Anno Domini 2025 is a Jubilee Year, proclaimed to be so by His Holiness, Pope Francis in his May 9, 2024 Bull of Intinction, Spes Non Confudit. It began on Christmas Eve, 2024, and will conclude on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2026.
Here is the Holy Father’s Decree on the Granting of Indulgence during the Ordinary Jubilee Year 2025, and here is a succinct summary of how you can obtain the indulgences — for which sacramental confession and absolution are absolutely necessary, as indulgences are the mitigation of temporal punishment due to sin, not the forgiveness of sin. The Holy Father has made the Jubilee indulgence possible without having to make the pilgrimage to Rome. The faithful are without excuse if they fail to take advantage of the copious opportunities this year brings.
Faithful Catholics, who frequently have justified grievances with the way the Church is being run by the clergy of all ranks, should relish this opportunity to avail themselves of the spiritual treasures entrusted to the Supreme Pontiff by Our Lord.
Remember that the great Catholic poet, Dante, who had serious grievances with Pope Boniface VIII (it’s complicated — really complicated), still immortalized that great pope’s Jubilee of 1300 in his Divine Comedy. While Dante scholars argue over whether Alighieri himself made the pilgrimage, it is certain that he knew quite a bit about it. He also praised the good spiritual effects of the Roman pilgrimage in the Divina Commedia. (A brief and well-written précis of Dante and the Jubilee Year of 1300 may be read in the article, “The Pilgrim’s Way,” by Jeanetta R. Chrystie.)
Dante’s exile from Florence and death sentence came at the hands of Pope Boniface’s political allies. Even so, as a Catholic, the great poet could look past the man, Boniface, and see a genuine spiritual good in the Jubilee Year indulgence. Yes, for the record, the author of the Purgatorio believed not only in Purgatory but also in the power of the pope to grant indulgences which could benefit both the living and the dead (cf. Canto II of the Purgatorio, wherein Dante’s friend, the musician, Casella, credits his ability to begin his penance in Purgatory to the indulgence granted by Pope Boniface VIII during the Jubilee of 1300). It is an aside, but it should also be recalled that even Martin Luther, at the time he wrote the 95 Theses, believed in both Purgatory and indulgences!
If we would avail ourselves of the indulgence of the Jubilee Year, we should also plunge into its spirit. The very principles upon which the Jubilee and its indulgence are based are essentially spiritual, as they concern exclusively spiritual goods and depend upon the spiritual powers granted to the Church by its divine Founder — and upon our own compunction of heart and good-willed carrying out of inner conversion as well as the external acts associated with the indulgence.
Pope Leo XIII reminds us of this in his promulgation of the Jubilee of 1900:
In the speech and the tradition of our fathers it [“the Great Jubilee”] has come to be known as the Holy Year, and the name is justified both by the extraordinary sacred ceremonies with which it is accustomed to be celebrated, and especially by the more abundant help which it affords for the correction of morals, and for that renewal of mind and heart which leads to holiness. [Emphasis mine. The Latin original is here: Properante ad Exitum Saeculo; an English translation is here, where one may also find a robust defense of the character of Pope Boniface VIII.]
One way that we might plunge more deeply into the spirit of the Christian Jubilee Year is to look at its Old-Testament antecedent, which, unlike our Christian observance, was of direct, divine foundation. It is promulgated in the directives given by God to Moses and recorded in Leviticus 25.
We are informed by the old Catholic Encyclopedia that the Jubilee Year, “contains three main enactments”:
- “rest of the soil;
- “reversion of landed property to its original owner, who had been driven by poverty to sell it; and
- “the freeing or manumission of those Israelites who, through poverty or otherwise, had become the slaves of their brethren.”
In the Christian institution of the Jubilee Year, these essentially temporal benefits were spiritualized in the remission of temporal punishment due to sin and in the consequent encouragement of the faithful to avail themselves of sacramental absolution — the faculties of which to grant are often more generously extended to priests in such years (as they are now).
