Jubilee 2025: Bearing witness to hope is a necessity, says Mgr Fisichella

Interview conducted by Marie Duhamel – Vatican City

5:29 p.m. this Thursday evening, the Pope presented the Bull of Indiction to the archpriests of the papal basilicas. A reading was given in Saint Peter’s Basilica before the celebration of Second Vespers, on the solemnity of the Ascension. The ordinary jubilee of 2025 is thus officially proclaimed.

From the opening of the Holy Door of the first of the major basilicas on December 24 to its closing on January 6, 2026, the city of Saints Peter and Paul expects to welcome 32 million people, including at least 100,000 faithful on foot. , of the “pilgrims of hope“.

Mgr Rino Fisichella, pro-prefect of the dicastery for Evangelization, returns to the impetus that the Holy Father wishes to give to this 2025 jubilee and which is evidenced by the title of this bull of indiction, “Spes non confusionit”.

In his Bull of Indiction, the Pope invites us to resuscitate this theological virtue of Hope. Why does Francis see the need for this?

The world is in a context of violence, in a context of war. How many times the Pope has spoken of a fragmented third world war. And how many times have we experienced evil in our daily lives. The witness of Christian hope is a necessity. The Church always speaks of faith and charity, but we have forgotten hope. The Jubilee Year becomes the opportunity, the path to put the Resurrection of Christ at the center. We cannot forget that the life of the Church always remains the announcement of the dead and risen Christ.

How does the Pope propose to make this jubilee time of remission of sins a time of learning to bear witness to hope?

The deepest meaning of the jubilee always remains the experience of God’s forgiveness and mercy, and this will become even more important in the face of the announcement of hope. During the jubilee, we not only have the hope of receiving God’s forgiveness. Hope becomes a certainty, a concrete experience with which each of us can touch God’s mercy and forgiveness.

In his bull of indiction, the Holy Father writes that it is not enough to announce hope, it is also necessary to give concrete signs of this Resurrection, that is to say, to protect the dignity of each person. , promote the person, do everything to give everyone a future. This really seems to me to be a novelty that must be highlighted: the announcement must be supported by the commitment of Christians to create new signs of hope.

“May the jubilee be an opportunity for everyone to rekindle hope.” The Pope, in his bull of indiction, does not address only the faithful. Why, and to say what?

The Bubble speaks of a call to hope. This is a call that is for each and everyone, for those who work every day to be peacemakers and for those who are responsible for peace at the government (political) level. The Holy Father is not afraid to make appeals which – we sincerely hope – can be listened to, heard and put into practice. The Pope speaks, for example, of the different forms by which prisoners can be amnestied. It is also very interesting that the Holy Father had the desire to open a holy door in a prison. It is also necessary to underline the appeal launched to the bishops so that they are living witnesses committed against the death penalty. Capital punishment can no longer be defended in our cultural context. The Pope also calls on the richest governments to look at the poverty of a third country, but also at the people who suffer and die from hunger, and at all the financial resources which are devoted to war. This is really the ancient call of the Bible in the book of Leviticus in chapter 25 when we talk about the first jubilee, but in our society, in our culture, in the world that we inhabit.

In his bull, the Pope insists on the pilgrimage, which characterizes the jubilee years. It offers the experience of silence, of essentiality, says François. What importance does this path of effort have for the pilgrims of hope that Catholics are therefore called to be, or in any case to become?

The pilgrimage is of course one of the most important signs of the beginning of the Jubilee experience. But the pilgrimage also symbolizes the life of each of us. We are experiencing a pilgrimage. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel published the day after the Second War Homo Viator, the pilgrim man. This is the path to discovering again the importance of faith in our life. We cannot forget that the whole world today lives surrounded in a new culture, which tells us about technologies and artificial intelligence. Young people aged 25 live with its language and with the resulting behaviors. It seems that faith no longer has a very important place in people’s lives, because technology seems to give the hopes – in the plural – that we desire, but we must move from hopes to hope, and that comes with a faith which becomes stronger every day and through the witness of an ever more coherent charity.

How can we live the Jubilee in the light of the synodal journey undertaken by the Church?

Jubilee and synodality are going in the same direction, they are on the move. The synodal journey, which will experience another privileged moment next October at the Vatican, is the approach of the entire Church towards a life of conversion. Let us not forget that the synodal path is always a path of evangelization. Because its goal is, and still remains, to define how we can be credible witnesses when the Gospel is announced. The Church cannot forget its nature and the responsibility received from Christ to proclaim the Gospel to everyone in today’s world. The synodal path becomes the method for announcing the Gospel today and the jubilees become a capacity and a modality for announcing the Gospel of hope.

In 2025, by coincidence of the calendar, Christians will celebrate Easter on the same day; will also be the 1700th anniversary of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. Can the Jubilee be an opportunity for a turning point for Christian unity?

It will provide a real opportunity for all believers to see the Church when it was one. Even if there were at the same time diatribes, struggles, confrontations, the Council of Nicaea speaks to us of unity. It is a council which was brought together, for the first time, for the unity of the whole Church. And we must remember that there is still a very concrete sign in testifying. You know that for the first time, the profession of faith written at Nicaea does not say “I believe”, as was customary until then, but says “we believe”. The text of the Nicene profession of faith speaks in the plural with the “We» ecclesial. I think that the Jubilee will allow all Christian believers to make an effort to rediscover this unity and this consciousness of being “We“.

In Rome several “journeys of faith» will be offered to pilgrims and a calendar of celebrations and events has also been established by the Vatican which will offer jubilees dedicated to prisoners, grandparents or communicants, but how the faithful who will not be able to make the trip will they be able to experience the Jubilee?

If we expect a volume of around 32 million people in Rome, the majority of the faithful will remain in their church. Concerning them, I would say that the Bull of the Holy Father is very clear. Pope Francis writes that the jubilee must also be experienced in local churches. And it is for this reason that the bishops are invited to live the jubilee of hope in the solemnity of prayer, the solemnity of the opening of the jubilee year in their cathedral, but also by living the different experiences organized in Rome with the Holy Father. They can be experienced in the dioceses. I am thinking, for example, of the day of the poor, of the jubilee of families, of that of prisoners, of the jubilee of the sick. I hope that all the events on the calendar can be experienced in the dioceses.