Recently, Pope Francis released his first encyclical letter. An encyclical letter is one of the most important and authoritative means by which a pope teaches as the successor of Peter.

As part of our Catholic faith, we are blessed to recognize in such an important document the pope speaking to us and to our consciences to lead us to Christ.

In short, an encyclical letter is not just another voice in a discussion, but it is Peter speaking to us. In this case, we have an historic document because the encyclical letter was begun by Pope Emeritus Benedict and was completed and issued by Pope Francis. So, two successive popes are speaking to us.

The title of the encyclical letter is “Lumen Fidei” (“The Light of Faith”). Pope Emeritus Benedict hoped to issue it as the completion of his “trilogy” of encyclicals. His first was on hope (“Spe Salvi”) and the second was on love (“Caritas in Veritate”). And so, both popes are reminding us of the theological virtues — faith, hope and love.

The idea of popes writing letters of this sort might seem far away from daily life and even something of an abstraction. In truth, it is anything but.

As we look around, especially in our society, don’t we see the signs of a faith that is becoming, as Pope Francis recently lamented, tired and habitual?

It seems that traditional values are in question. Our own beloved country is now heading down a path of secularism, with our own government and culture seeking to exclude God from our national life and discourse.

As believers, we feel the effort to make us feel ashamed and outdated because we “cling to our faith.”

It is no accident that religious freedom is suddenly so threatened, or that God’s eternal plan for marriage is being rewritten in our human laws of the moment. Both developments are linked to the decline in faith in our society, and they seek to hasten it further.

The encyclical letter lays out the challenges of faith clearly right at the beginning. It explains that one of the temptations of our age is to consider ourselves to be so modern that we are mankind come of age.
Faith was previously needed to console us and fill in the gaps that science and human study had not yet figured out about the world. But now we are so advanced, science has come so far, we are so much more mature than those who have gone before us, that faith is no longer needed.

Nevertheless, if we look around, we recognize that without faith, without God, we are left standing alone in a world without meaning.

Without faith, values and moral guidance are not timeless and a light for our steps. Instead, they are the decisions of the moment that we, with our limited and fallible human judgment, make and can revise at any time. And of course, it is always the powerful who decide what those values are.

But the encyclical reminds us that faith is a strange and wonderful call from beyond ourselves that is embedded in our hearts and our human nature.

With Abraham and Moses and Mary, we recognize that our very existence has come about for a higher purpose than just our own will or our own comfort.

Because of our faith in Christ and in his Father, we understand ourselves and the world. Faith lights our way in life, even if God does not, at every moment, give us every answer to every question. Faith will be explained fully when we see Christ face to face. But by listening to Christ, by trusting his guidance of the Church we are led on the path for which we were created; life eternal.

Have you never before read an encyclical letter? This might be the time to start.