A Spirit of Hope. MSC General Conference 2025

“Walking Together Building Structures That Serve”. Itaici-Brazil.

The future is not fixed—it is shaped by human imagination, belief, and expectation. Yet so much of what surrounds us today in politics, social media, and mainstream commentary projects the opposite. Commentators and influencers pose as prophets of inevitability, convinced they can see into the future. But instead of merely observing, they amplify humanity’s worst fears—climate catastrophe, uncontrollable AI, hostile migrations, robotic dominance, endless wars. This constant stream of polarised narratives and doomsday warnings becomes an echo chamber of despair, reverberating across societies and into our own imaginations.
This is the danger: when despair becomes the dominant vision, people lose the will to resist it. Bombarded by dystopian images and predictions, we slowly accept destruction as unavoidable, even attractive. Disaster films, apocalyptic feeds, and news cycles reinforce a fascination with collapse. Humanity begins to embrace dystopia, not because it is true, but because we have stopped imagining anything else.

“Breaking the Cycle as Missionaries of the Sacred Heart”. At the recent General Conference of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Itaici, Brazil, we were reminded that our charism is not simply to comment on the state of the world, but to transform it with a spirituality of hope rooted in the Heart of Jesus.
As MSC, we are called to refuse inevitability. We insist on possibilities. We proclaim a love without boundaries, a love that crosses nations, cultures, and divisions. We do not surrender to despair; we reactivate hope by living and preaching the possibility of reconciliation, communion, and healing.
This is not naïve optimism—it is faith. Faith that the Heart of Jesus reveals a future not bound by fear but open to God’s dream for humanity. Faith that imagination, when guided by love, can envision solutions rather than only problems. Faith that the Gospel itself is a living call to break cycles of violence, suspicion, and doom with the creativity of love.

“A Collective Responsibility”. The lesson is clear: negative thoughts, repeated and broadcast, create a negative future. But hopeful imagination and belief in change can alter the outcome.
The conference called us to witness courageously:
· not to feed despair,
· not to polarise,
· not to retreat into cynicism,
but to create spaces of encounter where new prototypes of community, mission, and solidarity can be tested and lived.
As MSC, our collective responsibility is to dream differently: to hold up not the image of collapse, but the vision of Jesus’ Heart breaking in, quietly but powerfully, wherever love is chosen over fear.
In this sense, the world does not need more prophets of doom—it needs dreamers of the Heart. And it is precisely here that our charism has something radical to offer: if humanity dares to dream with Christ, if we allow our imagination to be shaped by love, then truly, a better world is not only possible—it is already being born among us.

Chris Chaplin, MSC