By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski's talk during the 2025 Serra USA Rally for Vocations, Jan. 24, 2025, at the Dadeland Marriott Hotel in Miami.
This Serra Vocational Rally takes place within the Jubilee Year of 2025. This year we marked the 2025th anniversary of the Incarnation and the Birth of Christ. Also, this year is the 1700 anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, a key moment in the history of the Christian faith. The Council gave us what we call the Nicene Creed, which we recite at Mass every Sunday.
The theme for this Jubilee Year, as chosen by Pope Francis, is “Pilgrims of Hope”. This, I would venture to say, is an appropriate theme: for at the Incarnation, when Mary said “yes” to the Angel, she opened the doors of our world to hope. That hope became flesh in her womb, that hope is Jesus Christ – and he is a hope that will not disappoint. The Nicene Creed expresses Christian hope by affirming the resurrection of Jesus Christ, signifying the promise of eternal life for believers, and emphasizing that through Jesus' sacrifice, mankind can be reconciled with God and have a future life beyond death, offering a source of comfort and optimism even in the face of earthly challenges; essentially, it provides hope for a future life with God after death.
St. Peter in his epistle tells his community: “Be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you.”
But there don't seem to be that many people waiting breathlessly for us to tell them. How do we communicate this hope in an increasingly secular world — a world in which God is exiled to the margins of our lives, and of our consciousness?
So, we are pilgrims of hope in a world that has seemingly lost hope. A world without hope might be an existential desert — a lonely, arid, hostile place where tribalism has replaced religious fervor, where dysfunctional kids shoot up classrooms, where people resort to consumerism, or drugs, or sex to dull their pain and loneliness.
A world without hope is a world without a future, a world closed to the possibility of the Transcendent, a world without Sacraments, for the sacraments introduce us into the transcendent, a world beyond the material, beyond just the “here and now”.
The crisis of our modern or postmodern age can rightly be described as a crisis of hope. The social pathologies of our time – abortion, drug abuse, promiscuity, suicide, divorce, and the breakup of the family – are symptomatic of a loss of hope.
Even those who nominally identify themselves as Christians or Catholics betray a loss of hope in their abandonment of regular Church attendance and reception of the sacraments: for prayer is essentially an expression of hope.
Only those who hope pray.
But for us to journey in hope as pilgrims to Eternal Life, we need ministers of hope, we need priests to give us the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist, which can only be understood as manifestations of the hope that is ours in Jesus Christ. The Mass is a pledge of future glory – without hope, no future glory, no reason to celebrate the Sacraments or go to Mass – and therefore no need for priests, for their prayers or our own.
So, back to my earlier question: How do we communicate this hope in an increasingly secular world — a world in which God is exiled to the margins of our lives, and of our consciousness?
First, we must understand the nature of the crisis that the world is undergoing – if we get the diagnosis right, then we might find the proper medicine for a cure.
I think the Pope in urging us to see ourselves in this Jubilee Year as “pilgrims of hope” has pointed us in the right direction. And, in doing so, he is following the efforts of his immediate predecessors, Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, to rescue the Second Vatican Council from those who misread its intentions and misapplied its teachings.
After the Second Vatican Council, a common misunderstanding – and misinterpretation – was that the Council wanted to update the Church so that the Church would get with the times. Yes, the Church needed to be “updated” but Saint John XXIII’s and Saint Paul VI’s intent, and what the “updating” of the Council had meant to achieve, was not to surrender the Church to the spirit of the present age.
Some of those who had misinterpreted the Second Vatican Council as a surrender to the modern age did so because they also misdiagnosed the crisis of modernity as a crisis of faith – rather than one of hope. They held that modern man (and woman) could not believe anymore in the classic propositions of Christianity as we restate every Sunday in the Nicene Creed. They thought that if the Christian faith was to survive, it would have to adapt to the modern mentality. Such efforts to adapt the faith – or, as some would say, to “dumb it down” – failed: The failure was no more evident than in the collapse of vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Poorly catechized or especially defective catechized young people will not easily embrace a vocation to the priesthood or religious life, or for that matter a vocation to Christian marriage.
Modern man’s problem was not that he could not believe, but that he was so credulous he could believe anything. We see this credulity in so many of the things we, moderns, accept as true.
