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Special occasion: 2025 Jubilee Year

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN so excited for something that you can barely wait for it to happen? Maybe that thing is Christmas. Maybe it’s a vacation or a graduation or a wedding. Maybe it’s the start of a new job or a long-awaited reunion. There’s something invigorating about knowing that a great event is on the horizon. We don’t know how it will go, of course, but we hope that good things are in store.

What about a Jubilee year? If that wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, you’re excused. It’s a rare occasion—ordinarily, only once every 25 years!—so it might not be on your radar. But the 2025 Jubilee is almost here, so it’s worth considering why this event deserves not just excitement, but profound celebration.

Let’s start with the basics. 2025 will be just the 27th ordinary Jubilee—or Holy Year—in all of Christian history. The last one was in 2000. (There have been a few extraordinary Jubilee years, and Pope Francis pronounced one of those in 2015.)

The first church Jubilee was in the year 1300. It was so successful that Pope Boniface VIII declared that a year of forgiveness for all sins would take place every 100 years. But as time passed, that number shrunk to 50 years, then 33 years, and finally, in 1470, Pope Paul II settled on a Holy Year every 25 years.

The heart of Jubilee is restoration and forgiveness. It’s an opportunity to revitalize our relationships with God, ourselves, and each other. Jubilee has seven characteristics: pilgrimage, prayer, profession of faith, reconciliation, liturgy, indulgences, and the Holy Door. Each of these has great spiritual significance, and I encourage you to learn about them at iubilaeum2025.va, the official Jubilee website.

The heart of Jubilee is restoration and forgiveness. It’s an opportunity to revitalize our relationships with God, ourselves, and each other.

For 2025, Pope Francis has chosen the motto “Pilgrims of Hope.” When he announced this motto, he referenced the tragedy of the pandemic, poverty, and the plight of those who have fled their homelands due to war and climate change. Facing these catastrophes requires great hope indeed. And, perhaps surprisingly, these realities echo those of the year 1300—realities that inspired Boniface to institute a Jubilee in the first place.

We can go back further, though, to get at the earliest origins of Jubilee. We can go back to at least 400 B.C., to when the Old Testament book of Leviticus was written. Leviticus deals with the priests of ancient Israel, who were from the tribe of Levi. The book is known for its somewhat tedious list of laws. This, if you can believe it, is where we first hear about Jubilee.

In a section known as the Holiness Laws, God speaks to Moses about the sabbath, the sabbatical year, and the Jubilee year. The sabbath, of course, is a once-every-seven-days day of rest for humans. The sabbatical year is a once-every-seven-years year of rest for the land. The Jubilee year takes place after “seven times seven years,” or 49 years.

In Leviticus 25, God tells Moses about this awesome mega-reset that is Jubilee:

“You shall treat this fiftieth year as sacred. You shall proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to your own property, each of you to your own family. This fiftieth year is your year of Jubilee; . . . It shall be sacred for you” (Lev. 25:10-12).

Liberty for everyone! This is your year of Jubilee! This is the ultimate time of restoration. Whatever you owe, those debts will be wiped away. Whatever is owed to you must also be forgiven. It’s a reminder that EVERYTHING IS GOD’S. We need Jubilee because even if we always treat others fairly—and even if we’ve always been treated fairly ourselves—sometimes situations still become unbalanced. Whether it’s due to disease, conflict, poverty, personal sin, or bad luck, our lives get out of whack.

Jubilee has the power to fix all of that.

Unfortunately, most of our world doesn’t run on the laws in Leviticus 25. Loan payments and doctor’s bills and credit card debt won’t automatically zero out in 2025. But we can do our part to bring restoration and forgiveness to those around us. We believe, after all, that as we forgive, we ourselves are forgiven.

And we can hope. As Francis writes in Spes Non Confundit (Hope Does Not Disappoint), the Bull of Indiction of the 2025 Jubilee: “During the Holy Year, we are called to be tangible signs of hope for those of our brothers and sisters who experience hardships of any kind."

We don’t know how it will go, of course. But there’s a great event on the horizon, and we hope that good things are in store—for all of us.