The Holy Year
Every 25 years, the Catholic Church invites its faithful to a “Jubilee Year”, also known as the Holy Year.
For centuries, our Holy Mother, the Church has been celebrating Jubilees. During these Holy Years, she opens the treasury of her Indulgences more widely to her children, so that all may draw from it the remission due to their sins. Seven hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of the first Jubilee by Pope Boniface VIII, a new Jubilee of the Catholic Church will be celebrated in the year 2025.
Roman Catholics, we will be going to Rome in August 2025, but we need to prepare for this Holy Year in the spirit and tradition of the Church: the History of the Holy Years will guide us in the footsteps of our fathers, while the spirit of the Holy Year will help us to prepare for this Jubilee Year in a truly Christian spirit.
A little history:
As early as the 11th century, Christians travelled to Rome to venerate the tombs of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, in the necropolises of the Vatican and the Via Ostiense. Over the centuries, religious fervour and people’s attachment to the See of Peter led more and more pilgrims to the Eternal City.
On 22 nd February 1300, Pope Boniface VIII travelled from the Lateran to St Peter’s Basilica, where crowds of pilgrims were waiting for him. The Sovereign Pontiff ascended to the ambo and, after the homily, issued the bull “Antiquorum habet fida relatio”, proclaiming the first Jubilee in the history of the Church. Giotto immortalised this event in a beautiful fresco, part of which can still be admired today in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran.
Declaration by Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming the HOLY YEAR:
“Boniface, bishop, in perpetual memory. It is known from the faithful report of the elders that great indulgences and remissions of sins are granted to those who visit the venerable basilica of the Prince of the Apostles. We therefore (…), having found these kinds of remissions and indulgences agreeable, confirm and approve them, and even renew and approve them by the present writing. And so that the blessed apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul may be ever more honoured by the visits which the faithful will make to their basilicas (…) We grant to all those who, truly penitent and confessed, will visit these basilicas, during this year one thousand three hundred, which began on the day of the Nativity of Our Lord (…) a full and complete remission of their sins.”
To be continued…
