The Eternal City has opened its gates to an estimated 35 million pilgrims for the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope, which follows 2024’s Year of Prayer, declared by Pope Francis as a preparatory period for personal meditations on God and the Catholic vocation.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, a Holy Year, or Jubilee, is a great religious event which occurs every 25 years. It is a year of forgiveness of sins and also the punishment due to sin. It is a year of reconciliation between adversaries, of conversion and receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is consequently a year of solidarity, hope, justice, commitment to serve God with joy and in peace with our brothers and sisters. It is, above all, the year of Christ, who brings life and grace to humanity.
Deep down in the Holy Father’s desire in dedicating this Jubilee to the theme ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ we perceive a vision of a favourable occasion to reflect on this fundamental and decisive Christian virtue. This is more so in the very challenging times we are witnessing due to rapid climate change, together with the practically third world war being fought “piecemeal” that is unfolding before our eyes, that can lead us to assume attitudes of gloomy discouragement and ill-concealed cynicism.
Francis says that hope, on the other hand, is a gift offered to us by God and a task for every Christian.
A light in the night
In the introduction to his new book, Hope Is A Light In The Night, which collects excerpts from various speeches of his on the theological virtue of hope, the Holy Father writes:
“Hoping, in fact, is not a mere act of optimism, like when we sometimes hope to pass an exam at university (‘Let’s hope we make it’) or when we hope for good weather for the trip out of town on a Sunday in the spring (‘Let’s hope for good weather”). No, hoping is waiting for something that has already been given to us: salvation in God’s eternal and infinite love.
“That love, that salvation that gives flavour to our lives and that constitutes the hinge on which the world remains standing, despite all the wickedness and nefariousness caused by our sins as men and women. To hope, then, is to welcome this gift that God offers us every day. To hope is to savour the wonder of being loved, sought, desired by a God who has not shut Himself away in His impenetrable heavens but has made Himself flesh and blood, history and days, to share our lot.”
Pope Francis sees hope also as a task that Christians have a duty to cultivate and put to good use for the sake of all their brothers and sisters. He refers to the task to remain faithful to the gift received, as rightly pointed out by Madeleine Delbrêl, a 20th-century French woman who was able to bring the Gospel to the geographical and existential peripheries of mid-century Paris, marked by de-Christianisation.
The Jubilee is a year of solidarity, hope, justice, commitment to serve God with joy and in peace with our brothers and sisters- Charles Buttigieg
Delbrêl wrote: “The place that Christian hope assigns us is that narrow ridge, that borderline at which our vocation requires that we choose, every day and every hour, to be faithful to God’s faithfulness to us.”
The Holy Father reminds us: “God is faithful to us; our task is to respond to this faithfulness. But take care: it is not we who generate this faithfulness; it is a gift from God that works in us if we allow ourselves to be moulded by His power of love, the Holy Spirit who acts as a breath of inspiration in our hearts. It is up to us, then, to invoke this gift: ‘Lord, grant me to be faithful to you in hope!’”
Explaining further why hope is a gift from God and a task for Christians, Francis says that to live hope requires a “mysticism with open eyes”, as the great theologian Johann-Baptist Metz called it: knowing how to discern, everywhere, evidence of hope, the breaking through of the possible into the impossible, of grace where it would seem that sin has eroded all trust.
Witnesses of hope
The Holy Father recalls an opportunity he had some time ago to dialogue with two exceptional witnesses of hope, two fathers: one Israeli, Rami; one Palestinian, Bassam. Both lost daughters in the conflict that has bloodied the Holy Land for too many decades now. But, nonetheless, in the name of their pain, the suffering they felt at the death of their two little daughters – Smadar and Abir – they have become friends, indeed brothers: they live forgiveness and reconciliation as a concrete, prophetic and authentic gesture.
“Meeting them gave me so much, so much hope,” wrote Francis. “Their friendship and brotherhood taught me it is possible that hatred, concretely, may not have the last word. The reconciliation they experience as individuals, a prophecy of a larger and broader reconciliation, is an invincible sign of hope. And hope opens us to unimaginable horizons.”
The pope is inviting one and all to make a simple but concrete gesture:
“In the evening, before going to bed, as you’re thinking over the events you have lived through and the encounters you have had, go in search of a sign of hope in the day just gone by. A smile from someone you didn’t expect, an act of gratuitousness observed at school, a kind act encountered in the workplace, a gesture of help, even a small one: hope is indeed a ‘childlike virtue’, as Charles Péguy wrote. And we need to go back to being like children, with their sense of wonder, to encounter the world, to know it, and to appreciate it.
“Let us train ourselves to recognise hope. We will then be able to marvel at how much good exists in the world. And our hearts will light up with hope. We will then be able to be beacons of the future for those around us.”
Charles Buttigieg is a former refugee commissioner.