Pope Francis warns against ‘duplicity of heart’ at Sunday Angelus

Pope Francis before the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica during the convocation of the Jubilee of Mercy, April 11, 2015. / L’Osservatore Romano.

Vatican City, Feb 22, 2022 / 09:00 am (CNA).

The Vatican is holding a worldwide competition to choose the official logo for the Catholic Church’s 2025 Jubilee Year.

A Jubilee is a special Holy Year of grace and pilgrimage in the Catholic Church, which typically takes place every 25 years.

As preparations for the Jubilee year get underway in Rome, the Vatican’s evangelization office has opened up a contest to decide the year’s official logo.

The competition was announced on Feb. 22, and submissions can be uploaded to the website from April 1 to May 20.

Both teams and individuals can enter, and the winning submission will be chosen by a panel of judges from the Pontifical Council for the Promoting the New Evangelization.

The motto for the 2025 Jubilee, approved by Pope Francis, is “Pilgrims of Hope.”

“The logo must portray the essence of the Jubilee event, with particular attention given to the motto,” according to the submission guidelines.

The 2025 Jubilee will be the Church’s first ordinary jubilee since St. John Paul II led the Great Jubilee of 2000. The Jubilee of Mercy opened by Pope Francis in 2015 was an extraordinary jubilee.

Other required features for the Holy Year’s official logo are that it be original and unpublished, distinctive, adaptable to printing on different materials, and usable in both color and black and white.

The logo should also include the Latin phrases “Iubilaeum A.D. MMXXV,” which means “Jubilee 2025,” and “Peregrinantes in spem,” which means “Pilgrims of Hope.”

The Vatican’s evangelization office said that the competition was “open to all” and “anyone can participate, subject to acceptance of the rules and regulations.”

The pontifical council recalled that the winner of the logo contest for the Holy Year of 2000 was a 22-year-old woman studying at an art institute.

Her entry “has become part of history,” it said.

“The Jubilee’s logo symbolically conveys a message in an immediate and fitting way, and is an expression both of the universality of the Church’s message and of the particular spiritual needs of our contemporaries, who find comfort in this message, inspired by the theme of hope,” the evangelization council said.

In a letter published earlier this month, Pope Francis called for a “great symphony of prayer” ahead of the Jubilee Year in 2025.

The pope made the appeal in a Feb. 11 letter to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.

“As is customary, the Bull of Indiction, to be issued in due course, will contain the necessary guidelines for celebrating the Jubilee of 2025,” he wrote.

“In this time of preparation, I would greatly desire that we devote 2024, the year preceding the Jubilee event, to a great ‘symphony’ of prayer.”

Jubilees have biblical roots, with the Hebrew Bible describing how jubilee years were held every 50 years for the freeing of slaves and forgiveness of debts as manifestations of God’s mercy.

The practice was re-established in 1300 by Boniface VIII. Pilgrims to Rome were granted a plenary indulgence. Between 1300 and 2000, 29 jubilee years were held in Rome.

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Vatican City, Oct 4, 2017 / 03:51 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Wednesday Pope Francis said true Christians aren’t sad or gloomy, but have the specific task of being bearers of hope not only with their words, but with actions as simple as a smile or an act of charity.

In his Oct. 4 general audience, the Pope said it’s encouraging to know that the’ disciples “are announcers of Jesus’ resurrection not only in word, but with facts and with the testimony of their life!”

Jesus, he said, “doesn’t want disciples capable only of repeating learned and memorized formulas. He wants witnesses: people who spread hope with their way of welcoming, smiling and loving.”

The most important part loving, he said, “because the strength of the resurrection renders Christians capable of loving even when love seems to have lost it’s meaning.”

For Christians, there is a “more” to existence that can’t be explained simply with the strength of spirit or a great amount of optimism. Rather, believers are people that seem to have a “piece of heaven” with them, and who are accompanied “by a presence that no one can even intuit.”

Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims gathered in St Peter’s Square, continuing his catechesis on Christian hope. This week, he spoke of the need to have “missionaries of hope,” noting that the call for such witnesses is key in the month of October, which is traditionally dedicated to mission.

A Christian, the Pope said, not “a prophet of misfortune,” but rather, their task entails announcing Jesus, “who died out of love and who God resurrected on the morning of Easter.”

“This is the nucleus of our Christian faith,” he said, explaining that if the Gospels had stopped at the the crucifixion and tomb, “the story of this prophet would add itself to the many biographies of heroic personalities that often have spent their lives for an ideal.”

In this case, the Gospel would simply become “an edifying and consoling book,” but it would in no way “be an announcement of hope.”

However, the Gospels go beyond the tomb, Francis said, explaining that “it is precisely this last part that transforms our lives.”

Although everything seemed hopeless after Jesus’ death, with some disciples already beginning to leave Jerusalem, Jesus rose. And this “unexpected fact” completely “overturns and subverts the heart of the disciples.”

Christians, then, are called to spread this news in the world and “open spaces for salvation, like regenerative cells capable of restoring vigor to those seem lost forever.”

True Christians, Pope Francis said, are “not sad and angry, but convinced by the strength of the resurrection, that no evil is infinite, no night without end, no man is definitively in wrong, no hate is invincible from love.”

But while there is joy that comes from announcing the Gospel, disciples at times have had to “pay a dear price” for their hope, Francis said, and pointed to the many Christians who “have not abandoned their people” in times of persecution.

“They have stayed there, where tomorrow isn’t certain, where they couldn’t have plans of any sort, (but) they stayed hoping in God.”

Referring, as he often does, to the many modern martyrs who give their lives for Christ, the Pope said their fidelity proves that “injustice does not have the final word in life.”

“In Christ Risen we can continue to hope,” he said, noting that while men and women who have a certain reason to live are able to resist more than others in times of difficulty, “those who have Christ at their side truly no longer fear anything.”

“Because of this Christians are never easy and accommodating men,” he said, stressing that “their meekness must not be confused with a sense of insecurity or of submissiveness.”

And this, he said, “is why the Christian is a missionary of hope. Not by their merit, but thanks to Jesus, the grain of wheat who, fallen to the earth, died and brought much fruit.”

At the end of the audience, just before leading pilgrims in the Our Father, Pope Francis announced that a special meeting will be held March 19-24 with youth from all over the world in order to prepare for the 2018 Synod of Bishops on “Young People, Faith and the Discernment of Vocation.”

Youth who will attend the conference will also include non-believers and non-Catholics, whether they come from other Christian traditions, other faiths entirely. Conclusions of the discussion will be given to synod participants to take into consideration during the discussion.

In preparing for the synod, “the Church wants to listen to the voices, feelings, faith and even doubts and critiques of the youth,” Pope Francis said, which is why the March meeting will gather such a vast panorama of participants, and why, ultimately, their reflections will be taken into consideration during the synod itself.

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Picture of the Cathedral Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida taken on the day of the patron saint of Brazil, in Aparecida, Sao Paulo State, on Oct. 12, 2022. / Credit: CAIO GUATELLI/AFP via Getty Images

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