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Jubilee information
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A word from Monsignor Hennessy
Dear Parishioners,
His Holiness Pope Francis has also designated 2025 as a Jubilee Year, with the title of Pilgrims of Hope. Jubilee years are celebrated every twenty-five years as a period of special grace and conversion for the forgiveness of sins and the deepening of faith. You may recall the Great Jubilee of 2000 instituted by Saint Pope John Paul II and the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2015 (extraordinary since it was celebrated outside this cycle of twenty-five years).
In declaring this Jubilee Year, Our Holy Father wrote: For everyone, may the Jubilee be a moment of genuine, personal encounter with the Lord Jesus, the “door” (cf. Jn 10:7.9) of our salvation, whom the Church is charged to proclaim always, everywhere and to all as “our hope” (1 Tim 1:1). Everyone knows what it is to hope. In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future may bring. Even so, uncertainty about the future may at times give rise to conflicting feelings, ranging from confident trust to apprehensiveness, from serenity to anxiety, from firm conviction to hesitation and doubt. Often we come across people who are discouraged, pessimistic and cynical about the future, as if nothing could possibly bring them happiness. For all of us, may the Jubilee be an opportunity to be renewed in hope.
The Jubilee Year is marked by the opening of the Holy Door at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, through which countless pilgrims will pass to obtain the Plenary Indulgence, that is the special grace offered by God through the treasury of mercy entrusted to the Church. As not everyone can make such a pilgrimage, the Holy Father makes the obtaining of this special grace possible by making a pilgrimage to national and diocesan shrines, as well as to the church of our baptism.
I encourage you to visit our parish website for further information about what this Jubilee Year means and how we can all participate and be true pilgrims of hope. Additional information will also be made available as we celebrate this year so that we can truly understand its meaning and importance and benefit from the gift of the Plenary Indulgence.
In closing, I would like to share with you Pope Francis’s official prayer for the Jubilee Year, which I ask all of us to make our own:
Father in heaven,
may the faith you have given us
in your son, Jesus Christ, our brother,
and the flame of charity enkindled
in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,
reawaken in us the blessed hope
for the coming of your Kingdom.
May your grace transform us
into tireless cultivators of the seeds of the Gospel.
May those seeds transform from within both humanity and the whole cosmos
in the sure expectation
of a new heaven and a new earth,
when, with the powers of Evil vanquished,
your glory will shine eternally.
May the grace of the Jubilee
reawaken in us, Pilgrims of Hope,
a yearning for the treasures of heaven.
May that same grace spread
the joy and peace of our Redeemer
throughout the earth.
To you our God, eternally blessed,
be glory and praise for ever.
Amen
Sincerely in Christ,
Monsignor Hennessy
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