On December 24, as Catholics celebrate Christmas Eve and the end of the Advent season, they will also turn their eyes to Rome. Pope Francis will pass through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica, marking the official commencement of the 2025 jubilee year. This jubilee’s theme, “Pilgrims of Hope,” is meant to offer a message of comfort to victims of international warfare, the pandemic, and climate change. Between 30 and 40 million people are expected to come to Rome in 2025, more than double the annual tourism rate. Literally following in Pope Francis’s footsteps, the millions of pilgrims passing through the Holy Doors and making a penitential confession will partake in a Catholic ritual that stretches back more than seven hundred years. While the jubilee is a medieval tradition, and the Church largely seeks to replicate the first Catholic jubilee in 1300, the upcoming 2025 jubilee also presents some new events that distinguishes it from its predecessors.
The Christian jubilee has its origins in the Jewish tradition, which decrees that a jubilee (yovel in Hebrew) shall be held every fifty years (Leviticus 25:8–13), and that “in it you shall not sow, neither reap that which grows of itself, nor gather from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you. You shall eat of its increase out of the field. In this Year of Jubilee each of you shall return to his property.” To begin this special year, the shofar horn was blown at Yom Kippur, slaves were freed, and debts were forgiven.
Though the practice of Christian pilgrimage had been a popular aspect of medieval religious devotion, the idea of a universal jubilee involving a pilgrimage did not crystalize until 1299. In a time of ongoing disease and warfare, pilgrims went in droves to Rome at Christmas that year, seeking mercy and God’s blessings at one of the most sacred places in Christianity. Moved by the presence of the pilgrims, Pope Boniface VIII published a papal bull Antiquorum habet fida relatio (“There exists an ancient tradition worthy of faith”) on February 22, 1300, that established basic parameters of a one-time year of pilgrimage and penitence. Though he did not use the word “jubilee” in the document, Boniface promised the forgiveness of sins to those who made the pilgrimage. Traveling pilgrims had to visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul every day for fifteen days and make a confession in order to receive a full indulgence (those who lived in Rome could also do this, but they had to visit the basilicas daily for a month straight).
It is estimated that in that first jubilee, over two hundred thousand pilgrims made the journey to Rome. Their numbers included artists Cimabue and Giotto, banker and diplomat Giovanni Villani, and Dante Alighieri, who wrote about it in his Divine Comedy. In describing the jubilee, Villani noted it was “the most marvellous thing that was ever seen, for throughout the year, without a break, there were in Rome, besides the inhabitants of the city, 200,000 pilgrims…and all was well ordered, and without tumult.”
The 1300 jubilee was so successful that Christians clamored for the Church to plan another one, even though Boniface had intended that a jubilee should only occur every hundred years. He couldn’t have anticipated how the crises of the fourteenth century would change that. Devastating amounts of rain in the spring of 1315 led to the Great Famine (1315–1317), which plunged Europe into an agricultural and financial crisis. Shortly after, the Black Death (1347–1350) ravaged Europe, killing between a third and half of the population, while the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337–1453) had just begun. The Catholic Church itself was also in crisis, as the papacy had moved from Rome to Avignon, France.
These global crises led Pope Clement VI to issue a papal bull in 1343 that called for another jubilee year to be celebrated in 1350. The first jubilee brought pilgrims to Rome to visit the Basilica of St. Peter and Paul, but over time, pilgrims visited the Basilicas of St. John Lateran and Maria Maggiore as well. Today it is customary that in order to “complete” the as a pilgrim, one must go to Rome, visit all four major basilicas, and make a full confession. In doing so, the pilgrim receives a plenary indulgence, a complete forgiveness of sins. (This is not to be confused with the much-maligned medieval practice of selling indulgences—the idea that one could pay for the forgiveness of sins without performing penance.)
There have been over twenty Catholic jubilees since 1300, but they haven’t occurred on a regular schedule. In 1389, Urban VI chose to set the jubilee cycle to every thirty-three years to commemorate the number of years in Jesus’ life. But eager pilgrims flocked en masse to Rome in 1400, and Pope Boniface IX granted a special indulgence to those who made the pilgrimage.
