Editor's Note: University of Mary president Monsignor James Shea addressed the 20th annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on February 28, 2025. Please find the full transcript of his remarks below. 

Your Eminence, your Excellencies, my brother priests, beautiful religious who are here with us, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I feel like the luckiest man in the world. I was so scared to get up here and give this talk. I've been really nervous about it for the 20th anniversary of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, with all of you amazing people, in the presence of Congressman Chris Smith who received very worthily the Christi Fidelis Laici award. In the midst of all of that, I've been very concerned.

And then the Vice President of the United States shows up, and I thought, 'Wow, what a relief!' And then... Taylor Swift's boyfriend's teammate shows up, and I felt like no one is ever even going to remember that I was here. All the pressure's off! I can say whatever I want and so I'm feeling nice and relaxed, very happy.

Except I can't say anything I want because our good host, Mark Randall, has asked me to speak about hope. Of course, this is the great Jubilee Year of Hope. Our Holy Father has asked us as Catholics to ground ourselves in the theological virtue of hope during the course of this Jubilee year, and so I want to say a word about hope.

When I think about hope, I think about what St. Augustine said about time: 'Everybody knows what it is until you ask them, and then they can't tell you.' Hope is a little bit like that. It has a way of slipping the mind, and yet the Catholic faith is so helpful to us. The Catechism teaches us that hope is the theological virtue whereby we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in the promise of Christ and not relying on our own strength but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The one fact that I want to spend time with you on this morning is the fact that human beings cannot live without hope. We are inveterate in seeking ways and means of hoping, and without hope, everything falls apart for us. Without hope, human beings are miserable and unhappy creatures. It doesn't matter; you can give us health and wealth and prosperity of every kind, but eventually, without hope, we'll tire of it.

We can experience all of the delights of mind and body, pleasures of all kinds, amazing experiences and travels and interesting people, all kinds of pleasures and delights, but without hope, it all turns to ashes in our mouth. Without hope, we either outright die or we descend into a kind of living death of despondency and despair and lethargy. We need hope in the midst of our lives. We need hope not just that things are going to be okay for a while or at work or in our relationships or with our family or our finances. We need to know somehow that the end of our road is going to be good.

About 30 years ago, a film was released that was a box office flop. In the years after its release, it began to be more appreciated and talked about, and 10 years later it landed in the number one spot on IMDB's list of the top 250 films of all time, and there for the last 20 years it stayed. That movie is The Shawshank Redemption, which of course is a well-made film with great actors, but I think that its enduring appeal, the reason it's been for so long in the top slot on that list of great films, is because it is a portrait of hope, what it means for human beings to have hope, what it means for us when we lose hope.

One of the characters, an inmate in a prison, Red, tells his young friend Andy, he says, 'Let me tell you something, my friend: hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.' It reminds me of a taxi driver I had once in Rome. He was telling me all about his problems, and I said to him that I hoped that things got better for him, and he pulled over to the side of the road and turned around and shouted at me, 'The one who lives in hope dies desperately, dies in despair!' That's how Red looked at life.

And yet Andy wasn't buying it. He later wrote to Red, he said, 'Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and a good thing never dies.' And eventually, he won his friend over to his vision of life, to his vision of hope. And the last words of that film, read in the inimitable voice of Morgan Freeman, are this: 

'I hope that I can cross the border. I hope that I can see my friend and shake his hand. I hope that the Pacific is as blue as it's been in my dreams.'

This question of hope is so central to us as Catholics because we know that Jesus Christ speaks about hope in the course of his Revelation in the Gospels and that the New Testament insists again and again that hope is essential to the way in which we navigate our lives, that Jesus came to give us a kind of hope which is a bedrock, which gives us the perspective necessary to navigate all of the vicissitudes of life, the disappointments and the heartbreak and the triumphs and the joys as well, placing everything in its proper order and place. We need to have a hope which is deep hope, with a capital H, a bedrock foundational hope.

Not every hope is foundational. We hope for all kinds of other things which are not foundational, which instead are what might be called proximal hopes. We hope that we won't get sick. We hope for good things for our family and friends. We hope that our world won't descend into war or that our country and world won't experience financial collapse. We hope for things to go in the right way from a political perspective and questions of peace and justice and the dignity and protection of human life. We hope for good weather for a picnic or for a good season for our favorite team. There's nothing wrong with hoping in these ways. We have to hope in terms of the nitty-gritty details and ups and downs and practical necessities of our life.

But the problem comes when we take our proximal hopes and we somehow confuse them with our foundational hopes. What's so important for us, and this is very, very important: we go wrong when we confuse proximal hopes and foundational hopes. And much of what it means to live with character and truth and virtue is to learn what it means to hope rightly, to exercise our hope well, because the proximal hopes of life cannot bear the weight of our immortality.

We are immortal beings with eternal destinies. We were not made for this world. Our citizenship is in heaven. And so as a result, when we found our hopes upon things of this Earth, our hearts will always be broken, we'll always find disappointment.

