Telling our story. Catholics can cultivate genuine hope by emphasizing the human dimension in culture and politics.
In the West the experience of modernity frequently leads people to ask whether they are running things or things are running them. The answer lies in the connection between modernity and religious tradition. Are there useful and constructive and effective ways of thinking about the task of our living as though what Jesus taught and did makes sense, makes sense in a modern world that thinks and acts as if it has or will soon have all answers? Perhaps everything will turn out all right, but such optimism should not be confused with hope. As Vaclav Havel explains, hope "is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." To cultivate a perspective from which things can make sense, Catholics need to find a way to tell their story so that it has relevance in the modern world. In particular, Catholics must find stories that will account for the shift that had been building in our culture over centuries but that the Church only fully acknowledged during the papacy of John XXIII. To some extent, the stories will have to offer a counterstatement to the unintended negative effects of certain facets of the modern agenda. The stories will have to address the overemphasis on individuality that has resulted from the democratization of politics and culture, the uncritical belief that change is always for the better, and the modern world's power to overwhelm our ability to think critically about it. Finally, the stories will have to return a human dimension to economic and cultural life.