Luceat!

Whenever a leading presidential candidate in the most influential country in the world adopts a theological virtue as the ethos of his campaign, thinking young Catholic bloggers ought to sit up and take notice.

I was running on a treadmill one morning in March listening to Curtis Martin’s keynote address from FOCUS National Conference on my mp3 player. As I usually run outside, and my roommates and I do not have a television in our apartment, the gym has become the only place aside from the cafeteria in Newman Hall at the University of Illinois that I am exposed to news on television. As I ran, I noticed one of the TVs tuned into a major news channel which was running a bit on the primary elections. The story was following Clinton and Obama through various swing states, and was highlighting clips from the campaign trail.

While I was listening to Curtis, my eyes were drawn to the words displayed by closed caption, especially when Barack Obama entered the scene. As I watched Obama gesticulate emphatically, I heard Curtis Martin saying through my headphones, “We live at an extraordinary moment in history. You were made for a purpose. Young people will change the culture.” These words from our founder have resonated in my heart as true for quite sometime, and have moved me to serve as a missionary for the last three years. But in a moment that can only be described as surreal, I saw the faces of the young people present at Barack Obama’s stump speech somewhere in middle America light up in a similar way as the words on the closed caption echoed Curtis’ almost verbatim.

While I have not been able to recover Obama’s exact words from that day, I offer these words from his “Audacity of Hope” as another example of something that might as well have come from the lips of our founder:

“Young people want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless roll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to traveled own a long highway toward nothingness.”

Barack Obama has read the signs of the times.

He knows that we live in a culture that longs for Hope.

He is using the language of the New Evangelization.

Or is he?

In order to be better equipped to articulate the truth and beauty of the Catholic faith in a way that will resonate with the hearts of modern men and women, I will be a full-time graduate student next fall. This means that my days as a FOCUS blogger are numbered, and as a sort of last “hurrah,” I would like to take on one last project. If I were extremely pretentious (and boring) I would title this project “A philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and theological exploration of the concept of Hope in the thought of Barack Hussein Obama and Benedict XVI.” But since I am neither pretentious nor boring, but rather hip, very cool, and oh-so-witty (and because I am not afraid to steal uncopywrited ideas shamelessly from my brilliant friends [Amanda E. Graf, contributor]) we will call this little project “The Veracity of Hope.”

I hope you look forward to finding out what I have to say as much as I do!