“Hope is rekindled when we dig and break through the crust of reality, when we go beneath the surface,” the Pope told pilgrims gathered for the Saturday gathering.
At the special Jubilee Audience in Rome on September 6, 2025, Pope Leo returned to one of Jesus’ shortest parables—“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field”—and gave it a fresh, earthy angle. Like children who can’t resist digging to see what’s under the crust of the ground, he said, Christians are invited to go deeper than appearances. “Hope is rekindled when we dig and break through the crust of reality, when we go beneath the surface,” the Pope told pilgrims gathered for the Saturday gathering, part of the Holy Year’s ongoing catecheses.
As highlighted by Christopher Wells’ note for Vatican News, the Pope described the Kingdom as a treasure that changes how we live once we discover it—because the treasure is not an idea but a life: “The treasure that ignites hope is in fact the life of Jesus.” The task, he said, is to “set out in search of His traces,” confident they are close at hand, even in ordinary soil.
To make the point concrete, Pope Leo held up Saint Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, remembered in tradition as the patron of holy excavations in the land where Jesus suffered, died, and rose. He called her “a woman who seeks, a woman who digs.” Life had not spared her disappointments, yet she stayed faithful to the poor and kept searching. That quiet fidelity, the Pope suggested, works like a farmer’s patience: turning stubborn ground into a field capable of fruit.
Hope, then, isn’t optimism on autopilot. It asks for work. “Cultivating one’s own heart requires effort,” the Pope said, “but by digging, one finds; by lowering oneself one draws ever closer to that Lord Who stripped Himself to become like us.” The image is accessible to anyone who has ever gardened—or simply scraped a knee while playing outside. And it resonates with the Jubilee’s larger theme: hope as a daily practice, not a mood. Indeed, Pope Leo has repeatedly framed the Jubilee around hope as a living source of joy.
Returning to Helena’s excavations, the Pope added a striking line: Jesus’ Cross “lies beneath the crust of our earth.” In other words, God’s love is not out of reach; it waits where life actually happens—family burdens, quiet service, patient mercy. The Catechism puts it simply: hope “keeps [us] from discouragement” and sustains us on the way (CCC 1818). When we learn to look for Christ in the everyday, the field we were tired of working becomes the place of discovery.
There was a gentle warning, too: it is possible to walk over the treasure without noticing. But if we borrow the freedom of children—curious, humble, unafraid to get our hands dirty—we’ll find “another kingdom, another strength.” As the Pope summed up, “God is always below us, to raise us up on high.”
