Hope Is An Indomitable Child
Pierluigi Banna - Jubilee 2025 - Pilgrims of Hope - A dialogue on Hope.
Faldi: Good evening, everyone, and a welcome from me as well. I sincerely thank Monsignor and the Councilor for their warm words and for the attention they always give to the activities of our cultural center.
Today, my task is simple: at my side is the true guest of the evening, and I am very happy that Don Pierluigi Banna, known as Pigi, is with us. In this second meeting that the Senese Cultural Center has dedicated to the Jubilee of 2025, we wanted to take a step forward. In our first meeting in March, a professor from the University of Turin helped us retrace the history and origins of the Jubilee, starting from the time of the Jewish people. Today, however, we want to go into greater detail.
As has been mentioned, the key word for this Jubilee is “hope.” It is a word that is likely a source of much confusion, one that we are not normally accustomed to dealing with. It is a word often misunderstood, one that does not always reflect our individual experiences. Yet, the document with which Pope Francis proclaimed the Jubilee is titled Spes non confundit—“hope does not disappoint.” But to affirm that hope does not disappoint, we must first be conscious of what hope is, where it comes from, what it produces, to what it refers, and in which aspects of life it emerges.
These questions are particularly urgent in a historical moment such as ours. One need only read the newspapers, watch television, or observe what is happening in the world: wars, famines, and certain grave international situations. When I think of war, I think not only of Ukraine and Gaza but also of all the places we forget, such as South Sudan and parts of South America and the Far East. In such a context, how can we speak of hope? It almost feels detached from reality.
Some time ago, a major financial newspaper described an "epidemic of despair"—an increase in depression not for pathological reasons but as a sign of a now-resigned mentality. It is a merciless yet realistic picture, a feeling that we probably experience in our own daily lives.
Tonight's event aims to explore these themes more deeply. We have asked Don Pigi to help us take another step on this journey, on this pilgrimage that is leading us through the Holy Year.
For those who do not know him—and while we are few, it is only right to do so—Don Pigi Banna is originally from Sicily but moved to Lombardy many years ago. A graduate in Classical Literature from the University of Milan, he currently teaches theology at the Catholic University, where he holds the chair formerly occupied by Father Luigi Giussani and then by Julián Carrón.. He also teaches at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy. Above all, he is a friend, and that is why we invited him. I will now be quiet and give him the floor, thanking him for his presence.
Banna: Thank you for the invitation. I hope that tonight can be an opportunity for everyone to reflect on the theme of hope, which is truly being put to the test in our time. Faced with all the emergencies already mentioned, we must ask ourselves how we can offer hope. Hope, unlike charity, is not blind; it seeks to look beyond. And there are times when, in trying to look beyond, we see no positive outlook.
When I think of hope, the parable of the tares comes to mind. What is the temptation when we see the first shoots of weeds in a beautiful field sown by the master? Jesus tells us clearly: it is the fear that those weeds will overtake the entire field of vision, the entire horizon. And there is no shortage of reasons—no shortage of signs in our time—that push us away from being full of hope: the wars, already widely discussed, which appear unjust and deprive younger generations of a future; but there is also a deeper, internal pain afflicting the West.
As Michele told us, numerous surveys indicate a difficulty in enjoying life, especially among the young. I recently read a short book by Matteo Bussola, an author for Financial Newspaper, set in an adolescent psychiatric ward. It explores the dialogue between parents and children and the struggle of a father and mother to understand why their son refuses hope, asking, "What did I do wrong to leave him without hope?”
But there is also a pain in the hearts of these young people, one very similar to what each of us experiences in the secret of our own hearts. We are all shaken when a tragic event occurs. I remember reading an article by Maurizio Maggiani in La Stampa, in which he recounted meeting a young man at a bus stop who was crying uncontrollably. He approached the boy, who just kept crying. He tried to ask what was wrong but received no answer. In the end, Maggiani wrote: “My bus arrived, and I left. But I carried that boy with me, along with the piece of pain he had ignited in my heart.”
These are the tares, the seeds of pain that seem to prevent us from looking to our future with optimism, confidence, and hope. Faced with this situation, Michele used the expression “epidemic of despair.” There is another author, the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who says we are facing an "epidemic of anxiety," because anxiety is ultimately the opposite of hope. And what do we mean by epidemic? It is the recognition that in many situations, this negativity seems destined to grow like a wall closing in on us, crushing us and taking our breath away.
The temptation of the disciples in the parable is to think that the master of the harvest has missed something. If the seed that offers no hope is spreading so widely—among the young and old, on a global level—what is the temptation? It is the one experienced by the workers themselves, who say, “Look, you failed to prevent evil from entering this world. We cannot give ourselves hope, but we can commit ourselves to eradicating it.” This is a powerful temptation in our time: we lack the strength to hope, so instead we resort to a violence with which we try to win, thereby generating even more evil.
And what does the master of the harvest say to these workers? “Be careful, for in uprooting the weeds you risk uprooting the good wheat as well, because I have sown the seed of hope in this world.” I wish to say tonight that, in the face of an epidemic of anguish, the greatest temptation against hope is to take justice into our own hands. This leads to generating more violence, pointing fingers at evil, and identifying enemies to fight, all in the belief that we can restore hope to the world. But what actually happens is that our hands become contaminated with evil and grow sick, more intent on what is wrong than on the good that continues to grow.
I was struck by a long speech by Roberto Saviano presenting a book he considers prophetic: The Last Messiah by the Norwegian Peter Wessel Zapffe. Honestly, after his introduction, I lacked the courage to read it. Saviano presents it as the book that answers the thorny, distressing questions that plague our lives. It is as if he is forcing us to face this epidemic of anguish. Saviano says, “It is always there when life seems unfair, when you cannot explain why your dreams do not come true, why everything seems to vanish.” He adds, “If, upon hearing this, you think, ‘Saviano, what’s gotten into you?’ then stop reading. If, however, you have the courage, you have before you an author who offers a solution.”
So I read on. And what is the great solution this author offers? The revelation that every living being has a limit. Humanity, however, has a peculiar limit: to hope for happiness. Here is the great revelation: hope is the factory defect of the human being. There are the more naive among us who try to exorcise this evil of hope. Zapffe offers a few ways out. The first is to isolate oneself to avoid having too many desires. The second is to cling to symbolic forms of elevation like religion, family, or nation—so even our faith, in this church, would be a way to exorcise hope, given that everything is going wrong. A third way is to seek distraction in superficial activities: entertainment, drinking, traveling, spending. A fourth is to sublimate this anguish into art.
But, Saviano says, those who truly have the courage to face this evil are capable of a greater audacity, one that is not even suicide (something he admits to having often considered), because killing oneself would be to concede victory to this law. The true path, the one Zapffe embraced, is to cease procreating. By choosing not to reproduce, we allow the human race to die out, giving victory to this field of weeds that we call life.
Faldi: A beautiful prospect of hope, indeed.
Banna: Indeed. But in reality, we must question whether this path is truly capable of doing justice to the need for hope that is ineradicable from the human heart. In any case, this need is always reborn in us. We may try to remove the weeds by making ourselves sick, we may try to fight them, to sublimate them, or to lose ourselves in entertainment, but we can never shake off the need to hope. Saint Anthony the Abbot, one of the Desert Fathers I study, said: "When you see weeds running rampant, do not stand there uprooting them. Soon you will see what endures through time. It is what God sows in your life, for it lasts forever."
Here is another perspective, completely different from both those who rush to pull up weeds and those who, like Saviano's subject, resign themselves to death. What if, in the midst of these weeds, as the master of the vineyard suggests, there is a stronger seed—a seed that will prove more vigorous over time and will ultimately prevail? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to start looking for where this seed is blooming. That is where hope is born. True hope is the virtue of those who begin to see good where everyone else sees evil, where everyone is busy denouncing the weeds or resigning themselves to them, with eyes only for the negative. Hope always broadens our field of vision to give credit to a reality that is always greater than our expectations and disappointments.
Let me explain with a simple example. One evening, I was talking to a dear friend who told me, “Today was a terrible day; everything went wrong.” I asked her, “Everything? So you’re throwing in the towel?” She replied, “No, because the day isn’t over yet.” This is how hope is born: from the ability to realize that the weeds you see, which occupy your entire field of vision and which you want to uproot or surrender to, are not the whole story. There is so much more.
Moving to a second point, I would like to return to an image from the papal bull, Spes non confundit, in section 25: the image of the anchor. Pope Francis says the anchor, like our life, is tossed by the waves. We are often determined by a thousand factors, including the weather—whether it is hot or cold, cloudy or sunny. If something as simple as that can influence our hearts, imagine the power of other events. But what does the anchor do? It looks beyond; it sinks deeper. Its center of gravity is not in superficial reactions or conditioning but in the foundation. This allows it to hold firm in stormy seas and in dead calms alike.
On a biblical level, we have two figures who embody this gaze: one is overcome by anguish, while the other looks on with hope. They are classic figures, recognizable even to those unfamiliar with the Bible: Adam and Jesus Christ. What is Adam’s problem? Many explanations exist: the apple, the forbidden fruit, the woman. But I believe Jesus himself explained the problem, because at a certain point He found Himself in the same situation as Adam: before a tree, facing a choice. Except Adam, in the Garden of Eden, had his wife by his side. Jesus, in contrast, found Himself in a slightly more difficult situation: nailed to the tree of the cross, with thieves beside Him. Yet both experienced the same temptation.
And Jesus shows us where Adam failed. Adam, faced with the serpent’s temptation and his wife telling him it wasn’t so wrong to take the fruit, thought he had to handle the situation himself. He grew distressed and gave in. That is Adam’s cross: a perspective where you think you have all the facts lined up, you have done your calculations, but then you find yourself trapped. And if someone asks why you made that choice, you answer, “I felt like I had no other choice.”
Jesus, on the other hand, in a much more difficult situation, with His mother weeping at the foot of the cross and people shouting, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself!”—what did He do? He cried out desperately to His Father. He remembered that Someone had put Him in that place. Adam failed to do this. What would it have cost him to say, “Lord, about this thing you explained to us... could you help us for a moment? How should we handle this?” Jesus, first by crying out to the Father and then by entrusting Himself to Him, reminds everyone that even the most chaotic situation is not defined by our calculations or by the world’s. He anchored His life to that Presence, which is greater than the entire situation. This is the hope of Jesus in the face of the most unjust death, contrasted with the anguish of Adam.
This is the crossroads for every human being. When faced with the most complicated, closed-off situations of illness or trial, can we claim to know everything, to know how things will turn out? Or is it precisely in that situation, precisely because the weeds seem to be taking over, that we are allowed to look beyond, to discover a harmony, a design, a Presence that is not our own?
Those who anchor themselves to this Presence, to this point beyond themselves and their calculations, see more than those who are overcome by anguish. There is a beautiful passage in Augustine where he describes how Saint John, after the Resurrection, immediately recognizes the Lord on the shore. They had all been fishing and had caught nothing. At one point, a man on the shore tells them to cast their nets on the other side, and they catch an enormous number of fish. In that moment, John immediately knew that the man was the Lord. Augustine asks, “Why does John see more, understand better than the others?” He answers, “Because he who is more loved, sees more.” John was the beloved disciple. And he who is loved more, perceives more. He sees more.
That is the person who, in the midst of the most distressing situation, finds a presence that loves and affirms him. He can perceive truths within situations that escape the eyes of most, who are blinded by their own anguish. The Norwegian writer and Nobel laureate Jon Fosse says that those who experience this love have a light that ignites in their hearts, a light that makes them feel both unique and universal in this world. I think the first sign of hope is these people who, loved in the midst of the weeds, begin to see and point out what others, caught up in the anxiety of holding everything together, do not see.
In this last part, I would like to touch on a few signs of hope—points where, in this world marked by violence and despair, I seem to see sprouts that make us look beyond. I will mention three. As tonight's theme suggests, hope is an indomitable child.
The first sign is children themselves—certain holy children who are not naive but possess a simplicity in seeing and affirming life that makes them teachers of hope even for adults.
Another great sign of hope, in a society that speaks of decadence and a rejection of life, is seeing men and women who face illness and the end of their lives full of hope. Not because they do not suffer, but because you see in their eyes a certainty about what makes the heart happy. This summer I spent a day with some of them; they showed affection for one another with a tenderness—an embrace, a caress—that was born of a pure desire for the other’s good, from the knowledge that the other person is a gift. For me, people who live with their illness in this way are a sign of immense hope.
