyclical that deals with social themes, Vatican officials said.
I have no great powers of prognostication, but this seems to me to flow very naturally from Benedict’s concerns, his perceptions of the world’s problems, and his theological center.
When you read Benedict, what you find is a deep understanding of – and, you might even say sympathy with – the challenges of human existence, particularly in the modern world. We live with the questions that human beings have always and every lived with – “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of all of this?” but we live with them in a particular intellectual and even psychological climate in which certainty is a faint memory.
Cultures and societies that tell us we are valuable only in terms of our appearance, wealth or productivity. Human efforts to improve life on this planet produce decidedly mixed results and can even veer into destruction. The intellectuals assure us that there is nothing objective on which we can depend, that life, even in God, is more about the questions than the answers, and the Gospels are interesting stories.
Hope?
Yes, I think we could use some words on hope.
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