A Jubilee year in Los AngelesCentenary of the birth of St. John Paul II. Traces of his legacy"Pilgrims of Hope" is the motto chosen by Pope Francis for the next Holy Year of the universal Church, the Jubilee of 2025. It was Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, who announced it in the last few hours, recounting the results of the recent private audience he had with the Holy Father in early January.
The news that it would be the Vatican department headed by Monsignor Fisichella who would coordinate the preparation of the next Jubilee on behalf of the Holy See, in contact with the Italian civil authorities, was announced the day after Christmas, but close talks had already been going on for several months with the organizations concerned.
The Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, which according to the forthcoming text of the reform of the organization of the Roman Curia - Praedicate evangelium - should be merged with the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, already managed the previous "Jubilee of Mercy" (December 8, 2015 - November 20, 2016). It is true that then it was an event that not only came as a surprise at the behest of Pope Francis, but was intended to be "diffusive" with respect to the single city of Rome, with the opening of the "Holy Doors" in all the dioceses of the world. The first Holy Door to be opened, as will be recalled, was not that of St. Peter's Basilica, but that of the peripheral Cathedral of Banguì, in the Central African Republic.
The path of preparation
Returning to the next Jubilee in 2025, in addition to the logistical aspect, there will undoubtedly be the path of spiritual preparation. Suffice it to recall that for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, the path of preparation began six years earlier, in 1994, when John Paul II delivered to the whole Church the Apostolic Letter Tertio Millenio Adveniente. In that document, he anticipated the three phases that would lead to the fullness of this celebration: an "ante-preparatory" phase and three strictly preparatory years, from 1997 to 1999.
We are certainly not at the imminence of a change of millennium that would require a thoughtful reflection on two millennia of history, but certainly the last 25 years have represented for the Church and for society a "change of epoch," as Pope Francis has repeatedly emphasized.
A reasoning that the Pope also made in 2019 to the Roman Curia, when he reiterated that precisely in this epochal context, where among other things, he said, "we are not in Christendom, not anymore", the real urgency of Christ's witnesses is not to "occupy spaces" but to "initiate processes".
Certainly, the theme of hope also came to the Pope's mind after the events of the last two years, characterized by the pandemic, which in addition to so much suffering has sown in the world despair and disillusionment towards a future that seems uncertain, in which the ability to dream has also been lost.
The Jubilee will therefore be an opportunity to take up again the path of trust and to look with renewed eyes to the future that awaits us, each of us doing our part: pilgrims of hope.
