Home › Fathers, Saints & Teachers › Benedict XVI on Hope
At a glance
| Who | Joseph Ratzinger (1927–2022), priest and theologian, Archbishop of Munich, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981–2005), Pope Benedict XVI from 2005 until his resignation in 2013; died December 31, 2022 |
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| Standing | Pope; theologian No cause for his beatification has been opened. The Church normally waits five years after death, so a cause could not ordinarily open before the end of 2027. He is not called Venerable or Servant of God. |
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| The works | The encyclical Spe Salvi (2007); his Assumption homilies at Castel Gandolfo (2006, 2007); General Audiences on St. John the Seer (2006) and on the Parousia in St. Paul (2008); the books Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (1977) and Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two (2011) |
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| Weight | An encyclical is papal teaching addressed to the whole Church, though not every sentence in it is a definition of faith. Homilies and audiences are a pastor's preaching. His books are personal theological work; of Jesus of Nazareth he said plainly in its foreword that it is not an act of the Magisterium. Each is labeled below. |
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Why Benedict matters here
Few modern teachers thought longer about the last things. As a young professor he wrote a whole textbook on them; as pope he devoted an encyclical to hope and returned again and again to the Book of Revelation. Two convictions run through all of it. First, Christian hope is not a mood but a Person: “Man's great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God” (Spe Salvi 27). Second, the opposite of that hope is not only despair but false hope: the dream of building paradise on earth without God, or the urge to calculate when the end will come.
That is exactly the balance this site tries to keep. The Catechism warns against every attempt to realize the messianic hope “within history” through secular messianism (CCC 676), and the Lord himself tells us that the day and hour are not ours to know (Matthew 24:36).
Spe Salvi: “In hope we were saved”
The encyclical, dated November 30, 2007, takes its title from St. Paul: “in hope we were saved” (Romans 8:24, as quoted in Spe Salvi 1). It is Benedict's fullest statement on the last things.
Spe Salvi 1–3 · Faith is hopePapal teachingUnfolding
“The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.”
- Teaching
- In the New Testament, Benedict observes, “faith” and “hope” are nearly interchangeable. The first Christians were changed not by new information but by a hope they could trust: they knew the true God, who loves them, and so their present, even a hard one, could be lived and accepted (Spe Salvi 1–3).
- Why it matters
- Hope about the end is not reserved for the end. It changes how a Christian lives today.
Spe Salvi 16–23, 30 · Hope placed in progress alonePapal teachingWarning
“Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man.”
- Teaching
- Benedict traces how, in the modern age, the hope once placed in God was transferred to science, reason, freedom and political revolution, which were expected to bring about “the kingdom of man” (17, 30). He takes these goods seriously: reason is “God's great gift to man” (23). But he notes Theodor Adorno's grim remark that “progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb” (22), and he concludes that technical progress without moral growth is a threat rather than a hope. Marx's “real error is materialism” (21): man cannot be redeemed from the outside by better economic conditions, because “It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love” (26).
- The warning
- “A ‘Kingdom of God’ accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone” ends badly (23). This is the inner-worldly utopia the Catechism also warns against (CCC 676).
Spe Salvi 41–48 · Judgment as a setting for hopePapal teachingFuture
“The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope.”
- Teaching
- For Benedict, the judgment is good news. “A world without God is a world without hope” (44), because without a judge the innocent who suffered would never receive justice. But God's justice comes with mercy, and mercy does not make light of evil: “Grace does not cancel out justice” (44). So he can say: “The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace” (47).
- The fire that is Christ
- On purgatory, Benedict takes up the view of some recent theologians that “the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself.” Meeting him is the judgment: “Before his gaze all falsehood melts away.” The pain of that encounter is the pain of being healed and made able to love (47; compare 1 Corinthians 3:12–15).
- Not alone
- “No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone” (48). This is why we pray for the dead, and why our hope is always also hope for others.
- Why “Future”
- The Last Judgment is still to come (CCC 1038–1041), but we already learn to hope for it now, in prayer, in action and in suffering, the other “settings” of hope the encyclical names (32–40).
Spe Salvi 49–50 · “Mary, Star of Hope”Papal teaching
“Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us?”
- Teaching
- The encyclical ends with a prayer to Mary, who believed when everything seemed lost and who now goes before the Church as a sign of what God has in store for us. Its last line: “Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!” (50).
The woman and the dragon: the Assumption homilies
On the feast of the Assumption the first reading is Revelation 11:19a; 12:1–6a, 10ab, the woman clothed with the sun and the great red dragon. Benedict celebrated the feast each year at the parish church of St. Thomas of Villanova in Castel Gandolfo. His 2005 homily there speaks of Mary's Assumption (that “there is even room in God for the body”) but does not treat Revelation 12. His 2006 and 2007 homilies do. See also Revelation 12 and the Fathers on Revelation 12.
Homily, August 15, 2006 · God is strongerHomilyUnfolding
“The Woman … is stronger, because God is stronger.”
- Teaching
- Benedict reads the woman as both Mary and the Church: “this Woman who is Mary, who is the Church, seems vulnerable or defenceless.” The dragon stands for “all the powers of violence in the world.” They seem invincible, he says, but Mary tells us they are not (Homily, August 15, 2006).
Homily, August 15, 2007 · Love is stronger than hateHomilyUnfolding
“God is stronger than the dragon, that it is love which conquers rather than selfishness.”
- The woman
- She is first Mary, “clothed with the sun, that is, with God, totally,” and also the Church, the woman “who suffered, who had to flee, who gave birth with cries of anguish.”
