Authentic spirituality of hope must be recovered, says Argentinean archbishop

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Dec 20, 2007 / 10:21 am

Archbishop Hector Aguer of La Plata, Argentina, said this week that an “authentic spirituality of hope” which “helps us prepare for a Merry Christmas” must be recovered. This is “the contribution that we as Christians must make to our contemporaries.”

During his weekly program, “Keys to a Better World,” the archbishop spoke about Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” and he pointed out that “we all have the right to hope for many things” that “we need and that complement our lives and help us to aspire to happiness,” but “hope is the foundation of them all.”

“Hope allows us to trust in the future” but “not in a merely intra-historic future,” but “in a transcendent and eternal future, because the goal, the object of Christian hope is precisely eternal life,” Archbishop Aguer said.

That eternal life is “the total and perfect possession of unending life” and “that great hope to which the life of every human being and the course of all of human history is directed, is the foundation of all the legitimate human hopes,” he said.

Archbishop Aguer stressed that while life can bring frustration and tragedy, even in midst of the worst of circumstances, that hope remains firm because it is founded on the love of God. 

The archbishop explained the shortcomings of modern culture saying that it “has eclipsed that great hope and has sought to replace the Kingdom of God with the kingdom of man”, but at the same time, modern culture is in a state of confusion. This confusion, the archbishop said, arises because “man has so much strength to transform the world but at the same time has such interior emptiness”. Even in this situation, “what remains is the reserve of that great hope,” he added.