Christian social justice work has generally become more politicised over the last decade, Dr Anna Rowlands warns.
A month ago, the new US Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, achieved what most theologians fail to do in a lifetime: to make Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine headline news. Following an interview on Fox News and an extended online spat with the British political commentator and podcast host Rory Stewart, he launched his version of patristic-medieval idea of a Christian order of love into the febrile media stratosphere. His case was that placing the love of our family and nation first and only having loving obligations to others beyond kin, neighbourhood, and nation if there is moral and material resource left over when this duty is completed is not only a ‘natural’ instinct but also core Christian teaching. Vance presents this as the political theology of MAGA, coinciding with the announcement of huge cuts to the US international aid budget, a move with global ramifications, and severe criticism of the motivations of the US Catholic Church for its migrant support. In this context, the withdrawal from current forms of international humanitarianism is presented as an ordered Christian virtue.
Christian social justice work has generally become more politicised over the last decade”
This is a dramatic and significant shift in the way that Catholics in public office have talked about commitments to local and international social justice in recent decades. It is also diametrically opposed to the vision of universal siblinghood (fraternity) and social friendship that both Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti have promoted as the basis for a politics of hope. In fact, it is a case study in the diagnosis Fratelli tutti offers of a dis-integrating politics that is turning in on itself, promoting a notion of competing, even narcissistic localisms and globalisms, failing to see the constant relationship between the local and the universal.
This is a global phenomenon, not solely an American one. Christian social justice work has generally become more politicised over the last decade. Caritas Internationalis, the Jesuit Refugee Service, and many other actors can testify to this reality. The works of mercy, the commitment to structural work for justice, humanitarian relief, and development work are increasingly politicised and weaponised as part of wider cultural, economic, and political conflicts.
Evolution
I say this starkly at the outset for several reasons: firstly, it highlights the reality that when we talk about Christian visions for social living, we are talking about ideas already in circulation and subject to argument in our public life, not ideas we are proposing in a vacuum. Christian visions are already present and actively contested, even if not always in a well-informed way. Secondly, any account we give of Christian hope needs to be able to communicate itself clearly in this increasingly fraught context. We cannot be naïve about the political deployment of faith, nor risk countering it with a cheap hope. We live in a moment when the choice is not to have a political theology or not to have one, but one between rival political theologies whose accounts of love, hope, and justice differ widely, and indeed sometimes violently.
Political hope has not stood up well, and has been replaced by a politics of anger and resentment”
Thirty years ago, the secularisation thesis taught us that religion was heading toward museum piece status in the West. That thesis has not aged well, for while formal institutional religious affiliation levels continue to fall in the global North, the political significance of religion rises, and new forms of religious and post-religious practice emerge in both the global North and South. Religious communities also remain among the major humanitarian providers globally, ‘localising’ aid and integral development more effectively than many secular agencies. Furthermore, religious belief and practice continue to provide grounds for meaning-making, resistance and resilience to many with limited economic or political resources. In all these ways, religion is far from a museum piece and continues to exist, in evolving forms, as a complex, multi-layered and dynamic reality in our current world. It is far more interesting a picture than the secularisation thesis would have led us to imagine.
Many of us have also been raised on some version of the philosophy of liberalism that told us virtue language, especially the Christian language of faith, hope, and love, was a legitimate matter of private belief but had no place in a neutral, secular public space. The acquired virtues, including justice and prudence, remained relevant yet became more harmonious when separated from their connection to the infused theological virtues. And politicians traded in a language of secularised hope that was closer to that of simple optimism. That form of political hope has not stood up well, and has been replaced by a politics of anger and resentment. And so, here we stand in early 2025 in a moment when religion has defied secularisation theorists, politics has defied the philosophers of liberalism, and the virtue language of faith, hope, and love is resurgent, although as contested and irascible as ever.
Social
Significantly, this resurgence in the political claims of faith, hope, and love on all sides of the political arena occurs when many people report struggling with feelings of social hopelessness. The hunger for hope and the absence of hope are critical indicators of our moment’s health. As a small illustration, social science researchers have convincingly charted that having some sense of hope for the future correlates with engagement in civil society, voting, and nurturing health and friendships. Correspondingly, those who are vulnerable to feelings of social despair are much more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Hope and trust are deeply related. Hope is connected to social trust, participation in all aspects of social life, and a sense of connection to near and distant neighbours.
For all of these reasons, Pope Francis’ choice to dedicate this Jubilee year to the theological virtue of hope is especially timely – pastorally, spiritually, and politically.
Hope is not a cognitive decision or expectation, but rather a desire or appetite that all humans have for the good”
In what follows, I will highlight three themes central to Pope Francis’ decree for the Jubilee year are: that hope is to be understood first and foremost as a gift rather than something we have to originate within ourselves, that hope is, for Christians, a habitual practice – a way of doing and being, nor merely a feeling, and that maintaining the habit of hope is connected to our capacity to discern the signs of hope as part of our Christian duty to read the signs of the times.
To return for a moment to the very source JD Vance was so keen we air, St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas treats hope at some length in his writings, and what he has to say is, I think, quite useful. It is also the ground on which modern Catholic social teaching on hope, including the writings of Pope Francis, stands.