In the following years, jubilees occurred on a fifty-year cycle, and then every twenty-five years, starting in 1475. From then on, ordinary jubilees were held at regular intervals (except when the Napoleonic Wars prevented a jubilee from happening in 1800). Even when the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls was destroyed by a fire in 1823 (subsequently rebuilt), Pope Leo XII substituted Santa Maria in Trastevere as an alternative site for jubilee pilgrims. Some popes have also declared extraordinary jubilee years to mark outstanding events or anniversaries, such as the 1954 Marian Year, or the 2015–2016 Year of Mercy. The 2025 jubilee will mark an anniversary (1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea), and it also fits within the now-typical twenty-five-year cycle.
The most famous symbol of the jubilee is the Holy Doors at the major basilicas in Rome, and it is the Holy Door at St. Peter’s that the pope opens to formally begin the jubilee year. Pope Francis will open that door on December 24 and the doors at the other major basilicas shortly thereafter. Each of the Holy Doors is decorated with intricate art. At St. Peter’s Basilica, for example, there are sixteen panels with biblical stories that highlight both moments of sin (e.g., the expulsion from the Garden of Eden or Peter’s denial of Jesus) and of grace (Mary at the Annunciation and Christ’s baptism in the Jordan).
For centuries, the doors were cemented shut, and the pope instead commenced the jubilee by hitting each door three times with a hammer. In 1423, one chronicler noted that people showed such devotion to the bricks and cement fragments that as soon as the door was uncovered, “they are carried away by a general frenzy; the northerners take them home as holy relics.” In 1975, as Pope Paul VI struck the Holy Door at St. Peter’s, some debris nearly fell on him, and the hammering process was formally scrapped. Today, the doors are uncovered several days before, and the pope simply processes through them. At the conclusion of the jubilee, the holy doors are sealed up until the next jubilee year.
Francis also intends the 2025 jubilee to be an opportunity for mercy and justice on a systemic level. On the feast of St. Stephen (December 26), Pope Francis will for the first time open a special Holy Door at Rebibbia prison on the outskirts of Rome. The prison housed Pope John Paul II’s would-be assassin; it is also where John Paul visited him and offered forgiveness. Francis intends this unique moment to offer a message of hope and to call attention to “prisoners who, deprived of their freedom, feel daily the harshness of detention and its restrictions, lack of affection and, in more than a few cases, lack of respect for their persons.” This is of a piece with some of Francis’s other recent actions: last September, the Vatican signed an agreement with the Italian Minister of Justice and the mayor of Rome to promote opportunities for former inmates to reenter society through acts of service that will invite them “to look to the future with hope and a renewed sense of confidence.” Francis has also entreated wealthy nations to forgive the debt of the world’s poorest countries. Echoing his previous calls for the protection of the Earth in his encyclical Laudato si’, Francis will advocate international reforms to reverse climate change. Thus, the 2025 jubilee should not just be viewed as an opportunity for individuals to seek mercy through confession, but for changes to happen at a global level that will set prisoners free, protect the vulnerable, and restore broken relationships.
The spiritual, logistical, and financial preparations for the jubilee have been massive. Pope Francis formally called for the 2025 jubilee in the papal bull Spes non confundit (“Hope Does Not Disappoint”) which invokes Romans 5:5 (“Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us”). In anticipation of the jubilee, Pope Francis declared 2024 to be a year of prayerful preparation: “We devote 2024, the year preceding the Jubilee event, to a great ‘symphony’ of prayer.” These preparations also recognize that 2024 marked the end of the Synod on Synodality, another effort to bring together local communities to plan for the future of the Church.
In addition to the spiritual preparedness, Rome has undergone enormous infrastructure renovations. Over 4 billion euros in public funds have been dedicated for hundreds of improvement projects. Not only has this led to public transportation closures throughout 2024, but also to the restoration of major works of art (including Michelangelo’s Pietà and numerous Renaissance and Baroque paintings, frescos, and sculptures). Similar to the reopening of Notre-Dame in Paris, these works of art will illuminate the Eternal City and allow pilgrims and other visitors to observe the beauty of the Catholic faith.
The 2025 jubilee, the twenty-eighth jubilee year celebrated by the Catholic Church, will end on the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, 2026. By all predictions, it will be the largest in Catholic history. In this present day, it is radical to present such a bold message of hope in the face of suffering. Yet, like the medieval jubilees, which took place in the midst of numerous outbreaks of disease and warfare, the 2025 jubilee remains an invitation for Catholics searching for optimism, hope, and forgiveness to come to this sacred place, pass through the Holy Doors, leave behind sin, plead for grace, and pray for the world and its people.
