Like the Magi who traveled to encounter the
Child Jesus, we are on a journey as a Church,
We have entered into the Jubilee Year
2025 as “Pilgrims of Hope.”
First, some background:
As the Church makes its pilgrimage through
time, we occasionally observe a “Jubilee
Year” as a holy time especially focused on the forgiveness of
sins, the call to conversion, and our hope in the return of Jesus
as the ultimate goal of history.
The word “jubilee” comes from the Hebrew word yobel, which
refers to the ram’s horn used to announce a jubilee in the Old
Testament. God told Moses that every fiftieth year was to be
set aside for the return of absent members to their
households, the restoration of land to its owners, the release
of Hebrew slaves and the forgiveness of debts:
This fiftieth year you shall make sacred by proclaiming
liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a
jubilee for you, when every one of you shall return to
his own property, every one to his own family
estate. (Lev. 25:10)
Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Christian jubilee in
A.D. 1300. The Church first celebrated a jubilee every 100
years. This was eventually shortened to every 50 years and
then every 25 years.
There are also occasional extraordinary Jubilee Years: St.
John Paul II proclaimed a special jubilee year in 1983 to
celebrate the 1,950th anniversary of the death and
resurrection of Jesus, and Pope Francis declared an
extraordinary jubilee (The Year of Mercy) for the 50th
anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council.
Our current Jubilee 2025 was proclaimed by Pope Francis in
Spes Non Confundit (“Hope does not disappoint”). He wrote:
The coming Jubilee will thus be a Holy Year marked by
the hope that does not fade, our hope in God. May it
help us to recover the confident trust that we require, in
the Church and in society, in our interpersonal
relationships, in international relations, and in our task
of promoting the dignity of all persons and respect for
God’s gift of creation.
Second, more locally: you will find Bishop Neary’s
Proclamation of the Jubilee in the Diocese of Saint Cloud and
practical ways to participate in this week’s bulletin insert,
taken from the Central Minnesota Catholic magazine.
Third, some perspective: the Jubilee is a celebration of the
world-wide Church. We are united with the whole Church
across every human boundary on this common pilgrimage of
hope.
At the same time, in the United States, we are in the third
year of the national Eucharistic Revival, in which we
contemplate that the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist
sends us on mission: “Do this in memory of Me.” We are
called to give the love we have been given in Jesus to others,
our fellow pilgrims on the same path to joy in God.
In our Diocese, we are also engaged in our most recent
Pastoral Planning process for the future of our parishes
and ministries. Our theme for this work is All Things New:
Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future. Our Diocese, too,
is on a pilgrimage of hope as we prepare for a future
that asks us to rely more on one another as stewards of
God’s gifts distributed richly throughout the Body of
Christ.
Scholars are divided on whether the Jubilee Year
regulations in Leviticus were ever really applied in
Israel’s history. But whatever actually took place in the
centuries before Jesus, we are still inspired by the fact
that we are set free in Jesus, united in one bond of love
by the Holy Spirit, and have a place prepared for us in
our true homeland in the Father’s House.
Meanwhile, we are Pilgims of Hope, on our way,
together.
The Jubilee Prayer
Father in heaven,
may the faith you have given us
in your Son, Jesus Christ, our brother,
and the flame of charity enkindled
in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,
reawaken in us the blessed hope
for the coming of your Kingdom.
May your grace transform
us into tireless cultivators of the seeds
of the Gospel.
May those seeds transform from within both humanity and
the whole cosmos
in the sure expectation
of a new heaven and a new earth,
when, with the powers of Evil vanquished,
your glory will shine eternally.
May the grace of the Jubilee
reawaken in us, Pilgrims of Hope,
a yearning for the treasures of heaven.
May that same grace spread
the joy and peace of our Redeemer
throughout the earth.
To you our God, eternally blessed,
be glory and praise for ever.
Amen.
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