
I was giving a talk to our confirmation students on Thursday when two of their Moms bounded down the stairs of our retreat house. “White smoke!” they cried. Shortly thereafter, the grave and slightly trembling voice of the Cardinal Protodeacon sounded over St. Peter’s Square, Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus papam! Where were you when the white smoke appeared? At first, I didn’t allow myself to get excited like those two mothers. In my many years I’ve seen popes come and go, and the Church continues to decline. But these women stirred my hope. Where there is life, there is hope, and God has endowed women with the unique capacity to bear both life and hope. In the darkest times of my life it was my mother who bore me up, lifting my spirits with hope for the future. I think of my first semester in a large eastern university, terribly homesick and confused, and the Saturday morning phone calls with Mom that sustained me.
So the mothers announced at the retreat house, with hopeful enthusiasm, that we have a new Papa. After lunch we all drove down to a state park for a hike. At the entrance station a hippieish man with a long pony tail took my credit card and noticed my Roman collar. “We have a new pope,” he observed. “I like him. He’s a radical, like the guy before him, and I’m a radical.” I nodded politely. My new hippie friend is most likely not a Catholic, I thought, but at least he’s hopeful that this new pope will bring some good into the world.
Since Thursday I’ve been reading articles and listening to podcasts from mostly traditional Catholic perspectives about Pope Leo. Like my hippie friend at the state park, my traditional Catholic friends are excited and hopeful. On perhaps the most reliably traditional Catholic newscast of them all—Raymond Arroyo’s World Over program—the most often repeated word was hope. Will Pope Leo relax restrictions on the Latin Mass? “I’m hopeful.” Will the new Pope solve the Vatican’s financial mess? “There’s good reason to hope so.” Will he get a handle on Vatican-Chinese diplomacy? “We can certainly hope he will.” Can Pope Leo build bridges between liberal and conservative Catholics? “There’s every hope that he can do that.” And even this one: “we hope that Pope Leo, as an American, can communicate with Donald Trump more effectively!”
Everyone is hopeful: aging hippies and young traditionalists, practicing and non-practicing Catholics, believers and atheists. Hope springs eternal for the human race, and “we are not dead yet” (my favorite line from the Ukrainian national anthem). We can thank our mothers for giving us that life, and that hope. Let us keep hoping, even after honeymoons are over.