Published March 6, 2025
These remarks were delivered at Portsmouth Abbey’s Providence symposium on March 6, 2025
Our theme today is “pilgrims of hope,” and I promise to talk about that. But I need to start with a caveat. When I sat down to draft these comments, I discovered, rather awkwardly, that all of my heroes are pessimists. Georges Bernanos, the great French Catholic author, described hope as “despair overcome” — not exactly a sunny thought. And Roger Scruton, the wonderful British philosopher, wrote an entire book titled The Uses of Pessimism — 232 pages explaining why optimism is both stupid and dangerous. The good news is that optimism and hope have very little in common. Hope is a virtue. Optimism is a mood. Hope has a substance that the hollowness of optimism lacks. More on that in a moment.
So let’s begin.
I’ve always loved science fiction. And one of my all-time favorite films is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hollywood’s made four different movie adaptations of the original Jack Finney novel. But the 1978 version with Donald Sutherland is the gold standard. The plot is simple. Alien spores migrate across the galaxy. They land on earth. They grow into beautiful flowers. People take the flowers into their homes. Then, while they’re sleeping, the flowers morph into plants that consume the people. They replace each victim with a perfectly humanoid duplicate, but without a human soul and emotions. The plant creatures gradually become dominant. And they start hunting down any real, remaining humans, shrieking and pointing when they find one. Which then triggers a plant-creature swarm to devour the target.
I think this pretty well captures the nature of our current public life. We live in a culture with hornets in its head; hornets that never stop stinging because the internet never shuts down. A while back I got an email from a long-time bishop friend — not my former boss, by the way — and what he wrote is instructive:
“I’m in a terrible funk and don’t know what to do about it. I’m despairing for our country, for freedom of speech, and also for religious freedom in the future. I’m sure that I’ll get over the funk part, but not the concerns and worries. I’m also very angry with President Trump as well as the Democrats and media folk who hate him . . . I have to hope that God will protect us as a country and as a Church.”
Anger isn’t always wrong, and it’s not always the enemy of hope. But as technology advances, reshapes society, and rewires daily life with new modes of thought, the confusion in a culture intensifies. Confusion breeds division. Division drives conflict. And in the process, many of our assumed certainties, including basic religious beliefs, weaken. They become irrelevant to many adults and incomprehensible to the young.
And there’s an irony in all this. For all their wickedness and mendacity, the big atheist ideologies of the last century still had a kind of “religious” dimension or metaphysics. Marxists believed — in effect, they had a vigorous kind of faith — in an eventual withering away of the state. Today’s advanced consumer economies are very different. They neither dispute nor attempt to disprove supernatural and transcendent things. Instead, they render them uninteresting, unintelligible, and ultimately absent. Thus they’re more thoroughly atheist.
It’s in this sense – a basic revolution in how we think about and organize the world; a world where the idea of God is vaguely ridiculous because it has no utility – that we’re living a kind of new Reformation; literally a “re-formation” of how we think about the world and ourselves. At the same time, we’re also living a huge paradox: Man is instinctively a believing animal. We all have a religious DNA in the original sense of the Latin root word religare, which means “to bind.” We all believe in something, including the most hardcore materialists among us. We all take certain things on faith, and then we bind our reasoning to those articles of faith.
All those pious lawn signs that infested upscale neighborhoods during COVID — the ones that said “In this house we believe that science is real; that love is love; that reproductive rights are human rights” and so on — every one of them was a creedal claim for a new brand of religion-like discipleship.
Without God at its center, society always reverts to some form of idolatry. A society that removes the God question from public life invariably puts itself and its concerns in his place – no matter how much religious “neutrality” it claims. But it can’t produce happiness because no amount of distractions and material anesthetics can kill the inarticulate longing in each of us for something more than this world. The result is a culture of unsatisfied appetites, frustration, and quiet despair that can only be overcome by giving ourselves away in trust to Someone greater than ourselves.
Which is exactly what Georges Bernanos meant when he spoke about the meaning of hope.
