The upcoming year, 2025, marks a Holy Year, a year of the Jubilee Indulgence. This is a beautiful and very special observance which every Catholic should take to heart.
The roots of this observance go back to Old Testament times when by the command of God, on every 50th year, properties and even personal liberty were restored to their original possessor, for it would have been unfitting for anyone among the Chosen People – redeemed by God Himself out of the bondage of Egypt – to be despoiled of their ancestral holdings or permanently reduced to servitude.
What, then, about the Christian People, redeemed and set apart not by figures but by the Blood of Jesus Christ, the true Lamb of God? The Year of Jubilee could not but become a Christian tradition also.
Our manner of observing the Jubilee is different, of course, than it was under the Mosaic Law. Rather than 50-year intervals, it was determined in medieval times to hold a Jubilee every 33 years, the length of Christ’s lifetime upon earth, making it possible for a greater number of the faithful to partake in the observance at least once in their own lifetime. Later, in about 1470, the interval between Jubilee Years was made to be 25 years (beginning in 1475), coinciding as often as not with the original Pentecostal symbolism of 50 years.
The main ceremony of the Christian Jubilee is the unwalling of the “Holy Doors” in each of the four ancient basilicas in Rome. On Christmas Eve before the beginning of the Jubilee Year, the Pope presides over the removal of the brick wall obstructing the Holy Doors in St. Peter’s Basilica. At the same time, Cardinal legates preside over similar ceremonies at St. Mary Major, the Lateran, and St. Paul Outside the Walls. At the close of the Jubilee year, the Doors are walled up again. (This year, the opening ceremony is scheduled for December 24, 2024 at 7 p.m. in Rome, which is 1 p.m. EST.)
The significance of these Holy Doors is rich, tying together the Mosaic Jubilee with that of its Christian fulfillment. In the Jewish Jubilee Year, lands reverted to their former owners, debts were forgiven, and Hebrew slaves were set free, restoring absent members to their proper households. In this way, the Jewish theocracy was regularly restored as God had established it when He allotted to the Twelve Tribes of Israel their respective portions in the Promised Land. There were to be no permanently dispossessed or enslaved members of God’s Chosen People, no rival claimants to God’s title of Lord over those whom He had redeemed. Just as He had forgiven their debts and restored them to His friendship, they too were to forgive each other and return to that original order in which each stood unreservedly in His service.
We Christians have a far greater inheritance in the Life of Grace won for us by Jesus Christ than the Hebrew nation had in its plots of land in Palestine. The Jubilee is for us, then, a year of grace symbolic of that Messianic Year of Grace (Christ’s reign throughout eternity) prophesied by Isaiah (61:2). Atoning for our sins by His suffering and Death, Our Lord has opened for us the “gates” of divine Justice which had been shut against us since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Paradise. Our own burden of doing penance is likewise a sort of “doorway” to a restored friendship with God. The Church, then, grants a plenary indulgence (a full remission of the temporal punishment due to sins already absolved) to all of Her children who go on pilgrimage to Rome as penitents to venerate the tombs of the Apostles and the See of Peter. These penitents confess, receive Holy Communion, and pray for the intentions of the Holy Father while visiting each of the four great basilicas of Rome, devoutly passing through the Holy Doors as they enter.
The Jubilee Year is thus a call for the faithful throughout the world to recognize the central role of Rome in our lives as Catholics, sojourners as we are in this land of exile. And this fact leads us directly to consider the ramifications of the Message of Fatima for our time. As if we needed some new indication of this connection, the Vatican recently issued an “anime”-inspired set of cartoon mascots for the Jubilee Year … clad in rainbow colors, bearing names with a thinly veiled luciferian reference (Luce + Fe), and created by an avidly pro-“LGBT” artist who also produces degenerate sexual products, including items with demonic themes.
To be clear, the present Holy Year 2025 is a reminder to us of how we should mourn the degree to which the Church has been reduced in our time, and how fervently we should beg God to deliver us from the present persecutions of the Church. Those persecutions, Our Lady told us at Fatima, have come as a punishment for the sins of the world. Our deliverance, She also told us, can come only by means of devotion to Her Immaculate Heart, through the Consecration of Russia as requested by Our Lady of Fatima and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays.