Jubilee 2025 Part II

Jubilee Year 2025--Pilgrims of Hope--Part 2
 
When a pope prepares an ordinary Jubilee year, he constructs a Bull of Induction, the official announcement, that outlines his intention for the Church during the special year of prayer. Pope Francis has made HOPE the over-arching theme of this year’s Jubilee. This was emphasized in the opening words of the Bull - Hope does not disappoint. “In the course of the year,” Pope Francis wrote, “every effort should be made to enable the People of God to participate fully in its proclamation of hope in God’s grace and in the signs that attest to their efficacy.”  Pope Francis addresses that Truth that rests on all hearts and what he prays will be strengthened in this Holy Year. “Everyone knows what it is to hope. In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future will bring.”

This should ring true for all of us as we, Catholics, brothers and sisters of Christ, are known as a People of Hope. Our prayer rings out at every Mass when we proclaim that “we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior.” The pope prays for all of us that during the Holy Year, “the light of the Christian hope might illumine every man and woman as a message of God’s love addressed to all” and that “the Church might bear faithful witness to this message in every part of the world.” 

In the Pope’s call to us to live in a social covenant to support and foster hope, he desires peace in a world marked by more and more violence and conflict, and hope for those who in fear or selfishness have lost the desire to have children. The Pope also recalls the tradition of the Jubilee of offering amnesty or pardon of prisoners; praying that they can be offered a sign “to look to the future with hope and a renewed sense of confidence.” In the Bull of Indiction that formally proclaimed the Jubilee Year of 2025, Pope Francis called for governments to implement “forms of amnesty or pardon,” asking that prisoners be treated with the rights and dignity of all those created and loved by God, and pleading for the abolition of the death penalty. “In the spirit of the Ordinary Jubilee of the 2025, declared by His Holiness,” on January 14, the government of Cuba announced that 553 prisoners would be released.

Pope Francis considers all of those in need to have an offering of hope - the sick, the young, the elderly, migrants and the poor. He calls on Christians to live a life in keeping with their faith - to witness and accept the invitation to “Hope in the Lord.”

Let us embrace this Jubilee year in the spirit that has Pope Francis exclaiming, “Let us even now be drawn to this hope! May the power of hope fill our days, as we await with confidence the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and glory, now and forever.

Peace,
Cathy Pressimone
Parish Life Coordinator
[email protected]