Yes, you read that title correctly! It does, however, need better punctuation to convey the proper meaning, which a saint with local ties can provide.
The church has recently begun the celebration of Jubilee 2025. The year of festivities takes up an ancient tradition of pardon and restoration, first highlighted in the Jewish biblical tradition (cf. Leviticus 25:8-13) and later inaugurated in the Christian era in the Holy Year of 1300. Celebrated every twenty-five years since 1470, the jubilee seeks to turn our collective attention to the Lord in a particular way so as to re-focus our faith on the great things the Lord has done and continues to do for us.
“Hope does not disappoint” is the central message proclaimed by Pope Francis for Jubilee 2025. In a world today where so many people can easily be “discouraged, pessimistic and cynical about the future, as if nothing could bring them happiness,” an intentional focus on hope intends to offer an opportunity for renewal.
Learning to forget is one way to make that happen. This doesn’t mean denying reality, but choosing to embrace an even greater state of affairs. St. Leonie Aviat (1844-1914), who co-founded the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales and whose feast is celebrated Jan. 10, exemplifies how to do that.
Completing her studies at the Visitation monastery in Troyes (Francis), where young girls from the countryside came to live and work in the town’s textile factories, young Leonie was affected by their plight. Father Louis Brisson, who had opened a center to keep these young people safe and also educate them in the faith, convinced Leonie to establish a religious congregation to continue this apostolic work.
On the day of her religious profession, the future saint made a resolution that would become her life’s motto: to forget myself entirely. She would do so as a matter of hope.
Leonie appropriated the understanding of hope lived and taught by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), whose name she would take in religious life. The Doctor of the Church learned it through a powerful personal experience while he was a student in Paris.
After a time of despairing that he was pre-destined to eternal perdition, he came to understand hope as a faith-based conviction, more than a natural disposition, that exalts the goodness of life even without knowing what the future holds. His many writings encouraged hope not as the result of human accomplishment, but from an experience of the surpassing mercy of God.
In this sense, to forget (in order) to hope is to leave myself behind and commend myself entirely into the hands of divine providence. Even when temptation continues. Even where sin abounds. Even if discouragement follows. Even though suffering endures. Even with the apprehension and anxiety that cloud our perspective.
We can forget all that by choosing, instead, to remember the God in whom we believe: the Father who created us out of goodness and for goodness, the Son who redeemed us the sin that wounds our human nature, and the Holy Spirit who breathes within us and inclines us toward union with God forever.
In Salesian spirituality, hope arises from this understanding of who God is to us and for us. More than merely an optimistic outlook, this religious hope “gives inward direction and purpose to the life of believers,” as Pope Francis reminds us.
In this Jubilee year, we have the opportunity to redirect our lives by experiencing again the mercy of God that grounds our everyday hope. Through pilgrimage and prayer, we can come once more to know what the saints knew – that in the midst of all the contrary things happening around us (or within us), “hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).
St. Leonie Aviat’s apostolic work flowed from the hopeful resolution “to forget myself entirely.” As Pope John Paul II preached at her canonization, this self-forgetting in favor of God-remembering can also serve us as “an invitation to go against the current with respect to egoism and easy pleasures and open us up to the social and spiritual necessities of our time.”
Our time, our world needs hope, the Christian hope that does not disappoint.
As a new year begins and the Jubilee continues, let’s forget to hope; that is, let’s forget ourselves so as to hope in the one whose coming among us we just merrily celebrated, the Emmanuel who remains always with us.
Oblate Father Thomas Dailey holds the John Cardinal Foley Chair of Homiletics and Social Communications at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where he also directs the new Catholic Preaching Institute.
Jan. 22, 2025 at 7 PM
Our Mother of Consolation Church
Hope Springs Eternal:
A Salesian Life Lesson for the Jubilee Year
For the annual parish mission, Father Tom Dailey, OSFS, Salesian Scholar and the John Cardinal Foley Chair of Homiletics and Socialther Communications at Saint Charles Seminary will offer sound advice for cultivating hope in our life and world with lessons learned from the gentleman saint whose Feast we celebrate, St. Francis de Sales.
