The Vatican official charged with organising the 2025 Jubilee of Hope has stressed the importance of forgiveness and solidarity amid a global climate of anger and resentment. Source: Crux.
Speaking as part of a panel at a festival in Italy last week, Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella said, “Without hope, we cannot grasp the essence of life; hope belongs to the essence of Christian life, because, together with faith and charity, it represents the style of the believer.”
The pro-prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Evangelisation, which is organising the upcoming 2025 Jubilee of Hope, Archbishop Fisichella is in charge of the Jubilee preparations.
Archbishop Fisichella focused on two aspects of the Jubilee: hope and forgiveness, which were central themes throughout Pope Francis’s Bull of Indiction, Spes non confundit, or “Hope does not disappoint.”
Published in May, the bull set the tone for the Jubilee and included appeals from Pope Francis for things he said would help sow greater hope in the world, including amnesty for prisoners and debt forgiveness for developing nations.
He also made several appeals to show hope to populations he said are in the greatest need of it and indicated that ecumenism will be a major theme during the upcoming Jubilee year.
Archbishop Fisichella said that what makes the 2025 Jubilee year unique are two different aspects of it, the first of which is hope itself.
The second aspect is “the ability to give, to offer, to participate, to put into practice the concrete signs of hope,” he said, saying to do this requires “a personal journey of the entire church, of humanity, this is why we are pilgrims.”
This journey, he said, is especially necessary in “a period like this, in which there is so much daily violence.”
Some 35 million pilgrims are expected to travel to Rome for the Jubilee, amounting to more than 10,000 per day, the archbishop said. He insisted that Rome will be ready for the inauguration of the Jubilee in December, despite many ongoing construction projects that have yet to be completed.
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Jubilee to showcase forgiveness in world scarred by anger, Vatican official says (By Elise Ann Allen, Crux)
