By Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv.
Each Jubilee Year is a celebration of God’s mercy stretched out over a calendar year. God’s mercy is constant and always available, but we are not always mindful of that mercy. The Church, through sacraments and sacramentals, has a variety of ways of inviting us to draw close to God and to experience his merciful love so that we in turn may be merciful and loving towards others.
It is also common for a Jubilee Year to emphasize a particular theme within the celebration of God’s mercy, and Pope Francis has chosen the virtue of hope as the theme for 2025. No one needs to be reminded of the threats to hope in our present world, from the fear of nuclear war to the threat of a global ecological catastrophe as well as countless challenges to our serenity on a smaller scale. The pope continues to ponder the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and hopes that humanity will learn from the missed opportunities for greater solidarity and fraternity that the threat of the virus offered us. Instead, many people remain in the isolation that was characteristic of the pandemic, and our world seems even more polarized than before. Christians are always called to be a people of hope, and the theme of this Jubilee Year is also the pope’s expression of his dream of a world in which all people and all creation recognize their interconnectedness.
The Jubilee is typically an occasion for a pilgrimage, a journey of faith. Traditionally, pilgrims traveled to pass through the Jubilee Door at Saint Peter’s Basilica, opened only during these special years. But Pope Francis wants to make the mercy and hope celebrated even more accessible and even plans a Jubilee Door to be opened in a prison, inviting everyone to pass through a threshold towards the embrace of God.
Francis himself has been leading the universal Church on another kind of pilgrimage for three years: the three-year process of the Synod on Synodality. Although major Synod sessions were celebrated in October of 2023 and 2024, the Synod was more about a renewal in the pilgrimage of all God’s people as we walk together towards God’s Kingdom. The literal meaning of the word Synod, we have been reminded, is “walking on the way together.” The Synod is modeling both an ancient and a new way of being the Church, through processes of listening and discernment which are ever more inclusive. The willingness of the Bishop of Rome and the college of bishops to listen to the voices of all God’s people, especially those who are unaccustomed to having a voice, is itself a sign of the hope that is the focus of the Jubilee Year.
Many people who have felt disenfranchised by the institutional Church because of their gender, economic status, country of origin, marital status, sexual orientation or other categories had their hopes rekindled by the sight of synod delegates from around the globe seated together and listening to each other in order to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying to us about the future of our Church and how we should best live the mission we received from Christ at this moment in history. May hope continue to flow from these gatherings and touch all the members of the Church of God.
