The Year of Hope

8th December 2007 - 8th December 2008

On December 8, 2007, at the end of the Year of Humility, the Year of Hope began. The Bishop invited us to address our glance to the Mother of the Eucharist, the one we always invoke with the words "Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope…". Mary is the masterpiece of God, she is the hope of mankind, because all of us in our weakness, admiring this marvellous creature, we can be comforted and illuminated by her light and by her immense grace.

Mary is the hope of the Church, because she always accompanied and supported it in the centuries along its path sometimes bristly, thorny, hard and marked by persecutions. Mary is our hope: we can hope and have the certitude of likening to God because this is his will ("God made man in his image"), so we can spiritually liken also to the Immaculate Conception and hope to become pure and immaculate hosts, pleasing God.

The hope the Bishop talked about is not the human one, but the supernatural one, it is the theological virtue that is present in the man when the grace is present: hoping, in this case, means having the certitude. In the letter to the Romans, referring to Abraham, St. Paul writes: "Against all hope, he in hope believed", that is he had the certitude that God would have kept his promises and would have made him founder of a people as numerous as the stars of the sky; ths certitude always remained in Abraham's heart, also in the moment when the Lord asked him to offer as sacrifical victim his only son Isaac.

The Bishop explained to us that we also, as a community, we are called to hope against all hope, we must have the certitude that God will realize his plans and will put at the head of clergy the one who was condemned and taken away, even if today the human appearances indicate exactly the opposite. From the human point of view none can think that who was killed morally will be able to resurrect to do so great things that all the men will be astonished, but this is what will happen, because God doesn't disappoint, but He realizes his plans when He decides it. St. Paul himself in the letter to the Romans teaches to us: "Hope does not disappoint us" (Rom. 5,5).

The Bishop exhorted us to ask the Mother of the Eucharist to infuse into us a stronger and stronger joy in a moment in which, as a community, we are alone, abandoned, betrayed, humiliated, slandered and spread. Moreover we have to live with joy the wait that God realizes his plans ("Be joyful in hope" - Rom. 12,12); we have to imitate Mary in this, who since the moment of the Annunciation has awaited with joy the birth of her Son. In her heart were present joy and sorrow, because she knew that child would have suffered much. During her Son's passion and death she felt joy and sorrow, because she knew that through Jesus' death many children of her would have resurrected.