In the months leading up to Christmas 2024, the facades of Rome’s churches were draped with tarps and hidden by scaffolding. Crews scrubbed the ancient walls and repaired the crumbling plaster. Indoors, canvases by the great masters were draped for cleaning. Tourist itineraries were rerouted as popular sites became construction zones.
The reason? Rome is expecting to see a record-breaking 30-35 million visitors in 2025 — nearly triple the numbers from 2023.
Hordes of pilgrims are coming for the Church’s Jubilee, also known as the Holy Year.
“While a Pope can call a jubilee any time he wants, ordinary jubilee years are held every 25 years,” said Joan Watson, author of “Opening the Holy Door” (Ave Maria Press, $15.95). Jubilees, she told Angelus, are meant “to be particular moments of grace in the life of the Church.”
The custom of marking a jubilee every quarter-century dates back to the year 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII declared a Church-wide celebration and urged Christians to make pilgrimage to Rome.
But the roots of the observance go much deeper. Jubilee is integral to biblical religion, commanded by God, and observed by his chosen people. In the Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, God commands: “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family."
God outlines a clear agenda for healing of families and tribes who were divided and scattered. Families would be reunited, slaves set free, debts forgiven.
The jubilee was to be a homecoming, a year of liberation — a renewal and reenactment of the freedom won by Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. Yet it was more than this, said Old Testament scholar John Bergsma.
It was “a restoration of an earlier state of freedom — the freedom of our first parents in the Garden of Eden. They lived in a state of perfect freedom — being without sin, there was not yet the need of redemption and reconciliation with God.” Bergsma, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, is author of “Jesus and the Jubilee: The Biblical Roots of the Year of God’s Favor” (Emmaus Road, $17.95)
Israel’s prophets alluded to the practice of the jubilee, and they foretold its fulfillment in a great “year of the LORD’s favor” (Isaiah 61:1–2) inaugurated by the Messiah. Jesus quoted this passage from Isaiah at the launch of his public ministry, when he preached at the synagogue in Nazareth. He announced that the Spirit had sent him “to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18–19).
And then he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Christians have always seen the time since Jesus as a jubilee — a period of perpetual grace and mercy.
Nonetheless, it’s good to be reminded, and it’s good to honor God by celebrations.
The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew jobel — which is the ram’s horn (better known as a shofar) used to proclaim a time of rejoicing. Through a happy coincidence the Latin word jubilare, which has all the same consonant sounds, means “to cheer” and “to shout.”
Thus, Bergsma told Angelus, “the proper response” to a call for jubilee “should be joy, hope, and excitement.”
“Lived well,” he added, “this jubilee can be a moment of miracle and grace for all of us, a kind of yearlong spiritual Christmas Season, in which we daily awake to open the gifts of grace that God our Father gives us so lovingly.”
A traditional part of every jubilee celebration is the practice of granting indulgences. An indulgence is the remission before God of the temporal punishment that is due for sins already forgiven. The Church grants indulgences by drawing from the treasury of merit, the abundance of graces that belong to Christ and his saints. In the Book of Exodus, Moses similarly won forgiveness for Israel by reminding God of the fidelity of the patriarchs: “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self” (Exodus 32:13).
(In Spes Non Confundit [“Hope Does Not Disappoint”], the document by which Pope Francis decreed the Jubilee, he provides a good explanation of the doctrine of indulgences, as well as a brief history of the jubilee.)
In a jubilee year the Church attaches indulgences to certain charitable actions or practices of piety. The most characteristic is the simple act of walking through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s — or one of four other designated doors in Rome.
Indulgences may be applied to oneself or to others, even to deceased family members and friends.
Such actions are outward signs of an interior faith. Jesus prescribed such simple devotional actions that resulted in profound healing. (See, for example, John 9:7, when Jesus sends a blind man for a ritual washing of his eyes.)
Bergsma observed: “We need to realize that the Jubilee is not an ‘extra’ or an ‘add on’ to the Christian faith, but actually lies at the very center of Scripture, salvation history, and Jesus’ mission as the Messiah.”
Yet Christians will find reasons to grumble even about gifts, graces, and mercies, said the author Joan Watson, who is also pilgrim formation manager for Verso Ministries based in South Bend, Indiana. She noted that already people are complaining on social media about the pilgrim traffic in Rome.
“I’m trying to look at it like Christmas Mass,” she told Angelus. “We should be happy so many people are going to have this opportunity for grace.
“We can look at it as an inconvenience and we can judge their intentions, or we can give gratitude to God that so many have come — in the footsteps of pilgrims of the last 725 years — and trust the Lord is going to work miracles.”