The Council Fathers were not about changing the Church – at least in her essentials – (As I noted earlier, this year we also celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed). The Council was about changing the world by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Vatican II was about the Church rediscovering herself as essentially an evangelical movement. The purpose of the Church is, as it always has been, to announce Jesus Christ – who saves us from our sins and brings us to new hope.
As Christians, we know that we have a future – a future revealed to us by the Son of God who, by taking on our flesh, pitches his tent in our midst only to lead us to union with the Father in the communion or fellowship of the Holy Spirit. This hope is trustworthy, as the lives of the saints give witness – and thus hope enables us to face our present. The present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey, namely eternal life with God (cf. Benedict SS #1).
In Aparecida in 2007 the Bishops of Latin America in a document that prepared the way for Evangelii Gaudium, the Joy of the Gospel, they wrote: “A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of the faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, which does not convert the life of the baptized, would not withstand the trials of time. Our greatest danger is the gray pragmatism of the daily life of the Church in which everything apparently continues normally, but in reality, the faith is being consumed and falling into insignificance.
In 2005 — that’s also long time ago — but in 2005, a man named Christian Smith wrote a study on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers called “Soul Searching.” He says that the dominant religion among current American teenagers is what he called MTD, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” This MTD is a religion that believes in a distant God — out there — who simply wants everyone to be nice to each other and for everyone to be happy. This faith, Smith says, is parasitic — it must feed on established traditions of historical religions like Christianity and Judaism to survive and grow — but it changes and distorts the theological substance of those traditions in order to create its own distinctive theological and religious viewpoint. Of course, this MTD is found not only among teens, but it is the popular faith among many, if not most, U.S. adults.
And simply to accommodate our ministries, programs and practices to this alternative religion of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” is not a formula that will “save the world for Christ” or inspire the right young men to answer a call to the Catholic priesthood.
We must all start again from Christ, recognizing that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, who gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
Maybe, digressing on MTD (Moralistic Therapeutic Deism) is to get too deep into the weeds.
But as “pilgrims of hope”, it falls to us to transmit the Gospel in an adequate way in the new cultural context in which we live. But our task is not to change the Gospel, but to present the Gospel in such a way that it changes us — and those with whom we share it.
Of course, the Christ that is the answer to the longings of the human heart — the Christ that is found in the Gospels — is much different from the image of Christ that prevails in our culture today. The “popular” image of Jesus today, that of MTD, is of a Jesus who demands nothing, who never scolds, who accepts everyone and everything — a Jesus who no longer does anything but affirm us.
Pope Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, said: “The Jesus that makes everything okay for everybody is a phantom, a dream, and not a real figure.” The Jesus we meet in the Gospel — who is the same yesterday, today and forever — is demanding and bold. And therefore, he is not always convenient.
The Church's teachings have always been challenging to believers and a stumbling block to non-believers.
Jesus — the real Jesus of the Gospels — answers the deepest questions of our existence. As St. John Paul II wrote: “Young people, whatever their possible ambiguities, have a profound longing for those genuine values which find their fullness in Christ. Is not Christ,” he continues, “the secret of true freedom and profound joy of heart? Is not Christ the supreme friend and the teacher of all genuine friendship?” Then, he adds: “If Christ is presented to young people as he really is, they experience him as an answer that is convincing, and they can accept his message, even when it is demanding and bears the mark of the Cross.” And, of course, what St. John Paul II said about young people is also true of us as well.
And so, to conclude, I think any ministry seeking to foster vocations to the priesthood and religious life must be anchored in hope. The ministry of priests and religious point beyond the “here and now”, and so should their lifestyles. Like Mary, who in her “yes” to the angel at the Annunciation opened the doors of our world to hope, our priests and our religious through their “yes” open doors to hope, to transcendence.
Of course, we will continue to face strong headwinds; we will continue to have go against the currents of times. No ministry in the Church is sustained without faith – but has to be the faith we proclaim when we recite the Nicene Creed and not that of MTD – Moral Therapeutic Deism. And no ministry will be sustained without prayer. Indispensable for your efforts to promotes must be prayer.
Remember, only those who hope pray.
