Hope Does Not Disappoint: The Church’s Jubilee Year of 2025

On May 9, 2024, the late Pope Francis issued Spes Non Confundit (SNC) — “Hope Does Not Disappoint” — the “Bull of Indiction” (proclamation) of the Ordinary Jubilee Year of 2025. At St. Peter’s Basilica the following Christmas Eve, the pope passed through the “Holy Door” that is opened only during a Jubilee Year and is otherwise kept sealed. That ceremony was repeated in succeeding weeks at the other three Papal Basilicas in Rome: St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major and St. Paul-Outside-the-Walls. The Vatican, and the Church across the globe, is now fully engaged in the celebration of the Jubilee. 

So, what, exactly, is a Jubilee? The concept goes back a very long way, to precepts of the Mosaic Law recorded in the Book of Leviticus. At 25:8-10, we read: 

"You shall count seven weeks of years .... Then, on the tenth day of the seventh month ... the ram’s horn (yobel) blast shall resound throughout your land .... You shall treat this fiftieth year as sacred."

This passage is followed by a series of elaborate instructions for the return of ancestral land, fields being left fallow, redemption from servitude, settling of debts and celebration. Scholars debate when, if ever, such provisions were actually carried out. Yet, based on Leviticus’ proclamation, the symbol of a “year of favor from the Lord” (Isaiah 61:2) has been firmly established in both Jewish and Christian imaginations for millennia. It echoes in the words of the Prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. Christians are aware of it in Jesus’ own proclamation at the beginning of his public ministry, quoting words from Isaiah 61:1: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Luke 4:18). American Christians and Jews can see Leviticus 25:10 engraved around the top of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, in the King James translation: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” 

“Jubilee” was a particularly poignant image for enslaved Black Americans before the Civil War and can be encountered in Black spirituals sung in churches and various venues to this very day. 

Specifically, Christian Jubilee years date back to the year 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII declared the first one with an invitation to all Christians to come to Rome as pilgrims and to receive God’s merciful pardon of their sins. Succeeding pontiffs proclaimed Jubilees at various intervals until 1475, when the 25-year pattern took hold. There has been a Jubilee Year observed every 25 years since that time, with the exceptions of 1800 and 1850 (when Napoleonic ambitions and Italian nationalist turmoil interfered). This is what is meant by the designation of 2025 as an “ordinary” Jubilee Year. (There are also “extraordinary” Jubilees, proclaimed at the decision of particular popes, such as the “Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy” observed at the call of Pope Francis in 2016.)

Although the short answer for “Why now?” is simply, “It was time,” Pope Francis included a number of points in his explanation, in SNC, of conditions that he believed make this also “the right time” for a Jubilee celebration – the 1700th anniversaries of the construction of the Cathedral of St. John Lateran and of the Council of Nicaea and its Trinitarian creed; the “providential” coincidence of a common date for Eastern Orthodox and Western celebrations of Easter on April 20, 2025; and remote preparations for the “Extraordinary Jubilee of Redemption” in 2033, to celebrate the 2000th year since Christ’s Resurrection. But Pope Francis invested most of his words in the theme of hope chosen specially for this Ordinary Jubilee of 2025. 

The document’s title, “Hope Does Not Disappoint,” comes from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 5:1-5, where the Apostle to the Nations writes: 

"Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ ... and we boast in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."

The purpose of the Jubilee, wrote Pope Francis, is “to invite everyone to an intense experience of the love of God that awakens in hearts the sure hope of salvation in Christ (SNC 6).” Invoking the ancient practice of religious pilgrimage – an embodiment of “our human quest for meaning (SNC 5),” he wrote, “We are about to make a pilgrimage marked by great events, in which the grace of God precedes and accompanies his people as they press forward firm in faith, active in charity and steadfast in hope (SNC 6).”

What are these “great events”? Throughout 2025, upwards of 30 million people are expected to visit Rome for the Jubilee, coming as individuals, families, tours and pilgrimage groups, on their own timing or in response to invitations to specific categories of Catholics – catechists, deacons, teachers, young people, people with disabilities, health care workers and many others. Some gatherings will be focused on particular themes (justice or care for the earth, for example), or timed to coincide with other special events, such as the solemn conclusion of the year with the closing of the Holy Doors at St. Peter’s on Epiphany, Jan. 6, 2026.

Most of these pilgrims will participate in the rituals that have become associated with the Jubilee over the centuries. They will seek to visit all four papal basilicas in Rome to enter each one through its own “Holy Door.” Inside, they will offer simple prayers for the Church, for the pope’s special intentions, for the world, and for themselves, demonstrating their sincere desire for God’s mercy and healing in their lives. They will confess their sins, receive absolution in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and resolve to perform acts of mercy and charity toward others. Attending Mass and receiving the Eucharist (Holy Communion) after this reconciliation will complete the traditional conditions for what is known as the “Plenary Indulgence.”

Without getting caught up in a full explanation of the much-contested Catholic doctrine of indulgences, we can note with Pope Francis that: “the indulgence is a way of discovering the unlimited nature of God’s mercy. Not by chance, for the ancients, the terms ‘mercy’ and ‘indulgence’ were interchangeable, as expressions of the fullness of God’s forgiveness, which knows no bounds (SNC 23).”

The conditions for receiving the indulgence can also be fulfilled through participation in local events and celebrations in dioceses throughout the world during the Holy Year. Through this custom, the Church offers assurance that not only are one’s sins forgiven by God, but full healing for the lingering effects of those sins is also available from God’s abundant grace.

The pope is far from imagining isolated individuals desperately pleading with God for a lessening of their punishment and imagining that this is the Christian’s source of “hope.” Rather, the pope paints a vivid picture of a community of faith – the whole Church as the Body of Christ – sharing the material and spiritual gifts of God with the intention of being hope for one another. Ultimately, this is the real motivation for this Holy Year, the Ordinary Jubilee of 2025:

“Surely we need to ‘abound in hope,’ so that we may bear credible and attractive witness to the faith and love that dwell in our hearts; that our faith may be joyful and our charity enthusiastic; and that each of us may be able to offer a smile, a small gesture of friendship, a kind look, a ready ear, a good deed, in the knowledge that, in the Spirit of Jesus, these can become, for those who receive them, rich seeds of hope” (SNC 18).”

Fr. Clark is an associate professor of religious studies at Holy Cross.