Read carefully the closing paragraphs of the Catholic Encyclopedia article. They contain many wonderful lessons we can “baptize” as Catholics. For ease of reading, I will set off this lengthy quote by horizontal lines, for your convenience adding links to the scriptural references cited:
The design of the Jubilee year is that those of the people of God who, through poverty or other adverse circumstances, had forfeited their personal liberty or property to their fellow brethren, should have their debts forgiven by their co-religionists every half century, on the great day of atonement, and be restored to their families and inheritance as freely and fully as God on that very day forgave the debts of his people and restored them to perfect fellowship with himself, so that the whole community, having forgiven each other and being forgiven by God, might return to the original order which had been disturbed in the lapse of time, and being freed from the bondage of one another, might unreservedly be the servants of him who is their redeemer.
The aim of the jubilee, therefore, is to preserve unimpaired the essential character of the theocracy, to the end that there be no poor among the people of God (Deut. xv, 4). Hence God, who redeemed Israel from the bondage of Egypt to be his peculiar people, and allotted to them the promised land, will not suffer any one to usurp his title as Lord over those whom he owns as his own. It is the idea of grace for all the suffering children of man, bringing freedom to the captive and rest to the weary as well as to the earth, which made the year of jubilee the symbol of the Messianic year of grace (Isaiah 61:2), when all the conflicts in the universe shall be restored to their original harmony, and when not only we, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, but the whole creation, which groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now, shall be restored into the glorious liberty of the sons of God (comp. Isaiah 61:1-3; Luke 4:21; Romans 8:18-23; Hebrews 4:9).
The importance of this institution will be apparent if it is considered what moral and social advantages would accrue to the community from the sacred observance of it.
- It would prevent the accumulation of land on the part of a few to the detriment of the community at large.
- It would render it impossible for any one to be born to absolute poverty, since every one had his hereditary land.
- It would preclude those inequalities which are produced by extremes of riches and poverty, and which make one man domineer over another.
- It would utterly do away with slavery.
- It would afford a fresh opportunity to those who were reduced by adverse circumstances to begin again their career of industry, in the patrimony which they had temporarily forfeited.
- It would periodically rectify the disorders which creep into the state in the course of time, preclude the division of the people into nobles and plebeians, and preserve the theocracy inviolate.
The Jubilee observance took place every fifty years, on the year following a sabbath of sabbath years. It was to commence with the sounding of the ram’s horn (whence comes the word, jubilee) on “the seventh month, the tenth day of the month” (Lev. 25:9). As stipulated two chapters earlier, this is none other than the annual Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), when men were to offer special sacrifices for their sins in order to restore their wounded relationship with God.
This means that the regeneration of the land (which also “groaneth and travaileth in pain” — Rom. 8:22) and the restoration of man’s wounded relationship with his neighbor enjoined by the Jubilee, coincided with the restoration of his wounded relationship with God on the Day of Atonement. There was to be, then, a concomitant restoration of both the vertical and horizontal orders that were wounded by the disorder of sin. This makes sense when we consider that men’s relationships with God and each other were tightly bound up in the Jewish theocracy. The religion was, after all, social in character.
This is all easily baptized when we bear in mind that the essential two-fold core of the Mosaic Law, which summarized the two tablets of the decalogue in the love of God and the love of neighbor, was both retained and elevated in the New Law of the Gospel. For us Christians, too, our relationships with God and each other are tightly bound up. Ours, too, is a social religion; the Church is a “perfect society.”
As the Beloved Disciple put it:
If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not. And this commandment we have from God, that he, who loveth God, love also his brother. [1 John 4:20-21]
As we go about the observance of the Jubilee Year, we can do what lies in us to be reconciled to the two-fold object of our love: God and neighbor. This is so easy to say, but it embraces so much!
Now is a good time to reconcile with fallen-away friends and family members, to restore the relationships wounded by our sins of pride and selfishness, etc. — and to forgive our enemies.
If we are justly indignant at the doctrinal and moral corruption in the Church, this is Jubilee Year affords us wonderful opportunities to get our “Christian revenge” on those we blame, heaping coals of fire on their heads by ourselves becoming holy. Such vengeance is commended by the Apostle.
