Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
December 28, 2007
This time at the end of one civil year and the beginning of another has always been a time for reflection and resolution.
The ancient Romans used to turn at this time to the two-faced god Janus (after whom the month of January is named), because with one face he would help them to review the past year and with the other to look forward to the coming one.
For Christians, even though the liturgical year ends in November rather than December, we have had the tradition of singing a Te Deum on December 31, thanking God for all his blessings in the past year. We have also turned on January 1 to our Lady under the title of Mother of God and Queen of Peace, asking her both to mother us into greater conformity with her divine Son and to intercede for us that this new year may put to end the various conflicts experienced in the world, in our homes and in our hearts.
The passage of time, which seems to become quicker each year, confronts us with the reality that we are 365 days closer to death. That, in turn, helps us to ponder our priorities and reorder them, inspired by the new beginning that a new year always offers.
In a somewhat surprising section of his new encyclical, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict emphasizes that reflection on the end of our life and on judgment — which is common at this time of year — is a great means for growing in and practicing the virtue of hope. Such a statement will catch many Americans, even Catholic Americans, off-guard. Death is the foremost phobia in our culture. We try not to think about it very much and deem those who do as morbid and morose. With regard to God’s evaluation of our life when we die, many of us view it with dread rather than hope, if we reflect on it much at all.
So to us and our culture, Benedict reminds us of how meditation on the four last things is meant to encourage rather than depress us. Death is the portal to eternal life with God, the pope says, where we hope to “plunge into the ocean of [God’s] infinite love.” St. Paul compares death to childbirth; once the baby is born, the immense joy makes one forget the pangs. That joy comes from Christ, who promised “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (Jn 16:22). If we love Christ, then we cannot wait to be fully with him forever.
The prospect of judgment after death is also meant to fill us with hope. It constitutes, he says, the “essential” and “strongest” argument in favor of faith and hope in eternal life, because through judgment God will bring justice to all the injustice we and others have ever suffered. He will right all the wrongs. “The purely individual need for fulfillment in an everlasting love is an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity,” he declares. “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.”
Benedict adds that the image of judgment is frightening only in the sense that it evokes responsibility for us to love. If we are fulfilling that responsibility to love God and others, then there is nothing to be afraid of; it’s only when we are being unjust to God and others that the prospect terrorizes. When a young boy loves his dad, he will ordinarily run to embrace him when he returns from work. Other the other hand, when he has been naughty and his mother has told him she will inform his father, then the boy begins to dread his father’s arrival. It’s similar with us with respect to the return of the Lord Jesus. If we are loving God and others, then our approach to Jesus’ return should be with even greater hope and anticipation than a boy for that of his beloved dad; it’s only when we have been misbehaving that fear invades. The fear we have is then a blessing insofar as it gives us reason to repent and change our behavior.
In this section on death and judgment as a school of hope, Pope Benedict also reiterates, with new descriptive language, the Church’s constant teachings about the states that come after judgment: heaven, hell and purgatory.
He reaffirms the reality of heaven and who goes there straight-away: “There can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors, people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey toward God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.” To become people with these characteristics ought to be the goal of the life of every Christian.
He reasserts the clear possibility of hell for those “who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, for whom everything has become a lie, who have lived for hatred and suppressed all love within themselves.” He says that hell “is a terrifying thought,” but adds that we have witnessed in our own times “alarming profiles” of those who have lived this way. It’s probably easy for him to recall from his youth the faces of Hitler and many of the Nazis.
Finally, he confirms the teaching on Purgatory and says — full of hope — that this is probably where most people end up initially after they die. “For the great majority of people, we suppose, there remains in the depths of their inner being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil.” This filth covers purity and needs first to be burned away by the fire of Christ’s love, which melts falsehood, burns and saves. Purgatory is a place full of hope, where God’s mercy and justice meet.
The goal of a journey influences the road one takes. As we pass from 2007 to 2008, Pope Benedict wants us to reflect on our end and choose the appropriate means. This is the way we will be “saved in hope” and advance toward the eternal embrace of God-with-us, our redeemer.