c. 2007 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican on Friday (Nov. 30) published the second encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI, a theological reflection on the virtue of Christian hope and a critique of secular faith in scientific and political progress.

In Spe Salvi (“Saved by Hope”), Benedict contrasts Christian hope for eternal salvation with a modern tendency to focus on improving the conditions of earthly life.

The encyclical is “loaded with implication for daily life, politics and ethics,” said the Rev. Robert Gahl, an American who teaches at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

Benedict argues that the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries led to a belief that “the restoration of the lost Paradise is no longer expected from faith” but from science. Yet he noted that technological advances, including nuclear weapons, have shown that science “can also destroy mankind and the world.”

The Marxist faith in political revolution has been no less destructive than the growth of faith in science, the pope writes. Karl Marx mistakenly “thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right”; but 20th century communism left behind “a trail of appalling destruction.”

Benedict writes that Jesus “did not bring a message of social revolution” and “was not engaged in a fight for political liberation” _ reiterating a point he has made often in his long-running debates with proponents of Liberation Theology, a movement that seeks to fuse Marxism with Catholic social teaching.

Yet the pope denies that concern for personal salvation need undermine concern for the rest of society. On the contrary, “love of God leads to participation in the justice and generosity of God toward others,” he said.

Christian generosity applies not only in this world, the pope adds, but can take the form of praying for dead loved ones in the “intermediate state” of purgatory, where those waiting to reach heaven “have to pass through `fire’ so as to become fully open to receiving God.”

The ultimate object of Christian hope, according to Benedict, is the Last Judgment, a concept that he notes has “faded into the background” in an era of “individualized” Christian faith that is “primarily oriented toward the salvation of the believer’s own soul.”

For Benedict, the hope that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” is the definitive answer to contemporary atheism, which he describes as a “type of moralism.”

The atheist’s argument that a “world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God” can be countered only by a belief in divine justice, he argues.

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Despite his critique of Marx, Benedict also writes with admiration for the 19th century German philosopher, whom he lauds for his “great precision” and “great analytical skill.” At a press conference at the Vatican on Friday, Cardinal Georges Cottier described the encyclical’s passages on Marx as “almost a eulogy.”

Spe Salvi is also notable for the prominence of its non-Western references. Among Benedict’s principal exemplars of Christian hope are an African woman and two Vietnamese men.

His account of the 19th century St. Josephine Bakhita, originally of Darfur, Sudan, inevitably recalls the current ethnic and religious strife that has drawn international concern. Kidnapped and enslaved at the age of 9, Bakhita ended her life as a nun in an Italian convent.

Benedict quotes a letter from a 19th century Vietnamese martyr, Paul Le-Bao Tinh, who wrote that his faith gave him “joy and gladness” in spite of captivity and torture.

The case of the late Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, imprisoned for 13 years by the Vietnamese communist government, is for Benedict an illustration of the inspiring power of prayer.

“In a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness,” the pope writes, “the fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an increasing power of hope.“

KRE/PH END ROCCA