Before returning to the next paragraph in Pope Benedict’s document on Christian hope, Spe salvi, it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the newest successor of St. Peter, newly elected Pope Leo XIV.  As a sort of humorous aside, since I do not normally write with Roman numerals, I fully expect to make the mistake of transposing the numbers for his name since I have become so accustomed over the years to typing the same letters used for Pope Benedict’s name, though in a different order.  So if I accidentally put XVI instead of XIV, I hope you will be patient with me!

After watching the announcement of the new pope, I found myself reading and listening to people talk about the new Holy Father.  He only spoke briefly when he came out on the loggia to offer his first Urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world) blessing.  I listened to a podcast early the next morning that commented on a variety of things regarding his track record, and what we might expect during his papacy.  But as I said, those were words about him, they were not words from him.  Later that morning, I came across the homily that he preached earlier that day to the College of Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel.  After reading it, I was put at ease, for I had now heard from the pope himself.  I was encouraged at what I read, and there was a section from his homily that really resonated with me.  In speaking about the challenges we face in our present time with preaching the Gospel, he said:

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.  (Pope Leo XIV, Holy Mass with the College of Cardinals, 9 May 2025)

In many ways, this acknowledgment of the challenges being faced is very much in line with what we have been considering over the past two weeks from Spe salvi.  The relatively modern shift away from faith toward science and reason has made the Good News seem less and less relevant, and even foolish to the world’s “more advanced” understanding and sensibilities.

In the next paragraph for our consideration in Spe salvi, Pope Benedict notes that “two categories become increasingly central to the idea of progress: reason and freedom.” (Spe salvi, 18) But reason and freedom, according to these modern thinkers “were tacitly interpreted as being in conflict with the shackles of faith and of the Church as well as those of the political structures of the period.” (ibid.)

From the first homily of Pope Leo, it is encouraging that he sees clearly what Pope Benedict is emphasizing as to what continues to be a threat to the spread of the Gospel message in our modern times.  And thanks be to God, the Holy Father is not willing to back down from the challenge.  In his homily, he is encouraged the Cardinals to join in this effort to faithfully proclaim the Gospel in the midst of difficult settings.  Of course, this is something to which we are all called.  He said as much in the words he addressed to the world that afternoon of his election:

All of us are in God’s hands. So, let us move forward, without fear, together, hand in hand with God and with one another other! We are followers of Christ. Christ goes before us. The world needs his light. Humanity needs him as the bridge that can lead us to God and his love. Help us, one and all, to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, joining together as one people, always at peace. (Pope Leo XIV, First “Urbi et Orbi” Blessing of the Holy Father, 8 May 2025)

Address by then Bp. Robert Prevost at the Synod on Evangelization in 2012 

BISHOP PREVOST: Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel — for example, abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia. Religion is at best tolerated by mass media as tame and quaint when it does not actively oppose positions on ethical issues that the media have embraced as their own. However, when religious voices are raised in opposition to these positions, mass media can target religion, labeling it as ideological and insensitive in regard to the so-called vital needs of people in the contemporary world. 

The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully ingrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective. Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe, and uncaring — not because of anything they say or do, but because their audiences contrast their message with the sympathetic, caring tones of media-produced images of human beings who, because they are caught in morally complex life situations, opt for choices that are made to appear as healthful and good. 

Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today. If the new evangelization is going to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the context of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media. 

The church fathers offered a formidable response to those non-Christian and anti-Christian literary and rhetorical forces at work throughout the Roman Empire in shaping the religious and ethical imaginations of the day. The Confessions of St. Augustine, with its central image of the cor inquietam, has shaped the way that Western Christians and non-Christians reimagine the adventure of religious conversion. In his City of God, Augustine used the tale of Alexander the Great’s encounter with a captured pirate to ironize the supposed moral legitimacy of the Roman Empire. 

Church fathers, among them John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, were not great rhetoricians insofar as they were great preachers. They were great preachers because they were first great rhetoricians. In other words, their evangelizing was successful in 

great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived. Consequently, they understood with enormous precision the techniques through which popular religious and ethical imaginations of their day were manipulated by the centers of secular power in that world. 

Moreover, the Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred liturgy into spectacle. Here again, church fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the saeculum, and that our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery. 

At least in the contemporary western world, if not throughout the entire world, the human imagination concerning both religious faith and ethics is largely shaped by mass media, especially by television and cinema. Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel. 

However, overt opposition to Christianity by mass media is only part of the problem. The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public, that when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective. 

If the “New Evangelization” is going to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the challenge of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media. 

The Fathers of the Church, including Saint Augustine, can provide eminent guidance for the Church in this aspect of the New Evangelization, precisely because they were masters of the art of rhetoric. Their evangelizing was successful in great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived. 

In order to combat successfully the dominance of the mass media over popular religious and moral imaginations, it is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films. The proper mission of the Church is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. Religious life also plays an important role in evangelization, pointing others to this mystery, through living faithfully the evangelical counsels 

– Fr. Dominic wanted to give you a taste of our new Holy Father this week. 

Having muddled my way through an attempt to give the most fundamental explanation of the philosophical system proposed by Francis Bacon, I hope this week will be a little more articulate in explaining how Pope Benedict continues his reflection on the impact of this and other thinkers of Bacon’s era on the topic of faith and hope.