Luckily, people still suffer and die. That word “luckily” sounds quite crazy. But as someone in his mid-70s who’s very keenly aware of the clock, I mean it quite literally. No one in his right mind seeks out pain or loss, but sooner or later they enter into every life. And they each raise the fundamental question of why. Why am I suffering? Why did my friend or my spouse or my child need to die? What’s the purpose, if any, to all of our endless working and yearning, day after day, year after year? The question of why is the one question our culture so often evades or forbids. We don’t like its implications. Mortality anchors us to questions of meaning; questions about the meaning – and the consequences — of our choices and actions. And those questions, seriously engaged, open a path to self-examination, purified thinking, and a search for answers; answers that only Jesus Christ can fully satisfy.
I said a moment ago that all of my heroes are pessimists. But pessimism and hope fit quite comfortably together if we understand them as the two eyes we need to see life in its fullness; life as it really is. The world and its creatures, including you and I, are broken. But we’re also profoundly loved by the Father of everything good and beautiful. It’s worth recalling that the root meaning of the word “holy” isn’t “good,” though holy things are always good. In its Hebrew root kadosh, holy means “other than.” We’re meant to be a godly people “other than” the world, for the sake of the world. I like to think God gave us the Sabbath and the Jubilee holy year to force us to remember who we are; to step aside from the noise of the world; to ponder and participate in his love. Tolkien described the human story as a “eucatastrophe” — a tragedy with a happy ending; a catastrophe with an unearned invasion of joy at the climax. The problem with the modern world — you see this especially in progressive politics and theology, but also in so much of today’s scientific boosterism — is that it refuses to accept the tragic dimension of what it means to be human. It refuses to see a fully real reality. And in doing that, it blinds itself to deliverance and redemption, and finally to joy.
So what do we do about all this? Well, a spirit of gratitude wouldn’t hurt. Bonhoeffer said that “In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” But the Epistle of James said it best: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.” And St. Augustine, the perfect Late Roman cocktail of realism and hope, wrote that people are always complaining about the darkness of the times, but we are the times, we make the times. The point of being a pilgrim of hope in the City of Man is to make the times better by the witness of our lives.
I want to end with a few of my own reasons for hope. There are too many to count. I’ll mention just three.
The first is history. History is the great teacher of our need for humility based on man’s record of failure and sin. We’re never as smart as we think we are, and we’re never as wise as we need to be. But history is also a powerful source of hope based on the good we’ve done, the things we’ve achieved, and the fact that no matter how inventively we screw things up — and we’re really good at it — God never abandons his Church or his people.
The second reason for hope is the existence, right now, of scores of great apostolates and thousands of good priests, religious, lay Catholics and other lay Christians who do live their faith in public and in private with articulate clarity. And that’s our vocation as well; that’s what all of us here today are called to.
My last reason for hope is quite personal. But some similar reason for hope resides in each of our lives if we search for it. Depending on the data source, the lifespan of the average American marriage today is somewhere between eight and 20 years. Only about 7 percent of marriages in our country make it to the half-century mark. This past December my wife Suann and I celebrated our 54th anniversary, and I still look at her with desire and delight.
I can’t speak for her, of course, but she did stick around.
The reason those five decades of marriage exist; the reason we didn’t crater as a couple; is our faith in Jesus Christ, the support and love of implausibly generous Catholic friends, and the beauty of the Church – the mother who is always there, always forgiving, and always more beautiful than the warts of her people and leaders. Each of those 54 years was consumed by the everyday difficulties and joys that obscure the larger picture of life. But looking back, the years have been one long record of blessings, in our work, in our friends, and especially in our children. We have a son with Down syndrome, and he’s a gift to us as parents and to each of his siblings because he makes us human, and he prevents any of us from ever dismissing the dignity of the disabled.
Now, I’m telling you this not because our experience is unique, but because it isn’t. All of us in this room have some reason for gratitude and joy if we’re willing to see it. Each of our lives, even in the midst of setbacks and suffering, means something beautiful because God is good, and he wills the best for us.
The lesson I want to close with here is that hope feeds and grows on the experience of love, the will to persist in that love, and the letting go of anger — no matter how vicious or lunatic the times. Nations rise and fall. Ours has no special immunity, and its end someday will be no different. But in the meantime, God and his love for us endure. When we really believe that, and trust in it, and conform our personal and public lives to it, then we’re finally a people of hope – and we have something vital to contribute to the world.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