- The dragon
- For St. John, Benedict says, “this dragon represented for him the power of the anti-Christian Roman Emperors, from Nero to Domitian.” But the image reaches every age: he names the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships of the twentieth century, and today “materialistic ideologies that tell us it is absurd to think of God.” Against the empire the faith once “appeared as a defenceless woman with no chance of survival,” and yet “in the end love was stronger than hate” (Homily, August 15, 2007).
- Why “Unfolding”
- Benedict reads the dragon not as one hidden figure to be identified but as a power the Church meets in every century. That is the Church's way of reading the chapter, and it rules out pinning it on a single living person.
The General Audiences
General Audience, August 23, 2006 · John, the Seer of PatmosCatechesisUnfolding
“The wounded and dead Lamb is victorious!”
- Teaching
- Benedict sets the Book of Revelation against “the dramatic experiences of the seven Churches of Asia,” Christians under persecution. Its first and fundamental vision is “the Lamb who is slain yet standing” (Revelation 5:6), before God's throne: Christ crucified and risen, who “has the history of the world in his hands.” The point of all John's imagery is consolation: “trust in Jesus, do not be afraid of the opposing powers, of persecution!”
- On Revelation 12
- The woman, “threatened, persecuted by the dragon,” is “also protected by God's comfort. And in the end this Woman wins. The dragon does not win.”
- Prayer
- The book ends with “Come, Lord Jesus!”, one of the central prayers of the first Christians, “Marana tha” (General Audience, August 23, 2006).
General Audience, November 12, 2008 · The expectation of the ParousiaCatechesisFuture
“…the expectation of Jesus' parusia does not dispense us from working in this world.”
- Teaching
- In his series on St. Paul, Benedict turns to the Letters to the Thessalonians. The first letter (probably written in the year 52) speaks of the Lord's return; in the second, “Paul changes his perspective,” warning believers not to be deceived into thinking that, “according to chronological calculations, the day of the Lord is truly imminent” (see 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians). Waiting for Christ does not excuse idleness; it “creates responsibility to the divine Judge for our actions in this world.”
- Can we still pray “Come”?
- Benedict admits it is hard to pray sincerely for the world to end. Yet he concludes that “in a correct and proper way, we too can say, together with the early Christians: ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’” Because the Judge is the one who loves us, “We are consequently safe, free of fear” (General Audience, November 12, 2008; compare 1 Corinthians 16:22).
The books
These are Joseph Ratzinger's personal theological works and are summarized here, not quoted. They carry the weight of a great theologian, not of the Magisterium.
Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (1977)Theological work
- The book
- Written as a professor's textbook (German original 1977; English translation by Michael Waldstein, edited by Aidan Nichols, O.P., Catholic University of America Press, 1988; second edition, 2007, with a new preface by the author as pope). It works through the Kingdom of God and the expectation of the end, death and immortality, the state of the soul after death, purgatory, heaven and hell, the resurrection and the return of Christ.
- Main lines
- Ratzinger engages modern theories of the end (Barth, Bultmann, Cullmann, Dodd) and argues that the world's fulfillment comes through God's transforming love, not through human programs or a millennial kingdom on earth. He presents heaven as a Christ-centered reality rather than a place in space, and suggests that the purification of purgatory need not be measured in earthly time.
Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two (2011) · The eschatological discourseTheological work
- The chapter
- The second chapter, “Jesus' Eschatological Discourse,” reads Jesus' words about the end of Jerusalem and the end of the world (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21).
- The time of the Gentiles
- Benedict gives special attention to the “times of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24), the period between the fall of Jerusalem and the end, and shows that Matthew 24:14 and Mark 13:10 teach the same thing: the Gospel must first be preached to all nations. The first Christians expected this time to be short, but what mattered was the mission, not its length. He states plainly that the duration of this period cannot be calculated, and he does not try. It is a time of suffering and of hope, in which Israel too remains in God's hands.
What he warned against, and what he commended
| He warned against | Inner-worldly utopias: a “Kingdom of God” without God, the hope that science, politics or revolution will redeem man (Spe Salvi 17–23, 30). Calculating the end: Paul's warning against “chronological calculations” (Audience, November 12, 2008); the time of the Gentiles “cannot be calculated” (Jesus of Nazareth II). |
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| He commended | Watchfulness and work: waiting for Christ makes us responsible for this world. Prayer: “Maranatha,” “Come, Lord Jesus!” prayed rightly and without fear. Hope that acts in charity: “man is redeemed by love” (Spe Salvi 26), and “No one is saved alone” (48). |
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Benedict's own cautionBenedict never identified the dragon or the Antichrist with any living person, and he set no date. He read the visions of Revelation as a light on every age of the Church, and he insisted that the end is not a catastrophe to be feared but the coming of the Lamb who has already won.
For reflection
Do I live differently because I hope?
Benedict says the one who has hope lives differently. Where in my life am I placing my hope in something less than God? Can I pray “Come, Lord Jesus” today, not out of fear, but out of love?
Sources
- Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, November 30, 2007, vatican.va
- Benedict XVI, Homily for the Solemnity of the Assumption, Castel Gandolfo, August 15, 2005, August 15, 2006, August 15, 2007
- Benedict XVI, General Audience, “John, the Seer of Patmos,” August 23, 2006
- Benedict XVI, General Audience, “Saint Paul (12). Eschatology: the Expectation of the Parusia,” November 12, 2008
- Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein, ed. Aidan Nichols (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988; 2nd ed. 2007)
- Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week (2011), ch. 2, “Jesus' Eschatological Discourse” (see the excerpt on “The Time of the Gentiles”)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 675–677, 1030–1032, 1038–1041
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