Francis opens the Jubilee: ‘There is hope for each of us too’

Crossing the Holy Door of St Peter's Basilica in his wheelchair, on Christmas Eve, the pope launched the Holy Year 2025. "For Christian hope is not a cinematic “happy ending” which we passively await: it is the promise of the Lord to be welcomed here and now. May a new time be opened for the Earth disfigured by the logic of profit, for the poorest countries burdened by unjust debts, for the prisoners of old and new slavery’.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - ‘This is the night when God says to each one: there is hope for you too, there is hope for each one of us, because God forgives everything’. With these words Pope Francis this evening accompanied the opening of the Holy Door of St Peter's Basilica, the great sign of the Jubilee Year 2025 that the Catholic Church is inaugurating this Christmas.

An extraordinary time of grace and mercy, which has marked the path of Catholic communities around the world every 25 years since 1300, and which will see millions of pilgrims converge on Rome until 6 January 2026. A time during which Pope Francis invites us to focus on perhaps the most difficult virtue in our time, asking everyone to become ‘pilgrims of hope’.

But this hope does not rest on our own strength. It springs from the event that Christmas night announces: ‘God has descended among us to raise us up and bring us back into the Father's embrace’.

Francis himself showed this by passing through the Holy Door of St Peter's in a wheelchair, in an image of fragility as powerful as that of 2015 in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, when he inaugurated another Holy Year in a land bloodied by war during the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy.

Moreover, in an eloquent image of the synodal Church, in this first act of the Jubilee 2025 the pontiff chose to pass through the Holy Door immediately after him, before the long procession of cardinals and bishops, 54 representatives of God's people from every continent, in their traditional dress: among them also a Chinese family and another Iranian, while one of the prayers of the faithful - later during the celebration - was read in Vietnamese.

A world united around the God who became a Child, which however does not hide the dramas of today's wars. Even on the night of the Jubilee, Pope Francis wanted to mention the horror of ‘children being machine-gunned and bombs on schools and hospitals’.

In St Peter's basilica, the ‘mystery of Love’ was prayed in Arabic so that it might ‘offer its peace to the whole world, convert the workers of iniquity, comfort the suffering of the weak’.

Francis explained in his homily: ‘Christian hope is not a happy ending to be passively awaited: it is the Lord's promise to be welcomed here and now, in this land that suffers and groans’.

‘Hope,’ he added, ’ahope is not a cinematic “happy ending” which we passively await, but rather, a promise, the Lord’s promise, to be welcomed here and now in our world of suffering and sighs. It is a summons not to tarry, to be kept back by our old habits, or to wallow in mediocrity or laziness;  hope does not accept the faux prudence of those who refuse to get involved for fear of making mistakes, or of those who think only of themselves. Hope is incompatible with the detachment of those who refuse to speak out against evil and the injustices perpetrated at the expense of the poor. Christian hope, on the other hand, while inviting us to wait patiently for the Kingdom to grow and spread, also requires of us, even now, to be bold, responsible, and not only that but also compassionate, in our anticipation of the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise. ’.

The invitation of the Jubilee to rediscover the joy of the encounter with the Lord is not only a call to spiritual renewal. ‘It commits us to the transformation of the world,’ said the Pontiff, ’so that this may truly become a Jubilee time: may it become so for our Mother Earth, disfigured by the logic of profit; may it become so for the poorest countries, burdened by unjust debts; may it become so for all those who are prisoners of old and new slavery.

Hence the invitation addressed to each one ‘to bring hope to the weary who have no strength to carry on, the lonely oppressed by the bitterness of failure, and all those who are broken-hearted. To bring hope to the interminable, dreary days of prisoners, to the cold and dismal lodgings of the poor, and to all those places desecrated by war and violence. To bring hope there, to sow hope there’. The Jubilee opens ‘so that all may be given the hope of the Gospel, the hope of love, the hope of forgiveness’.

Francis concluded, “Dear sister, dear brother, on this night the “holy door” of God’s heart lies open before you. Jesus, God-with-us, is born for you, for me, for us, for every man and woman. And remember that with him, joy flourishes; with him, life changes; with him, hope does not disappoint."