Holy Year 2025: A Time of Prayer and Hope

On Sunday, December 29, Bishop Rhoades will lead a procession from St. Mary, Mother of God Parish in Fort Wayne to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at 10:45 a.m. If the weather is inclement or the sidewalks are impassable, the procession will begin from the St. Mother Guérin Chapel. Mass will begin at the cathedral at 11:30 a.m.

On the same day, December 29, Father Mark Gurtner, vicar general of the diocese, will lead a procession at St. Matthew Cathedral in South Bend beginning at 10:30 a.m. in the cathedral gym and processing around the block. Mass will be celebrated at 11 a.m. in the cathedral.

To prepare our hearts, “The pope has asked us all to join in a ‘great symphony of prayer,’” Father Gurtner told Today’s Catholic.

In this way, Catholics from around the world join together spiritually and sing praise to the Lord. Father Gurtner emphasized that we do not enter this year alone but rather in great numbers, producing this “great symphony.”

“We join the universal Church throughout the world in celebrating this Jubilee Year, the center of which is in Rome,” Father Gurtner said. “We unite ourselves in prayer and ask God to receive the benefits of grace which the jubilee year affords,” Father Mark concluded.

Pope Francis opens the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica to inaugurate the Jubilee Year of Mercy at the Vatican Dec. 8, 2015. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

What is a Jubilee?

In his document Spes Non Confundit (“Hope Does Not Disappoint”), Pope Francis formally announced that the Holy Year 2025 will officially begin when he opens the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve, and it will continue through the feast of Epiphany on January 6, 2026. In the document, released in May, the pope appealed to the world’s Christians to become joyful heralds of hope in a world marked by fear and despair.

“Each of us needs hope in our lives, at times so weary and wounded, our hearts that thirst for truth, goodness, and beauty, and our dreams that no darkness can dispel,” the pope said.

“Everything, within and outside of us, cries out for hope and continues to seek the closeness of God, even without knowing it,” he said during an evening prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica back on May 9, the feast of the Ascension.

Ordinary holy years, which the Church has held every 25 years since 1470, are meant to help the faithful deepen their relationship with Jesus, “the ‘door’ of salvation, whom the Church is charged to proclaim always, everywhere, and to all as ‘our hope,’” the document said. The pope can proclaim extraordinary holy years, as Pope Francis did in 2016 with the Year of Mercy. A holy year is a time of pilgrimage, prayer, repentance, and acts of mercy, based on the Old Testament tradition of a jubilee year of rest, forgiveness, and renewal.

The basis of Catholic holy year celebrations is the biblical jubilee year, “which is meant to restore access to the fruits of the earth to everyone,” the pope noted. For that reason, no holy year celebration can be authentic without involving and assisting the poor, including migrants and refugees.

“In the realization that all of us are pilgrims on this earth, which the Lord has charged us to till and keep,” Pope Francis also expressed his hope that Christians’ jubilee pilgrimage also would include time “to contemplate the beauty of creation and care for our common home.”

Within the Church, he said, people should prepare for the 2025 Holy Year with prayer and by promoting synodality and “a renewed awareness of the demands of the universal call to responsible participation by enhancing the charisms and ministries that the Holy Spirit never ceases to bestow for the building up of the one Church.”

Pope Francis wrote that hope is needed where people only care about the here and now, by those who are caught up in individualism or “who look to the future with anxiety and fear.”

“Hope is needed by God’s creation, gravely damaged and disfigured by human selfishness,” he said.

“Hope is needed by the Church, so that when she feels wearied by her exertions and burdened by her frailty, she will always remember that, as the bride of Christ, she is loved with an eternal and faithful love, called to hold high the light of the Gospel, and sent forth to bring to all the fire that Jesus definitively brought to the world,” he said.

“May the Lord, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, grant us the grace to rediscover hope,” Pope Francis prayed, and “to proclaim hope and to build hope.”

“We must fan the flame of hope that has been given us and help everyone to gain new strength and certainty by looking to the future with an open spirit, a trusting heart, and far-sighted vision,” the pope wrote in a letter formally entrusting preparations for the 2025 Jubilee to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization.

Holy Year Indulgences

For centuries, a feature of holy year celebrations has been the indulgence, which the Church describes as a remission of the temporal punishment a person is due for their sins.

“Every sin ‘leaves its mark’” even after a person has received forgiveness and absolution through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, Pope Francis wrote in the document proclaiming the Holy Year 2025. “Sin has consequences, not only outwardly in the effects of the wrong we do, but also inwardly, inasmuch as ‘every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death, in the state called purgatory,’” he wrote, quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In May, officials with the Vatican outlined ways in which the faithful could obtain an indulgence during the celebration of the Holy Year 2025, including pilgrims who pass through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica during the Jubilee, going to confession, receiving Communion, and praying for the intentions of the pope. Others who can receive an indulgence include inmates in prison and those who work to defend human life or assist migrants and refugees.

Fasting “at least for one day of the week from futile distractions” such as social media also can be a path toward a jubilee indulgence, according to norms published in May.

The norms for receiving an indulgence during the Holy Year were signed by Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, the new head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court dealing with matters of conscience and with the granting of indulgences.

The basic conditions, he wrote, are that a person is “moved by a spirit of charity,” is “purified through the Sacrament of Penance, refreshed by holy Communion,” and prays for the pope. Along with a pilgrimage, a work of mercy, or an act of penance, a Catholic “will be able to obtain from the treasury of the Church a plenary indulgence, with remission and forgiveness of all their sins, which can be applied in suffrage to the souls in purgatory.”

For those who cannot travel abroad, local bishops around the world can designate their cathedral or another church or sacred place for pilgrims to obtain the indulgence, the cardinal wrote, asking bishops to “take into account the needs of the faithful as well as the opportunity to reinforce the concept of pilgrimage with all its symbolic significance, so as to manifest the great need for conversion and reconciliation.”

People who cannot leave their residence – “especially cloistered nuns and monks, but also the elderly, the sick, prisoners, and those who, through their work in hospitals or other care facilities, provide continuous service to the sick” – can spiritually join a pilgrimage and receive the indulgence, according to the norms.

Visiting the sick or a prisoner, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or welcoming a migrant, “in a sense making a pilgrimage to Christ present in them,” can be another way to receive the indulgence, the cardinal said, adding that an indulgence could be obtained each day from such acts of mercy.

“The Jubilee Plenary Indulgence can also be obtained through initiatives that put into practice, in a concrete and generous way, the spirit of penance which is, in a sense, the soul of the Jubilee,” Cardinal De Donatis wrote, highlighting in particular abstaining on Fridays from “futile distractions” like social media or from “superfluous consumption” by not eating meat.

“Supporting works of a religious or social nature, especially in support of the defense and protection of life in all its phases,” helping a young person in difficulty or a recently arrived migrant or immigrant – anything involving “dedicating a reasonable portion of one’s free time to voluntary activities that are of service to the community or to other similar forms of personal commitment” also are paths toward an indulgence, he said.

“Despite the rule that only one plenary indulgence can be obtained per day,” Cardinal De Donatis wrote, “the faithful who have carried out an act of charity on behalf of the souls in purgatory, if they receive holy Communion a second time that day, can obtain the plenary indulgence twice on the same day,” although the second indulgence is “applicable only to the deceased.”

For more information on the Holy Year indulgence, visit the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at usccb.org/resources/Indulgence_Vatican_Bollettino.pdf.

Clare Hildebrandt is a staff writer for Today’s Catholic. Catholic News Service contributed to this report.