Hope

We dedicate the Summer 2008 issue of Communio to Trish Bozell's memory, and wish to provide an introduction to some small part of her goodness and grace to our readers who may not know of her and her extraordinary life.

Inspired by Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, Spe salvi, the Summer, 2008 issue of Communio is dedicated to the theme of “Hope.” . . .

“Mary, God’s most beautiful child, helps man to become, as she is, a gratuitous longing for God. She intercedes so that man may, as she did, become prayer.”

“It is the element of creative freedom within human nature that is so vulnerable to damage from a secularist culture. The severance of the links between notions of God, human nature, ethos, and religion, and the emergence of counterfeit notions of faith, hope, and love, set limits on the intellectual horizons of people.”

“God speaks, and in speaking he hands himself over to us. He loves, and in loving he hands his happiness over to us. He hopes, and his hope is his answer to Joan. The God we hear speaking is efficacious hope, a God new from all eternity.”

“Hope is therefore not purely waiting for a future intervention by God that is yet to take place, but rather it is a trusting expectancy and the active cooperation of one’s freedom with a gift already initially given and straining towards its fulfillment.”

“The individual theologian’s subjectivity needs to be stretched wide open so as to be able to participate in the subjectivity of the Church.”

“It is easy to see the at once untimely and salutary character of a thought like Origen’s for our age, tempted as it is to deny God any right to intervene in the destiny of the world. But who does not see that a God prohibited from dwelling in the world and history loses, by this very fact, any interest for us?”

“To be a Christian is to be one who hopes; it is to situate oneself on the foundation of a sure hope.”