Power to Pope Benedict

by Michael Shackleton · February 6, 2008

ESKOM’S failure to plan for the future needs of this country’s electricity consumption, not least at the prospect of the upcoming football World Cup tournament of 2010, is making tongues wag.

No matter the assurances that the government will find a way out, there appears to be a sense of hopelessness and doubt about that. We find ourselves echoing the words of the 18th century poet Alexander Pope, who wrote: Hope springs eternal in the human breast, man never is, but always to be blest.

These words will strike a chord because, no matter what frightful experiences befall us, it would be odd if we did not hope that things will eventually return to normal. And we have every right to expect that those in charge of running our beautiful land will get the message of our despair, snap out of their apparent smugness, and make a grand commitment to the good of the South African people who put them into government.

Pope Benedict has add-ressed this idea of a worldly vision of hope in his latest encyclical Spe salvi (It is through hope that we are saved). Christopher Howse, writing in the British newspaper Telegraph, quotes a fellow journalist who, on looking through a summary of the encyclical, exclaimed: There’s no news here. It’s all about God!

What a comment on how today’s people want God kept to a very individual level, a personal belief not for general consumption, especially not in a newspaper.

Yet the encyclical is not all about God. Humanity is very much the setting of Benedict’s theological thought. He is not on a theoretical plain but on an extremely practical one, if the world would only take notice.

Benedict suggests that faith in Christ has become virtually meaningless today. The world is aware rather of its own potential; that people’s lives can be improved by means of current technologies and other scientific advances of our times.

God, in other words, is irrelevant to the reality of human reason and freedom, which provide us with all we need, giving us a hope for now and the future without the interference of any concept of the superior hope given by faith in God’s revelation of himself to humanity. This is an ideology from the 19th century utilitarian thinkers who held that reason and freedom were all that were needed for a better world.

The effect on our own times is that faith is not denied but rather displaced to another level, the level of purely private and otherworldly affairs. Faith is clearly of no interest to the world. His Holiness sees this as a crisis of hope, rather than of faith itself.

As we wait for the power and the lights to be switched on again permanently, we can appreciate the pope’s message. Hoping in modern science and human freedom means limiting the horizon of hope by hoping in what is impermanent and prone to failure. Benedict assures us that there is a greater hope that surpasses everything else, which can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and can bestow on us what human nature itself cannot attain.

Though we may find ourselves in the dark without our electricity-dependent crutches, we may yet think seriously, especially during this time of Lenten sacrifice, of where our true universal hope must lie. We should consider the questions posed by the Holy Father: what may we hope and what may we not hope?