Faith and Politics at the Jubilee in Rome
This summer two events took place in Rome as part of the Jesuit initiative ‘Faith and Politics’ which encourages young Europeans to consider public service as a vocation to the common good. Kevin Hargaden has written a reflection on the events entitled ‘Faith and Politics at the Jubilee in Rome’. Read the reflection below».
Faith and Politics at the Jubilee in Rome
Faith and Politics is a long running Jesuit initiative encouraging young Europeans to consider public service as a vocation to the common good. That could mean a career in the civil service, or the brave move into electoral politics, or a commitment to social entrepreneurship, or direct activism, or many other pathways. But it invites young people to recognise that Christian faith harmonises with a concern for how our towns and cities and nations are run.
The initiative is run as a partnership between three Jesuit social centres – JESC in Brussels, Aggiornameni Sociali in Milan, and ourselves as JCFJ. The Jubilee of Youth presented us with an opportunity to reach a new audience so along with Giuseppe Riggio, SJ and Cesare Sposetti, SJ, I organised two events that dovetailed with the wider Jesuit Magis events.
It was a remarkable experience. I met hundreds of young adults who had journeyed from as far away as Santiago in Chile to take part in this extraordinary festival. What struck me most was that, amid all the diversity, they shared a dedication to the good things of life. This Jubilee was marked as much by food, fun, and friendship as by traditional practices of piety. In our first event, a conversation on “Hope in Politics” conducted in Italian, it was clear that this new generation is deeply engaged and unwilling to settle for the status quo. They are agitated by the narrowing of their future through fearful populism and climate collapse, and they are eager to see the connections drawn between Christian faith and public life. They instinctively grasp a profound truth: justice is what love looks like in public.
With crowds of people attending events all around the city, it was hard not to be affected by the energy. In our second session, a participant asked a very obvious – but deep – question of us. “How do we maintain hope in the face of the social and economic discouragements we see in our work?”
My answer was that while I find little grounds for optimism on the Irish housing and homelessness crisis, the climate and biodiversity crisis, or the rising numbers of people in prison, I do find hope in how the gospels and the New Testament are full of stories of people who seemed to be facing devastation, but then God did a new thing. For Christians, hope might occur in the good times, but it comes into its own when times are tough. What I carried home from Rome is that Christian hope is not a naïve denial of the crises we face, but a stubborn trust that God’s Spirit continues to move through history. Hope does not erase discouragement; it transfigures it into the ground from which creative action can grow.
In that sense, the young people we met embodied hope: their joy, their seriousness, and their desire to link faith with justice all testified that the future of politics need not be captive to fear.