The Holy Father explains the consequences of this “disturbing step” taken by Bacon and his system of thinking:

up to that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption”. Now, this “redemption”, the restoration of the lost “Paradise” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. (Spe salvi, 17)

The pope then describes how this philosophy not only affects the understanding of faith, but hope as well, taking on a new form that Bacon calls “faith in progress” (ibid.) Our hope no longer lies in the faith given to us through the promises of Jesus Christ, but rather in the promises that science and technology will bring about as they propose solutions to problems that had, up to that point, been thought impossible or unexplainable.  

Francis Bacon has been recognized as saying that the “Three Great Inventions” of the Renaissance were the printing press, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass.  The printing press enabled the more rapid expansion of knowledge and thus would make possible the faster spread of information about new inventions that would support his system.  Gunpowder marked a significant change in the ability of those who were less powerful to contend with their opponents, thus allowing for alterations to well-established power structures.  The mariner’s compass made navigation easier, and was at the service of new discoveries that could expand our understanding of a variety of topics.  These were examples of how applied knowledge and technology were capable of changing how we understand the world around us.

There is no question that the past several decades has seen remarkable growth in science and technology, especially with the growth of the Internet, medical breakthroughs, travel to space, and most recently, Artificial Intelligence.  Those who find Bacon’s philosophy attractive will be all the more convinced of its veracity given the ample evidence to support it.  The Holy Father says as much when he concludes this paragraph by writing: “[a]s the ideology of progress developed further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.” (ibid.)

In response to philosophies that try to claim that science and technology are slowly chipping away at our need for faith, the Church has not remained idle.  I think of somebody like Father Robert Spitzer, S.J., a Jesuit who has written and spoken extensively on faith and reason, offering a sound intellectual response to support how these two fields are not opposed, and how the many advances in science do not indeed explain away the faith.  The Church is often accused of being anti-science, but such a claim is based on little awareness on how much faithful Catholics, past and present, have contributed to the development of science while maintaining the need for faith.

What more might we learn from Pope St. John Paul II regarding building around ourselves our own środowisko, a culture or environment or framework, of faith? Just to recap, we began with those first days of Fr. Wojtyła beginning to live life with young people in Krakow, showing them an external, and internal, freedom that they had never known. Before that, as a young man, it was the heartfelt prayer learned from his own father, and learned while suffering the loss of his own father, that had led him towards God’s call to be a priest and nourished him spiritually for the rest of his life. And, on top of those beautiful, and painful, periods of his early life, another characteristic that was always part of him was the simple choice to care deeply about every person around him.

Freedom lived with others. Prayer learned from others. Love given to others. 

Notice the pattern: John Paul II didn’t navigate life alone. So many times, what we emphasize about his life: his philosophical erudition, his charism and energy, his mysticism, his political adroitness, his greatness on the world stage, his love for hiking and skiing, his humility amidst the rigors of Parkinson’s … Each of those things considered on their own could sketch for us a man who was incredibly gifted from the beginning, picked by God for a sublime mission, and who ran the race before him very much on his own. 

I recall one particular afternoon while in seminary in Rome texting a couple other guys to see if they wanted to go for a run. I cautioned that I wasn’t wanting to do anything crazy and we could go as slow as we wanted and just enjoy a couple miles together. Well, as we got through the first mile and had a nice long downhill I was feeling pretty good, so we (I) picked up the pace. And if you’re going at a good clip you don’t want to slow down on the flat mile in front of St. Peter’s (this was while I was in Rome). AND, if you have a pretty good time you might as well storm up the final hill at full speed… We finished our run, said a prayer together before the little grotto of Our Lady, and one of the guys turned to me: “Bro, I came out here to take it easy and have fun together, and you didn’t let us do that at all.” It was a rebuke; it was humbling. I still struggle with that today: going for a jog with others and pushing it too fast. 

But I think all of us do. 

Maybe it is not in running, but who of us does not have some area of life where we feel a little bit desperate and our temptation is to just leave somebody else behind because we are feeling the pressure to finish, fix, or figure something out. Money is tight, or I’m getting older, or the todo list is too long, or the culture isn’t what we want it to be, or we need to make a decision now, or I need to get to something else and don’t have time for you right now… Our world is constantly pressing into us the lie that “You’re not good enough.” Think about it: every advertisement, every website, most of our interactions with other people, and even just the noise and hubbub and stoplights that get in our way each day, are – down where we don’t even notice it anymore – saying “Go faster.”; “Do more.”; “It’s not enough.”

The fact is, if we are operating out of that posture – out of fear, worry, hustle, or not-good-enough-ness – we are more faithful disciples of the internet than we are disciples of Jesus.

And the consequence of the constant running, constant trying to make ends meet, constant worry about the next thing is that we will not have time for other people – at least, not real people, who aren’t perfect and who might realize that we aren’t perfect either – and that frenetic solo-ing of life is absolutely poisonous to really being rooted in God, to really living a human life. So, one more part of środowisko then is simple: “Be not afraid.” 

Such were JPII’s first words as Pope when he stepped out on the logia of St. Peter’s: Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows “what is in man”. He alone knows it. So often today man does not know what is within him, in the depths of his mind and heart. So often he is uncertain about the meaning of his life on this earth. He is assailed by doubt, a doubt which turns into despair. We ask you therefore, we beg you with humility and trust, let Christ speak to man. He alone has words of life, yes, of eternal life.

– Fr. Dominic was not alive when JPII was elected Pope. When Benedict was elected, he was 12 years old and first starting to serve Mass with his brother (who had just received his First Communion), and when Francis was elected, he was on break during his first year of seminary. You may find it a beautiful thing to pray about this week: How has God carried you (and the Church) through the different Popes that were part of your life?