History's Mistakes

In these very hard days we are living through, days when we have slept very little, days when we have wept at so much violence and so much death, days when we have seen our students and political leaders mocked to our faces and slandered, one asks God where Justice is.

Because I had a feeling hard times were coming, about two months ago I began collecting books that spoke to me of hope, because that virtue is essential today for those of us here, living through these very difficult moments with our children.

One of the readings that has helped me most is Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Saved in Hope,” especially the chapter on the Last Judgment. It is good to think about it when you feel your hands are tied and you are powerless in the face of so many lies and injustices rubbed in our faces and in the lives of so many innocent people.

Benedict XVI tells us that from the earliest times the prospect of the Judgment has influenced Christians as a guide for ordering their present life, as a call to their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God’s justice.

Faith in the Last Judgment, he writes, is first and foremost hope, a hope whose necessity has become clear precisely in the upheavals of recent centuries. He is convinced that justice is the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life.

The image of the Last Judgment, he says, is not first of all a terrifying image but an image of hope, perhaps for us the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a frightening image? He would call it an image that demands responsibility… God is justice and creates justice. That is our comfort and our hope.

He explains that a person’s choice in life becomes definitive at death, and that his life then stands before the Judge. That choice, shaped over the course of a whole life, can take different forms. There may be people who have destroyed within themselves the desire for truth and the readiness to love; people in whom everything has become a lie; people who have lived for hatred and trampled love within themselves. It is a terrible prospect, but in some figures of our own history we can recognize, with horror, people of this kind. In such individuals nothing could be remedied any longer, and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: that is what the word hell means.

Those people are the mistakes of history who have done so much harm to so many, who have trampled over so many in order to hold on to power at any cost.

But history’s mistakes also have their hour, and they will have to give an account, first before Jesus Christ and then before the whole world, on the Day of the Last Judgment. On that day the whole Truth will be known, before the eyes of the whole world, and God will do Justice.

As Christians, with our eyes set on the Heaven that will be ours if we live doing Good and working for Justice to reach our land, we will keep going with great fortitude and hope, because we are also sure that God and the Blessed Virgin of Coromoto will help Justice and Peace shine in our beloved Venezuela.

I take this opportunity to thank everyone around the world for so many signs of solidarity, support and prayer. Please don’t stop praying for Venezuela; we need your prayers very much.