This is part of the diagnostic which we can apply to the cultural moment in which we find ourselves. Look around; never before have we been so healthy and wealthy. We've achieved great length of life and technological wonder. I flew here yesterday from the University of Mary's campus in Phoenix in a big metal tube going hundreds of miles an hour through the sky. It's extraordinary, the world in which we live. And we've been able to experience freedom from so much adversity. We're living pretty good, we're living pretty well, and yet our rates of anxiety and suicide and depression are soaring. This should be no surprise; our whole civilization has taken its hope and put it on proximal things, all of which are sand shifting, not bedrock. And this is the recipe for the losing of hope.

The letter to the Hebrews says that hope is like an anchor, a sure and steady anchor for the soul. This is a beautiful symbol of hope, the anchor. An anchor is something which is very practical; it's not just an idea. Sailors need an anchor in order to experience security in the midst of waves and storms and wind; otherwise, they'll find themselves, if the anchor slips its cable, they'll find themselves crashing upon the rocks. Hope is like that for us; it's the anchor for our lives. It provides a ballast such that we are able to deal with things small and large in the proper way because we have placed ourselves upon the rock, the bedrock of true hope.

St. Peter in his first epistle says, 'By the great mercy of God, we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and to an inheritance imperishable, undefiled, unfading, held for you in heaven.' And then he says this: 'Therefore you rejoice greatly, though for a time you may have to experience various trials.' In other words, joy is the result of hoping rightly, and that doesn't exclude trial and sorrow and heartbreak and suffering. Those things can exist alongside joy if we ground our lives truly and rightly in hope, but if we place our lives upon proximal hopes, then our joy will be strangled.

You know, it's an amazing thing; it's a paradox because often times an insult to Christianity is that we have our heads in the clouds, that we live dreamy kind of unreal lives and that because we placed our hope in heaven, we don't really do any lasting good here upon this Earth. That was the insult of many people, including Karl Marx and his observation that religion is an opiate for the people. Of course, everybody, we know this; it's the complete opposite. It's precisely the people who have grounded their hope in heaven and eternal life who have the most clear vision of how to transform the world, how to bring about good, and more than that, who have the staying power, who have the deeper strength necessary to weather the storm when disappointment, hardship, and setback happens, as it inevitably does whenever we're struggling for that which is good and worthy of our effort, energy, and time. Instead, it's the people who have tried to make a heaven on this Earth, it's the utopians and the ideologues who have not succeeded in making a heaven on Earth but have transformed it time and time again into a kind of living hell.

When we think about someone like Chris Smith, whom we're honoring this morning, think about how much good he has done in 40 years of public service. And it's not because he's been obsessed with the issues of the day or the changing times. There's so much vicissitude in the world, and he knows, and we all know, that everything that we strive for could change tomorrow. Winds shift, and things blow, and policy changes, and everything we've worked for can go up in flames. But that doesn't matter to us because we're not working simply for that; our citizenship is in heaven, and we know that the efforts that we place upon this world, all of our exertions for the good and the true and the beautiful, have an effect in time and eternity because God is working alongside of us, giving strength and wisdom, fortitude to our smallest and even our meager and failing efforts.

My spiritual director one time told me in a moment of discouragement, and he said, 'Don't you know that God is equally pleased by failure and by success? Don't you know,' he said, 'that God is equally pleased by failure and by success? For him, it's our hearts that he wants.'

Let me give you three images of hope to close my time with you this morning. First, you know, I'm the oldest of eight children. I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. There are seven boys all in a row, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, seven. And we've got another priest too, one of my younger brothers is a priest, so two priests. But that's not important to my parents. What's important to my parents is the last child, who is their only daughter.

Late... no, don't save... save your cheering. Late, late last night, my sister, that little girl, gave birth to a baby girl, Christina Agnes! Every time a child is born, this is a cause for hope for us, not just natural hope, not just proximal hope, but there's a kind of supernatural hope. Father Ronald Knox has an extraordinary Christmas homily in which he focuses upon the first couple of verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis when in the devastation after the fall, after the rebellion in the garden and that aboriginal catastrophe which was the source and is the source of all our sorrow, pain, and despair, after everything fell apart and it looked like the whole thing was over at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Genesis, Eve gives birth to the first human baby and she cries out in relief, 'With the Lord's help, I have gotten a man! I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord!' And it meant that God had not given up on the human race. And this repeats itself every single time a newborn comes into the world. Every single time that first cry goes up, it means that God has not given up on the world and that we have cause for hope.

A second image of hope, everybody: we're here together at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on the Friday before the beginning of Lent, the Friday before Ash Wednesday. This is for all of you people who are out there on television, I want to tell you that the people in this room have been eating on this Friday morning all kinds of sausage. They've been feasting on sausage. They know that technically they're supposed to, if they eat meat on Friday even outside of Lent, they're supposed to do some other kind of penance, and they think that it's listening to me. That's fine; I can grant that as long as you're not eating sausages while you're listening, because that cancels it out.