Hope
For Aquinas, hope is not a cognitive decision or expectation, but rather a desire or appetite that all humans have for the good. Aquinas considers hope to be an appropriately selfish virtue – it is for ourselves and for others who share our human condition. While love is the truly benevolent virtue because it desires good without expecting anything in return or counting the cost, hope remains the appropriately selfish virtue. It speaks to what we, ourselves, need in order to persevere. It is the deep-rooted desire in every human soul that, throughout our lives, good and not harm will come to us, and that, even if the pathway is not smooth, we can strive toward some form of real fulfilment for ourselves and others. Aquinas describes hope as not only an appropriately selfish but also an irascible passion because it represents a desire for a worthy good that is notably difficult to attain. If the good longed for were easy to achieve, it would not constitute hope. If it were something we could accomplish effortlessly and without God’s assistance, it would not be hope. Hope takes us through a path of difficulty, struggle, loss, failure, and sometimes suffering. Yet, it remains hope because although it is difficult to attain, it is still possible to attain. We see injustice but know it is not invincible, as Laudato si states. This represents the crucial tension within a Christian understanding of hope – the difficulty and the possibility of reaching what is good. Here, recognizing hope as part of our pursuit of the good, albeit arduous, it is essential to comprehend what makes hope ‘possible’ from a Christian perspective.
What makes hope possible is not a belief in human progress or the assumption that things will resolve in the end if we merely relax and let events unfold. Indeed, Aquinas refers to such assumptions as the enemy of true hope. What makes the good things we rightly hope for possible is that hope is not something initially generated by human beings; rather, hope is a divine gift infused in us. In a sense, this should provide relief in a world where creating feelings of hope on our own can seem impossible.
I can tell myself a story which creates a connection between my past, present and future”
To illustrate this briefly, five years ago, I conducted a series of interviews with refugees living in asylum destitution in London. For protracted periods of up to a decade, those I interviewed had been living without formal immigration status and without recourse to a right to work or to welfare support. They existed on charitable assistance and networks of other refugees. In talking to them about religion’s role in their stories, the same passage was quoted repeatedly to me: Jeremiah 29. ‘I have a plan for your welfare and not for your harm, for a future with hope.’ I was told God has a plan for me, for my welfare and not for my harm. If I have not yet reached that place where the plan is clear to me, it is because my story is not yet complete. I have hope because there is a promise that no powers of this world can completely destroy and because I can tell myself a story which creates a connection between my past, present and future. Talking about these interviews at a conference, I was approached afterwards by two prison chaplains who told me of the power of the same Jeremiah narrative those experiencing incarceration.
It was striking to sit with people living hand to mouth, without status, and experiencing the extreme brutality of the modern nation state and to be told that hope remained a meaningful construct. In fact, the difficulty of their experience intensified, not diminished, hope’s meaning. Hope was intensified ultimately because it was first and foremost a sustaining theological category, a category of God’s action that invites us to a certain kind of response from God’s creatures.
Agency
Those I interviewed clearly stated that hope leads to agency. Hope, which is a gift, invites us into an active reception. It draws us into the great drama of the cooperation between God and humanity. Hope infused in us, leads us into hope’s actions. As an aside, it is interesting that social science treatments of hope also make this connection to agency – those who feel they have no agency in the world, no capacity to really act, are likely to be most without hope, those with a sense of their agency, retain more hope even if it is stretched in difficult circumstances. So we seem to have some natural sense of what Aquinas hints at. For Aquinas it is a question of what we hope in, and what we hope for. The Christian question of hope is a matter less of feeling hopeful, than of centering ourselves in hope’s actions, thinking about hope’s agency through us, in Christ, for a broken world. Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti lay out the practices of hope we are called to: theologically, hope is born of a trust that we can always change our direction, that crises take us deeper into a recognition that we depend on God and each other, and that no one is saved alone. They also call us to political actions of hope: learning to distribute power, wealth, status differently, practicing a priority for the needs of the poorest, localising power and globalising compassion.
Each act of hope is a participation in what is lasting and eternal”
To this tradition of thinking about hope, Pope Francis adds a further dimension in his Jubilee writings, suggesting that part of being signs of hope to others, is undertaking together a discerning of the signs of hope as part of reading the signs of the times. This is a particularly tricky and countercultural ask, I think. Media saturates us with news that makes us feel despair; leaving us with a Hobson’s choice of ignoring it to restore some mental balance or engaging with it, but knowing the very thing we engage with is a distorted mirror of a wider reality that is so difficult to capture an image of.
One final feature of social despair is challenged by this distinctively Christian tradition of reflection on hope. We can tell ourselves that our efforts, however well-meaning are in vain. Foolish in the eyes of the world. We do not yet see all the fruits we long for. A final word from Josef Pieper helps us reinterpret those sentiments in a Christian register. He argues that all attempts to act in faith, hope and love do not merely keep us going for now, lost or won in the moment. Rather, each act of hope is a participation in what is lasting and eternal. He writes “nothing good, true or beautiful is ever lost; rather, it is folded into eternity. Apocalyptic prophecy tells us, in the words of Von Balthasar, that “[t]he world will be harvested and the harvest brought home”. A politics of hope acts now, in the gap, based on the promise that is inalienably ours and our neighbours, for both time and eternity.
This abridged talk by Dr Anna Rowlands ‘A Politics of Hope and Catholic Social Teaching as a Guiding Light’ was the St Patrick’s College Maynooth Annual Trócaire Lent lecture, delivered on March 11, 2025.
Theologically, hope is born of a trust that we can always change our direction, that crises take us deeper into a recognition that we depend on God and each other, and that no one is saved alone”
