While bishops around the world are asked to designate their cathedrals or other significant churches as special places of pilgrimage and prayer for the Holy Year 2025, the Vatican is not asking them to dedicate and open a “Holy Door” at those churches. Source: CNS.
The Dicastery for Evangelisation, which is coordinating the celebration of the Jubilee, issued a note on August1 praising “the pastoral and devotional motivations” of bishops who wanted to designate a local Holy Door but saying the only holy doors will be at the basilicas of St Peter at the Vatican, St John Lateran, St Mary Major and St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome and, perhaps, at a prison.
In Spes Non Confundit (Hope Does Not Disappoint), the papal bull officially proclaiming the Holy Year, Pope Francis wrote that “in order to offer prisoners a concrete sign of closeness, I would myself like to open a Holy Door in a prison, as a sign inviting prisoners to look to the future with hope and a renewed sense of confidence”.
In Catholic tradition, the Holy Door represents the passage to salvation – the path to a new and eternal life, which was opened to humanity by Jesus.
The tradition goes back more than 600 years. Pope Martin V, in 1423, opened the Holy Door in the Basilica of St. John Lateran – the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome – for the first time for a jubilee. Later, Pope Alexander VI had Holy Doors opened at the four main basilicas in Rome for the Holy Year of 1500.
The doors are formally closed at the end of a Holy Year and then bricked up by masons.
In its note on August 1, the Dicastery for Evangelisation pointed out that the Pope did not request bishops open Holy Doors in their diocese for the Holy Year 2025.
Instead, Pope Francis asked bishops to celebrate the solemn opening of the jubilee on Sunday, December 29, and suggested that “a pilgrimage that sets out from a church chosen for the collectio and then proceeds to the cathedral can serve to symbolise the journey of hope that, illumined by the word of God, unites all the faithful.”
FULL STORY
Diocesan Holy Doors will not be feature of Jubilee 2025, Vatican says (By Cindy Wooden, CNS)
