Why will Pope Francis symbolically open the Holy Door at St Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve?

On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis will open the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica to inaugurate the Jubilee year of 2025. It is a momentous occasion, a year marked out for forgiveness and renewal. There have been Holy Years since 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII called the first, but they ultimately derive from the Jubilees of the Old Testament when the fruits of the earth were given to all: “The sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you; for your cattle also, and for the beasts that are in your land, all its yield shall be for food” (Lev 25:6-7).

Over time, the intervals between Holy Years have shortened, from 100 years to the biblical 50 to 25 years at present. This Jubilee marks the first 25 years of this millennium since Pope St John Paul II inaugurated the Jubilee in 2000. It is an opportunity to review those 25 years and to make all things new again. His Holiness has called it a “year of Evangelisation”, with the motto: “Journeying as Pilgrims in Hope”.

The Church, with the world, has undergone many vicissitudes in the last quarter-century. It has lost members in Europe and in Anglophone countries and gained others in Africa and Asia. The old scandals of sexual abuse have not been resolved, being ultimately based on the problem of how sinful humans exercise power and how institutions protect themselves. There have been new challenges, too – notably the Covid pandemic, which was arguably mishandled in many countries by the harmful decision to shut churches rather than open them responsibly. Respect for human dignity has diminished with the increasing acceptance of assisted suicide as a means of dealing with the problems of pain and loneliness, and the migrant crises have brought fresh tensions in many parts. Meanwhile, the challenge of caring for this earth, our common home, is still urgent, and the Pope has asked that young people should make this a priority for the Jubilee.

The Year of Jubilee offers the chance of a new beginning. The faithful who go to pray in the Jubilee churches in Rome will have the valuable benefit of a plenary indulgence. The gathering of so many people in the city of Ss Peter and Paul can only bring blessings on them and their communities. Even if we cannot journey to Rome, we can bring the Jubilee to our own places through prayer and pilgrimage. Jaded as we are, there will be a real sense of expectation when Pope Francis opens the Holy Door – and in opening it, he invites us all to step inside.

This article appears in the December 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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