By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Every 25 years, the Church celebrates a Jubilee Year to commemorate that God became flesh of our flesh and was born a child. He grew up in a holy and loving family. He came to reconcile us to Himself through His self-giving, life-giving sacrifice on the Cross and His rising to new Life for our salvation and the salvation of the whole world.
The Jubilee Year will conclude in Rome on the solemnity of the Epiphany, and outside of Rome a week earlier on the Sunday we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family.
This Jubilee marked the 2,025th anniversary of the Incarnation, and its purpose was to strengthen our faith, to recognize Christ in our midst, so that, our lives are transformed, we may be pilgrims of hope. Many made pilgrimages to Rome, and many more made local pilgrimages to designated shrines and churches in their own dioceses.
Pilgrims are not wanderers with no particular place to go. Pilgrims are people with a destination. They know where they are going, and therefore, they know who they are.
As Catholics, we call ourselves a “pilgrim people” because we are just “passing through” this “vale of tears;” and we do hope to “pass over” with Jesus into the Kingdom of His Father. A “pilgrimage” is a way of reminding us of this: We journey to holy sites as a way of reminding ourselves that life is a journey whose destination is God in the Kingdom of Heaven, where our hope in Jesus Christ will be vindicated. For we walk by faith, confident that Jesus Christ is the hope that will not disappoint.
Perhaps because of the ascendant secularism of our times, perhaps because of the mediocre witness or even counter-witness of too many Christians, many people today have lost hope — or perhaps they never had it in the first place.
For many, politics has become a “replacement religion,” that attempts (unsuccessfully) to fill a void for belonging, moral clarity, and meaning that once was the role of religion in society. And aren’t the various “woke” ideologies today substitute religions, peddling an ersatz or false hope that will ultimately disappoint their adherents, as last century’s false religions of Marxism and Fascism disappointed theirs?
A world without God is a world without hope; without hope, there is no future. Many of the social ills of our day are symptomatic of this loss or lack of hope. For example, lives lost through suicide or through addictions are referred to as “deaths of despair.” For one who has hope does not kill himself, nor does she poison herself with drugs. While not as serious in this country as in Europe or in China, we are on the cusp of experiencing a demographic winter as birth rates continue to drop. Children are, of course, our future. But without hope, there is no future. Women who abort their babies in their wombs obviously do not see a future of hope for themselves and their babies, and young people put off marriage and having children because such commitments require a belief in a future of hope.
As noted, in dioceses outside of Rome, the Jubilee Year will conclude on the feast of the Holy Family, the Sunday after Christmas. As pilgrims of hope, we also need to remember that hope is nurtured in the domestic Church, the Church in the home: the family.
Whether directly related to the activities of the Jubilee Year or not, many have observed an upsurge in interest in faith, especially among young people. Secularism, with its cold rationalism and materialism, has led to disenchantment and has led many to rediscover in the Church a new sense of wonder in her celebrations of the Sacred Mysteries and her Sacramental life.
So, this Jubilee Year, which began in Rome on Christmas Eve last year and will end with the feast of the Epiphany in 2026, could not have come soon enough. A world without God is a world without hope; without hope, there is no future.
Jubilee 2025 has called each one of us to spiritual renewal and to the transformation of the world by reintroducing hope to the world.
The Archdiocese of Miami will celebrate the concluding Mass of the Jubilee Year on Saturday, Dec. 27, at St. Mary Cathedral at the 5:30 p.m. Vigil Mass.
