Realistic hope has been a feature of the early years and founders of the Thomas More Centre. It was a hope carried on by the pursuit of deep faith, intelligent discussion and rich friendships. We aim to carry that on today.

Sometimes, that involves working hard to build up scarce resources and to run events against the odds. It involves a humble hope that we be sent talented people who can assist us to find ingenious and attractive ways to expand our mission. It always involves being dependent on the guidance of a truth and goodness that lies beyond us.

Pope Benedict XVI writes in his enduringly inspiring encyclical on hope, Spe Salve (2007), that true Christian hope is more than a “piece of information” or a warm feeling – it is performative. It sustains and changes lives and whole cultures.

In Spe Salve, the Pope traces the substance of hope evident in the scriptures and in the lives of saints and believers.

Hope is a type of meter of the life of our faith. Hope is the guaranteed promise of a blessed and fulfilled life which we all only know in this life through glimpses, aspirations and desires.

"This unknown 'thing' is the true 'hope' which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity." (Spe Salve n,12)

The Pope asks today’s Christians in his penetrating way:

"Is it (hope) 'performative' for us—is it a message which shapes our life in a new way, or is it just 'information' which, in the meantime, we have set aside and which now seems to us to have been superseded by more recent information?" (Spe Salve n.10)

Most people know that one of my own heroes of this pithy type of enduring hope was the Florentine-born, Bavarian philosopher and writer – the great Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). The 135th anniversary of his birth was last week on October 12.

In just a brief sketch of the man, we note that Dietrich was born into a cultured but fairly agnostic Bavarian family living in a former monastery in Florence. In this cosmopolitan world, he was taught languages and an appreciation of art and music along with philosophy by his mother and tutors in his expansive home life.

Dietrich wanted to pursue the life of philosophy as a defender of the inherent dignity of the person. He became a student of the German phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler.

In 1914 he became a Catholic and then a leading lay thinker and writer who from the early 1920s opposed the emergence of totalitarian regimes and movements. He was targeted by the Nazis and spent the 1920s and 30s both avoiding and loudly opposing the inherent violence and dehumanisation of Nazi and Marxist ideology and culture.

Escaping with his life, Dietrich with his wife, child and a coterie of refugees in his care escaped the SS, travelling across Europe to hide in the slums of Toulouse in the south of France. From there they escaped to South America eventually to sail to New York where without any possessions and with holes in his shoes, he began life as a philosophy professor eventually teaching at Fordham University on a bequest.

Later in life, he called out the problems he saw in the Church both before and after the radical changes wrought in society and amongst the faithful during the secularising of the 1960s and beyond.

Dietrich warned the West of the dangers of different types of depersonalisation posed to it by economic, intellectual and cultural errors about the nature, the dynamics and the destiny of the human person and human relationships. But he was not a stern and puritanical figure. He attracted many people to his humble apartment and to his classes where he passionately drew them to a higher vision for their minds and souls.

The von Hildebrands sometimes returned to Bavaria where their soirees and gatherings became a bright spot in the austere lives of post-war Germany. One of their guests was the brilliant young priest, Fr Joseph Ratzinger.

Dietrich was a figure of the type of Christian hope that is truth-seeking and compelling, of which Pope Benedict XVI writes.

Real hope is not the same as bland and blinkered optimism.

Dietrich wrote in his Art of Living that Christian hope is not bland, conventional or "harmless". In the 1970s he opposed those Christians who tried to make the faith merely a pale shadow of secular humanism.

Christians are called, he wrote, not only to respond to natural goods which he saw as “messengers” of the true God but also to be transformed by the real presence of Christ in their lives. They were to be "transformed into Christ".

Holiness is therefore the real stuff of hope. Dietrich wrote that transcendent "classical" beauty of the saints are vivid signs of hope in confused times.

These personifications of God’s love serve us best in times of need, even if their presence proves to be a sign of contradiction.

Saints rattle the cages of our lazy habits, our set ideology and they rankle our complacency. Dietrich writes: "The saints are an uncomfortable challenge to those who have no thirst to change in the direction of holiness … the saints bring the supernatural uncomfortably near."

The Thomas More Centre hopes that its great patron, St Thomas More, and von Hildebrand will continue to encourage us to move towards the courage, truth, authenticity and hospitality of which these two men were edgy and beautiful examples.

Let them destabilise our apathy!

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre