PROVIDENCE — The Jubilee Year of Hope is the perfect time to reflect on what hope really is — and according to the panelists at the 2025 Providence Catholicism and Culture Symposium, most people today get the definition wrong.
“We’ve forgotten what it is to hope in God and replaced it with the hope that God” will solve all the world’s problems, said Darryl De Marzio, executive director of the Portsmouth Institute, at the March 6 event, held at the University Club in Providence.
The symposium, co-hosted by the Portsmouth Institute and the Humanities Program at Providence College, featured Peter Nguyen, Executive Director of St. Thomas More Teaching Fellows; Francis X. Maier, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and Father Ryan Connors, S.T.D., rector of Our Lady of Providence Seminary.
The discussion was moderated by James Keating, humanities program director and associate professor of theology and humanities at Providence College.
Nguyen began the evening with a talk that framed the virtue of hope within the context of Catholic education. Although enrollment numbers at Catholic schools currently look bleak — with the closure of several Boston-area Catholic schools, a 30 percent enrollment drop over the past two decades, and a 2 percent drop whenever a charter school opens near a Catholic school — Nguyen said that he sees a “sign of hope” in Catholic schools’ students and teachers.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the decrease in Catholic school enrollment itself is the opportunity for hope.
“Suffering – experiencing life as it is – produces hope,” Nguyen said. Hope is “built up through lived experience.”
The key to restoring Catholic school numbers, Nguyen noted, is evangelization. In a culture in which 86 percent of Catholic students lose their faith by graduation, “we are failing” to pass on the faith.
Catholic identity is present in Catholic schools, said Nguyen; but many students “never encounter it” directly.
The solution is to encourage students, teachers, and especially parents to share their faith with others.
Nguyen’s theme of suffering being a vital component of hope was echoed by Maier, who opened his talk by stating that “all of my heroes are pessimists,” drawing a laugh from those in attendance.
“Optimism and hope have very little in common,” Maier observed. “Hope is a virtue; optimism is a mood.”
“We live in a culture with hornets in their head,” he continued – “hornets that never stop stinging because the internet never shuts down.”
The ever-present availability of news feeds and the addictive pull of social media “intensifies confusion in a culture,” Maier said. Consumer economies are “more thoroughly atheist” than Marxism, because consumer economies don’t ignore faith as Communism does, but rather deliberately render faith pointless and even ridiculous.
“Without God at its center,” Maier said, “society always reverts to idolatry.”
One of the greatest dangers in the current culture, Maier said, is the avoidance of suffering at any cost, preventing people from asking “the fundamental question of why”, especially when it comes to our own mortality.
Refusing to “accept the tragic dimension of what it means to be human” prevents us from realizing that God’s love is present in the darkest and most broken circumstances, said Maier. Pessimism and hope are “the two eyes we need to see life as it is.”
Reasons for hope, Maier said, include Catholics who witness to others by living the faith and the evidence of history that regardless of how badly humanity fails, “God never gives up on us.” In the midst of — not apart from — setbacks and sufferings, “God is good.”
In the final talk of the evening, Father Connors focused on hope as “a specifically theological virtue” rather than an emotion. The understanding of hope as an emotion, he said, means that “hope is the least understood” of the virtues.
“Virtue is seated in the will,” said Father Connors, rather than in feelings. Hope is the desire for heaven.
Hope is opposed by two vices, he observed: presumption, which is the desire for and confidence in salvation without conversion of life; and despair.
Today’s culture appears to suffer from both of these vices at the same time, said Father Connors.
Yet hope originates in baptism, as this sacrament “belongs to the supernatural order,” placing within the baptized a yearning for God. Even after committing grave sin, the baptized retain the faith and hope bestowed in baptism.
This, he said, is the very reason for the Sacrament of Confession, which prevents presumption by requiring conversion of life and defeats despair by restoring within the penitent a sense of hope for heaven.
“The one who hopes,” said Father Connors, “lives differently.”
