Annual Catholic Appeal Theme 2025

Together we bring hope in an age of anxiety

By Father Louis J. Cameli, STD

Every five years, I have had the privilege to gather with my ordination class from the North American College in Rome. If you number those of us who are still alive and in ministry, we now account for 14 dioceses across the United States. Our reunions are an occasion to catch up with each other and to thank God for the gifts he has given us through our priesthood.

Our conversations are free-flowing and invariably interesting as we share the patterns of our experience. A few years ago, as we entered our mid-70s, we detected a new and perhaps age-related experience of anxiety. Since then, other people in my age cohort have confirmed this experience in their own lives. This form of anxiety is not emotionally crippling, nor does it impinge significantly on daily functioning. Rather, this anxiety seems to be more a backdrop in our lives as we fret about getting things done, about bad things that could happen, or about covering all our bases. It is, as best we could determine, rooted in the diminishment of our physical energy and maybe some emotional wear and tear over the years. Anxiety also poses its own spiritual challenges, but more about that later.

Obviously, anxiety does not belong only in the realm of older people. Young people, even children, can struggle with anxious feelings. In an even wider social and cultural range, the poet W.H. Auden wrote in the 1940s about our time as “an age of anxiety.” With the world war of that period, with its genocides, and with the development of the atomic bomb, clearly, there was reason to be anxious, and that remains true into our own day.

It is helpful to consider what exactly anxiety is. At the level of feeling, anxiety is fear and foreboding with varying levels of intensity. Anxiety anticipates a looming loss ahead of us. It anticipates that things will not turn out well. It suggests that we will be out of control and unable to manage whatever outcomes we want in our lives. Our anxiety also can be targeted or specifically directed to some specific event or outcome, but it also can be more ominous as a diffused and vague feeling about what might happen to us.

As we consider it, anxiety has many dark undertones. Might there be anything good about it? Can something positive emerge from this heavy emotion? In fact, there is a real but limited positive side to anxiety. In the world and in our lives, there are real dangers and challenges. There is a real prospect of loss that we face daily. A healthy dose of worry or anxiety can keep us alert and ready to meet those dangers and challenges. Of course, instead of being a healthy alert, anxiety can take on a life of its own, paralyze us, and render us unable to move forward. That unhealthy form of anxiety needs our attention. How can we deal with it?

People have developed different strategies. Some engage in denial, not admitting that there is any problem at all. Others counter their anxiety by pushing their own self-confidence to center stage. Still others distract themselves with whatever will take their mind off the source of their anxiety. They aim for a relaxed attitude or a kind of indifference. The flaw in these strategies is that they all rely on a force of will to “get over it.” In the end, we cannot — by dint of our own efforts — free ourselves from anxiety in its deep and unhealthy forms.

ENTER HOPE

Here is where hope enters and confronts anxiety. Both hope and anxiety are about leaning into the future but with vastly different approaches and outcomes. Anxiety, as we have described it, looks at a future fraught with peril and likely to end in loss and disaster. Hope looks to the future with confidence in a positive outcome. A sure and reliable hope, however, is much different than an illusory hope. That kind of false hope has a shaky foundation in wishful thinking that either assumes that everything will just be all right or that we can make it so. It looks like hope, but it really is a way to fool ourselves. Real and reliable hope, on the other hand, has its foundations in God.

Faith, hope, and charity are the three theological virtues, that is, three foundational capacities that mark our lives: to believe in God, to trust confidently in God, and to love God and each other. They are “theological” in the sense that they come to us as a gift or grace of God. The Greek word for God is theos, and so we call these theological virtues. Hope trusts confidently in God and what God offers us, that is, the fullness of life in him and in his kingdom. This hope opens horizons for us and orients us to what lies ahead for us. Unlike anxiety that looks with foreboding and alarm at the future, hope confidently aspires to the fulfillment of God’s promises to us. While we walk on this Earth, our hope may be imperfect. There may be rushes of worry about the future. Still, even as we struggle, we can discover a basic hope within us. Even more, we can grow in the theological virtue of hope as we make our spiritual journey through life.

There are fundamental faith convictions on which we base our hope. The first conviction is that God, who is Creator and Redeemer, is in charge of our world and our lives. Real sovereignty belongs to God and to God alone. Furthermore, he has a holy plan that is at work in our lives. Saint Paul echoes this: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God …” (Romans 8:28) Elsewhere in the same letter, Saint Paul shares his vision of how hope unfolds in our lives: “… since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurances produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:1–5)

This vision of hope that leads us beyond anxiety to confidently embrace the future that God prepares for us helps us understand Paul’s words to the Philippians: “Do not worry about anything …” (Philippians 4:6) This admonition is impossible, unless we live firmly anchored in God’s hope. Similarly, hope helps us understand Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body …” (Matthew 6:25; see 26–34).

Finally, God’s hope that moves us beyond our worry and does not disappoint us is not merely a personal possession: It is a gift, and every gift is meant to be shared. This is the sense of this year’s theme for the Annual Catholic Appeal, Together we bring hope. It also resonates with the Holy Year theme proclaimed by Pope Francis, Pilgrims of hope. Whatever we do to serve and to help others proclaims the hope in which we stand. Through our support of one another and especially our support of those in need and the poor, we are witnessing that God has a plan for all of us, that our destiny is in him, and that we are moving together to the fulfillment of our hope, which, indeed, is God’s hope for us.

Additional resources to study, reflect and pray about hope:

• Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd edition): nn. 1817–1821. These four paragraphs offer a clear and accessible summary of the teaching on hope.
• Spe Salvi [Saved in Hope], an encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI on Christian hope (2007). This encyclical is available at the Vatican website in an English translation. Google the title, and that will lead you to the English version.
  In this encyclical, Pope Benedict addresses what he calls a “crisis of Christian hope” in modern times. With his great theological acumen, he explores the traditional understanding of hope in the context of today’s circumstances.
• Spes non confundit [Hope does not disappoint], the bull of indiction proclaiming the ordinary jubilee of the year 2025, Pope Francis (2024)
  |Pope Francis offers the whole Church an opportunity to enter the Holy Year and deepen our sense of God’s hope in our lives. His style, as always, is accessible and practical. This too is available at the Vatican website in an English translation. Google the title, and that will lead you to the English version.

Newsletter (PDF)