Each week CatholicNews.ie highlights various elements of the upcoming Universal Jubilee 2025 year. To herald the year, on Sunday 29 December, bishops across Ireland will celebrate Mass in their dioceses for the solemn opening of the Holy Year, and thereafter events will be organised locally. In addition, specific jubilee projects will be proposed by the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
What is a Jubilee Year
A Jubilee or Holy Year is a special year of forgiveness and reconciliation, in which people are invited to deepen their relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation. The Jubilee 2025 year’s theme is ‘Pilgrims of Hope’, and Pope Francis is inviting Catholics to renew our hope and discover a vision that can “restore access to the fruits of the earth to everyone”. We are also invited to rediscover a spirituality of God’s creation in which we understand ourselves as ‘pilgrims on the earth’, rather than masters of the world.
This week Bishop Fintan Monahan reflects on Pope Franics’ upcoming book – ‘Hope Is A Light In The Night’.
“Just last week the good news was reported on Vatican News that Pope Francis has a new book coming out which focuses on the theme of the upcoming Jubilee for 2025 with the theme “Pilgrims of Hope”. The much anticipated new book will be a great resource for us all to glean some wisdom from Francis on his understanding of the great virtue of Hope. Hope is the second of the three theological virtues, the others being faith and love. The book contains a series of excerpts from homilies and speeches of Pope Francis on the theme of hope.
“The Pontiff situates the need for hope in the challenging world in which we live, with so much conflict, darkness and sadness the antithesis to hope, a world of what he calls “gloomy discouragement and ill-concealed cynicism”.
“Pope Francis writes that hope is both a gift from God and a task that must be cultivated by all Christians. The new publication collects excerpts from various speeches by the Pope on the topical theological virtue, a favourite them of his.
“Hope he tells us is both a gift and task for every Christian. It’s more than what the secular world might wish for, an ideal or a sense of optimism, e.g; hoping for fine weather or success in passing an exam. It is very real, concrete and present to us because it has been infused into our soul gifting us the pathway to eternal salvation.
“He says; “To hope, then, is to welcome this gift that God offers us every day. To hope is to savour the wonder of being loved, sought, desired by a God who has not shut Himself away in His impenetrable heavens but has made Himself flesh and blood, history and days, to share our lot.”
“He uses the phrase of the theologian Johann-Baptist Metz that hope demands being seeing a “mysticism with open eyes”… “knowing how to discern, everywhere, evidence of hope, the breaking through of the possible into the impossible, of grace where it would seem that sin has eroded all trust.” Echoes of the remark of Karl Rahner before the turn of the millennium that the modern believer would either be a mystic or nothing at all!
“As with all his writings Pope Francis suggests something very doable and practical to put flesh on what he is talking about, the virtue of hope. He encourages everyone at the end of the night, similar to the Ignatian practice of “Examen” to reflect at the end of each day, to see where the evidence of hope has been during the day just past and how I might have contributed or not to that.
““Let us train ourselves” … he says “to recognise hope. We will then be able to marvel at how much good exists in the world. And our hearts will light up with hope. We will then be able to be beacons of the future for those around us.”
“With great anticipation and joyful hope I look forward to this useful and edifying resource which is aptly entitled ‘Hope Is A Light In The Night’.”
✠ Fintan Monahan, Bishop of Killaloe
ENDS
