Pope Francis launches Jubilee 2025 with opening of Holy Door

Hannah Brockhaus By Hannah Brockhaus for CNA

December 24, 2024 Catholic News Agency News Briefs 0 Print

 

Pope Francis opened the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica before Mass on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 2024, officially launching the Jubilee Year 2025. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Dec 24, 2024 / 14:10 pm (CNA).

Pope Francis opened the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica before Mass on Christmas Eve, officially launching the Jubilee Year 2025.

“O Christ, bright star of the morning, incarnation of infinite love, long awaited salvation, sole hope of the world, illumine our hearts with your radiant splendor,” the pope prayed on Dec. 24, during the rite of opening of the Holy Door, which was preceded by readings from the Old and New Testaments, the singing of the O Antiphons, and the proclamation of Christmas.

“In this season of grace and reconciliation grant that we may put our trust in your mercy alone and discover once more the way that leads to the Father,” Francis continued. “Open our souls to the working of the Holy Spirit, that he may soften the hardness of our hearts, that enemies may speak to each other again, adversaries may join hands, and peoples seek to meet together.”

The rite to open the Holy Door — sealed since the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2016 — included the proclamation of a passage from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says: “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

Seated in his wheelchair, the 88-year-old Pope Francis leaned forward to knock on the gold Holy Door. As assistants opened the two sides of the door, the choir sang in Latin: “This is the Lord’s own gate. Where the upright enter. I enter your house, O Lord.”

After breaking open the special door, Francis stopped at the threshold to pray briefly in silence as the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica pealed out into the cool Rome night.

The pope passed through the Holy Door into the basilica followed by cardinals, bishops, priests, and ministers for Christmas Mass, as well as representatives of other Christian churches and Catholics from five continents wearing traditional clothing from their countries. The choir sang the Jubilee hymn, “Pilgrims of Hope.”

While symptoms of a cold kept the pope indoors on the weekend before Christmas, he was well enough on Tuesday to open the Holy Door and preside over Mass during the Night for the Nativity of the Lord. It was also one of Francis’ first public appearances sporting hearing aids.

The first ordinary jubilee since the Great Jubilee of 2000 is on the theme of hope, a virtue that “does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love,” Pope Francis said in Spes Non Confundit, the “bull of indiction” formally announcing the Holy Year.

“For everyone, may the Jubilee be a moment of genuine, personal encounter with the Lord Jesus, the ‘door’ of our salvation, whom the Church is charged to proclaim always, everywhere and to all as ‘our hope,’” he wrote.

The Jubilee, a year filled with special spiritual, artistic, and cultural events in Rome, will conclude during the Christmas season 2025. An important part of the Jubilee is the opportunity to receive a plenary indulgence — a grace granted by the Catholic Church through the merits of Jesus Christ to remove the temporal punishment due to sin.

Some of the biggest events of the Jubilee of Hope will be the canonizations of Blessed Carlo Acutis, during the Jubilee of Teenagers on April 27, and Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, during the Jubilee of Young People on August 3, and the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents, and the Elderly, on the weekend of May 30-June 1.

Pope Francis will also open a Holy Door in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison on the feast of St. Stephen on Dec. 26.

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Prison ministry includes helping people after incarceration, Pope Francis says

November 8, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Vatican City, Nov 8, 2019 / 11:01 am (CNA).- In addition to looking after the physical and spiritual needs of those in prison, Catholics have an obligation to recognize the humanity of those who have left the prison system and to help them get back on their feet, Pope Francis said Friday.

“As Christian communities, we must ask ourselves a question” about those who have been released from prison, the pope said Nov. 8, addressing Catholics involved in prison ministry around the world.

“If these brothers and sisters have already paid the penalty for the wrongdoing, why is a new social punishment placed on their shoulders with rejection and indifference? On many occasions, this social aversion is one more reason they run the risk of repeating their own faults,” he said.

Often when a person leaves prison, he or she finds themselves in a world which is foreign to them and which, at the same time, does not trust them, the pope continued. This can make it very difficult for them to find work and to make a decent living.

“By preventing people from regaining the full exercise of their dignity, they are once again exposed to the dangers that accompany the lack of development opportunity, in the middle of violence and insecurity,” Francis stated.

“True social reintegration,” he argued, begins with access to decent work, education, self-development opportunities, and health care.

But it is often easier and more comfortable to ignore or deny the injustices present in society than to try to create equal opportunities for all citizens, he said, calling it “a way of discarding.”

He said this is the same reason many places choose incarceration as a solution over trying to fix the root societal problems which lead people to crime.

Especially today, he said, societies are called to overcome the stigmatization of people who have served time in prison for their mistakes.

“Because instead of offering the right help and resources to live a dignified life, we have become accustomed to rejecting,” he underlined, and people do this instead of looking for and noticing what effort a person might be making to respond to the love of God in his or her life.

Pope Francis spoke about ministering to the imprisoned during an audience with participants in a two-day conference on Catholic prison ministry, organized by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

The pope said he entrusted to the dicastery the task of making evident the Church’s concern for those in situations of suffering, including the imprisoned, but added that “it is not a task indicated only for the dicastery, but it is for the whole Church in fidelity to the mission received from Christ.”

The Church “is called to act permanently the mercy of God in favor of the most vulnerable and helpless in whom Jesus himself is present,” he said. “We will be judged on this.”

The conference took place at the Vatican Nov. 7-8 and was held to learn more about diocesan and local prison ministry in countries around the world, so that they can strengthen and improve through sharing ideas and experiences.

Pope Francis argued that prisons themselves also fail to properly reintegrate people into society, because they lack the resources to address the social, psychological, and relational problems imprisoned people often face.

Prison verpopulation is also a problem, he noted.

Pope Francis thanked those who serve the incarcerated, noting Christ’s words that “what they did to one of the least of my brothers, they did to me.”

“With the inspiration of God, each Church community is taking its own path to present the Father’s mercy to all these brothers, and to make resonate a permanent call, so that every man and society seeks to act firmly and decisively in favor of peace and justice,” he said.

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