Finally, the third and greatest sign for me will always be those who face death without fear. It is a gift given to some. I was struck recently by a story from the Bishop of Istanbul about the many Syrian refugees who die for their faith. They are certain that their relatives who died for their Christian faith did not give their lives in vain but revealed what is essential. Here is a seed that dies not as a sign of a tragic end but as a confirmation for my own life of what is worth living for. Ultimately, martyrdom is not a gesture of courage but the ability to say to the whole world, “There is a reason to live, because there is a reason to die.” And seeing how you die, I too want to truly live my life.
As I draw to a close, it seems to me that, as the Pope recalls in Spes non confundit, there is one figure who gathers all these signs of hope: this ability to look beyond the world’s calculations because it is rooted in a relationship of love. This figure is, clearly, Mary. There is a false Latin etymology that connects the word spes (hope) to the word pes (foot).
A medieval father, Bernard of Clairvaux, linked this “suspended foot” to the life of Mary. After all, we can imagine Mary’s life this way, with her foot perpetually suspended. Suspended for what purpose? To follow the Presence that had turned her life upside down. This suspended foot always gave direction to her existence, from the very feast we celebrate these days, the Visitation. As soon as Jesus was conceived, Mary’s feet were set on the path to Elizabeth, and this encounter allowed her to recognize that the promise was true. She still saw nothing, yet at Elizabeth’s cry of recognition, she glorified God because she had been loved and could look with hope upon her own life and the lives of all the humble and afflicted.
Mary, throughout her life, is a sign of hope, but there is one condition for this hope to be set in motion: it must pass through a “Yes.” Hope cannot be understood apart from human freedom. There is no greater love than that which submits to the “yes” of our freedom. And before that step, one is alone. No one could say that “yes” in Mary’s place, just as no one can say it in ours. I would dare say that even the Son is alone in that step before the Father. It is a decisive step, one that is at stake for each of us every day: the decision whether to yield to an accumulation of calculations and ledgers that do not add up, or to yield to a Love that wants to carry you further.
In this decisive step, however, we can recognize—by looking at Mary—that once the “yes” is so much as whispered, a celebration begins that we could never have imagined. That “yes” is solitary, but as soon as it is uttered, a life anchored in this love is filled with joy. It seems to me that this is the promise of hope. Hope promises that we will see more, not less. But this seeing is conditioned, thank God, by the freedom that is at stake every day in our “yes.” Thank you.
Faldi: I don’t know about you, but I have dozens of questions. I will ask just one, starting with your quote from Augustine: “He who is more loved, sees more.” This implies that something must come first. As Pavese wrote: “You are life and death. You belong to everyone and to no one. You are like hope.” If something must come first, is hope then possible only within Christianity? Is everything else just optimism—a mere seeing of the positive side of reality? Is the experience of hope possible only in Christianity?
Banna: I would say that Christianity offers the great challenge of hope in the face of something I have not found in other worldviews: hope in the face of death, in the face of the end of all things. When it seems that time makes everything pass away, that even our most cherished affections vanish, there is Someone who, in His love, can say, “Death is not the last word.” Someone who has entered death and promised that death itself will be buried. Only Christianity offers this radical hope.
But before this ultimate case, the dynamic we have described is true in any situation. Any love, even for non-Christians, is verified by its ability to help us see more. Let me give a very simple example. When I was little, my parents loved to spend their afternoons in jewelry stores. You can imagine a five-year-old in a jewelry store: it was a moment of anguish and despair for everyone. “Don’t touch that, don’t put your hands there.” They looked at me as if the Antichrist had arrived. But one day, I found myself Browse a jewelry store window, not because I had developed a passion for gold, but because I had fallen in love and wanted to buy a gift.
So, this ability to look beyond and open oneself to a fuller knowledge is proper to love, to the recognition of truth in life. The problem is that the challenges of existence always demand a greater love: a love greater than betrayal, a love greater than pain, a love greater than death. Therefore, I would not say that hope-giving love is found only in Christianity. Everyone must examine what kind of love they find to sustain the hope in their own lives. But in the face of the great trial of death, I have found no other sign of hope so clear.
Faldi: Thank you again. I think we have largely achieved the goal we set for ourselves. My hope is that this evening has given all of us something to help us on this journey. I thank you all again for your presence, I thank Don Pigi for his hospitality, and I have two announcements to make as we conclude. The first is that at the back of the basilica, it is possible...
The text, transcription, translation and editing has not been revised by the author.
Source: https://youtu.be/iItoWWCzNtQ?si=btb8yG-qw-vZMJdD
