INSIDE america

The Crisis of Faith
Separation between reason and experience, the attempt to “purify reason,” and any of the myriad ideologies cannot fulfill our hopes. We can imagine
a life without faith in God but not without hope

By Lorenzo Albacete

The topic of faith and politics has certainly been one of the most debated issues of the electoral campaign, and it will certainly continue to be a hot topic for the foreseeable future. In my own participation in these discussions, I have been able to confirm again and again Fr. Giussani’s insight that the fundamental obstacle to a fruitful discussion about faith is the separation between reason and experience. When the discussion moves to the subject of hope, the same problem appears. As Pope Benedict XVI states in Spe Salvi, the “crisis of faith” today can be understood as a “crisis of hope.” The advantage of defining the problem in terms of hope rather than faith is that it is easier to verify the failures of a misplaced hope than those of an unreasonable faith. In the modern age, faith has been displaced from the level of knowledge and its power to “purify reason” (the term used by Pope Benedict), that is, as essential to understanding the real needs of Man. Instead, faith has been limited to the realm of the purely subjective and its scope has been restricted to purely “otherwordly” concerns. As a result, we have no way of verifying what objective and irreplaceable contribution faith makes to this life. Consider, instead, the experience of hope. A purely otherwordly hope would make unbearable our present life. It would make it a “hopeless” life, and that would be unbearable. We can imagine a life without faith in God, but we cannot imagine a life without hope. It is easier, therefore, to see the necessary connection between hope and knowledge than between faith and knowledge. But what is the source of the knowledge upon which hope is based? This can be verified historically, as Pope Benedict does in Spe Salvi. The “knowledge” sustaining modern hope has come from one or another ideology of progress: a political ideology, a scientific one (including so-called scientifically conceived politics that recognize the true structure of history and society), a philosophical system, etc. Yet, again and again, these ideologies show their inability to fulfill our hopes, and hope is increasingly being replaced by a stoic resignation approaching total hopelessness. This was precisely the situation in the culture encountered by the first Christians when they left Palestine and arrived in the great cities of the Roman Empire. Today, we must respond to it as they did. For this to happen, Pope Benedict says, it is necessary to undertake a “self-critique of modern Christianity” by returning to its “roots.” This is precisely the path we have been following in our School of Community, guided by Fr. Carron’s witness to Fr. Giussani’s charism. Now we begin our meditations on hope. It comes not a moment too soon!