Growing Our Hope: The Way to God
The Second Vatican Council emerged as a response to contemporary man. Its message of pastoral renewal and spiritual transformation traced a horizon of hope-filled lights on the path of humanity.
I feel that I am a spiritual child of its teachings, which marked my path towards God. That faithful God who invites me, and all of us, to follow him by being faithful daily and to hope against all hope. We live in a world without God, a world which finds it hard to believe and a world which does not know how to wait. The Council teaches us that the mission of Christians is to put God back in temporal tasks, in the midst of our work and our actions. The Council was a moment in the history of the Church in which God transformed the Church in a special way.
Pope Francis invites us to live the Holy Year of the Redemption as pilgrims of the hope already alive on the horizon of the Conciliar Church. He stated in his February 2022 letter announcing the Jubilee Year of 2025:
We must keep the flame of hope alive that has been given to us and do everything possible so that each one of us may regain the strength and certainty to face the future with an open mind, a trusting heart, and a broad outlook. The coming Jubilee can do much to restore a climate of hope and trust, signifying a new rebirth that we all perceive as urgent.
Everything is connected! In these words, I see the continuation of the Council and the Church’s teaching on hope. We are pilgrims, searching for God, and the virtue of hope encourages and compels us to continue walking, searching, and living our faith that seeks and finds as we go.
For me, it is important to look for signs of hope that bear witness to God’s presence in the world and thus keep the flame of hope burning as the Pope asks us to do. Hope, a theological virtue, orients us and indicates the direction and purpose of our existence. We are invited to rejoice in it, to let it remain in us as an anchor, so that the faith and love that we want to live and share with joy and enthusiasm through hope may grow there. All this happens because we believe in a definitive encounter with the Lord of glory. We live in expectation of his coming and in the hope of living forever in him. With death, life does not end but is transformed forever.1
When my mother died a few days ago, this dimension of eternity became a strong invitation to make a life that lasts forever the goal of my earthly pilgrimage. We know that after death we will be able to fully enjoy the earthly desire that awakens hope: to know Jesus more intimately because life will be eternal in his presence; to love him more intensely because we will be filled with his love, and to follow him more closely because we will have found him. Finally, our happiness will be complete, because we will have reached our goal, the full realization of our vocation. After death, I will exist forever in the Love that does not disappoint and from which nothing and no one will ever be able to separate me.2
Hope has a special meaning for me in this Holy Year. Guided by the Bull of the Holy Father, I wanted to share it with you readers and friends, so that it may carry us beyond the trials and pain of loss. May the gift of hope that we all ask for, for one another, help us to journey through life without losing sight of the greatness of the goal to which we have been called, heaven.
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1 Roman Missal, Preface of the Dead I.
2 Francis, Spes Non Confundit: Bull of Indiction of the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025, May 9, 2024, § 21. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/bulls/documents/20240509_spes-non-confundit_bolla-giubileo2025.html
Paula Gómez Victorica was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lived in Massachusetts from 2001 until December 2024. She is a Certified Spiritual Director and is trained in accompanying individuals through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. She is currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Ignatian Spirituality at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College, where she also taught Biblical Spirituality through asynchronous online courses.
For the past three years, she served as the Director of Faith Formation and Coordinator of the Hispanic Community at St. Ignatius Jesuit Parish. Since moving to San Antonio in 2025, Paula has continued her ministry as the Ministry and Liturgy Coordinator at a local parish and at the Oblate School of Theology (OST).