Anyway, so next Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we will not need the results of the latest Pew research study on religious affiliation in this country to know that faith is alive. Our churches next Wednesday will be full to overflowing with people who are searching for hope, hoping for hope, wanting desperately hope that their lives can be different from how they were, that things can change, that reform of the inner person, repentance is possible and transformative.

It's an extraordinary thing to see. A couple of years ago, I was on a flight on Ash Wednesday, and the stewardess came back to me and knelt down in the aisle where I was sitting, and she began to cry, and she said, 'I wasn't able to go to mass today on Ash Wednesday because I'm working morning till night, Father. Would you happen to have any ashes?' I couldn't believe it. I had a little a little vial of ashes in the overhead compartment up on top, and I'm not like Father Boy Scout, I'm not usually prepared in that way, but I had some ashes, and so I said yes, I do, and I took them down, and I imposed ashes upon her while she knelt there. By the end of the flight, the two other stewardesses, one of the pilots, and more than half of the plane had followed her and had knelt down in the aisle to receive ashes. This is the hope with which we live, and it's latent in people, it only needs to be activated by our witness.

Now let's talk about witness to hope for just a moment. I, like all of us, have been keeping vigil with our Holy Father in his suffering and his sickness. The whole Catholic world has surrounded him with prayer, as well we should. And when someone whom you love, whether it's our Holy Father or a member of our family or a close friend, is sick and suffering, and when you begin to think about mortality in their regard or in your regard, that's a great seedbed for hope. Because hope, of course, hope ultimately is, as the Catechism says, 'desire for the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness,' precisely as our happiness, as the fulfillment of our being.

In the midst of this vigil, I cannot help but think of the last time when the whole Catholic world kept a vigil for a pope. It was the early months of 2005, February, March, and the very very first couple of days of April. We were keeping vigil for Pope John Paul II. John Paul II passed into eternal life, entered the house of the Father on the 2nd of April, 2005. It was the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday, a feast that he himself had given to the church.

And let me tell you this: at that time I was the associate pastor of the cathedral in Bismarck. I was there with an elderly pastor, a great man who had been the pastor there since I was 2 years old. And he had this policy where we would hear confessions at 7:00 p.m. from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. every Saturday night. And I told him when I got there, I said, 'Father, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.' I said, 'Saturday night confessions? That's when people are out sinning!'

And he said to me, 'You young priests, you come in and you want to change everything. You don't have any wisdom, and so you yank things around, and then the people suffer because they become discombobulated and confused about what's happening. We're going to have confessions on Saturday night from 7:00 to 8:00 every week because we've had it that way forever. Go sit down in the confessional and hear confessions.' This is what he said to me.

Well, the night that John Paul II died, the bishop came over to the cathedral, we rang the bells, and then the bishop said the first of the Memorial Masses for the repose of the soul of John Paul II. And then that night, as I did just about every Saturday night at 7 o'clock, I went into the confessional to hear confessions.

You know that old pastor was right. I should have known that he would be. Every week some families would come and they would make it their family confession time, or you'd have a handful of people between the hours of 7:00 and 8:00. That night, the night of John Paul the second's death, I went into the confessional at 7:00 p.m. and I heard confessions without a single break, without stopping, until 2:00 in the morning. I absolved that night every single one of the Ten Commandments. People came in, and they said, 'Father, I haven't been in confession in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 70 years!' I couldn't believe it. It was extraordinary.

And of course, there's a natural explanation, there's a proximal explanation for that. He had been the Pope for so long that people thought, 'Gosh, if he can die, well then I can die! I'd better get my things in order.'

But there was a supernatural explanation too. As I stepped out onto the street that night in front of the cathedral and looked up into the stars, I knew that I had had a first front row seat to the extraordinary outpouring of grace from that amazing life, life of John Paul II.

When I was studying in Rome, George Weigel finished his biography of John Paul II, and he titled it Witness to Hope. I knew that night, and I was so grateful that as a young young priest I had been given this opportunity to see with not even a scintilla of doubt possible that heaven is real, that the grace that comes to us from God and from his saints is real and that we can found our whole lives upon that hope and that that hope is contagious and that it inspires others to live rightly, to hope rightly, and it brings so much joy and happiness to this sad, sorrowful, and fallen world. In fact, it's the only source for us, as St. Peter reminds us, of our joy here below.

Dear friends, my friend Curtis Martin says that this generation of Catholics, all of us, this generation of Catholics is responsible for this generation of people, for this generation of human beings who live right now upon the face of the Earth. We live in a world which is deeply in need of Hope. Where will the world find that hope? Where will they experience witnesses to Hope if not through us?

It's important not just for our own salvation that we are men and women of hope, that we are sentinels of the invisible world, that we long each day in small things and in great things for the ultimate joy of heaven and union with God. It's important not just for our own salvation; it's important because that's how we transform the world and that's what the world is so needful of. We can fill the world to the brim with hope, but it starts with us here this morning. 

God bless you all.