The first great success is that it has given the Catholic Church a year to focus on the most easily forgotten theological virtue. If “faith, hope and love remain,” as St. Paul affirms (1 Corinthians 13:13), hope endures most precariously.
Most Christians readily understand faith as a trust in God that leads to a trust in what he has done, said and promised. Similarly, while difficult to live, it’s not complicated to grasp what it means to love God and others.
Hope, on the other hand, few can define. If St. Peter calls us to be “always ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks of the reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15), it’s crucial to know what hope is, why it’s reasonable, and how to articulate it, in season and out of season, to all comers. The Jubilee has provided the opportunity for greater theological clarity, more consistent practice of the virtue, and a context for us to give the reasons for our hope to anyone listening.
The Catechism defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817). It’s a God-given moral muscle by which we relate to God, desire him and his kingdom and yearn to live with him forever.
Hope helps us to stake our life on what Jesus has told us about this world and the next and to live not by our own wits and capacities but in docile dependence on, and communion with, the Holy Spirit and his gifts.
That definition brings us to the second fruit of the Jubilee, which is the Church’s credible response to the crisis of modern despair. So many are living without hope because, like the ancient Ephesians, they are living without God in the world (Ephesians 2:12).
We see this crisis in the push for the legalization of suicide and euthanasia; in the epidemic of addiction to fentanyl, pot, booze, porn, gaming and other attempts to escape from human life; in the loss of the desire to make lifetime commitments or transmit life because of despondency regarding the future; and in the explosion of loneliness, isolation, fear, anxiety and lack of meaning plaguing people of every generation, especially so many of the young.
A 2023 survey of U.S. high-school students by the Centers for Disease Control showed that 42% (and 57% of girls) said they felt persistently hopeless or sad, 18% had come up with a concrete plan on how they would end their life in the previous year, and 10% actually tried to carry out that plan — and thankfully failed. The Jubilee has given the Church an opportunity to propose the reason for our hope in response to this pandemic of despair.
The Jubilee, third, has provided the Church the chance to strengthen her eschatology, which has become enfeebled over the last several decades, with disastrous consequences to Church life and mission. At the root of the modern problem of lack of meaning is the belief that our life and choices in this world don’t matter very much.
There’s a popular and pernicious idea that it really doesn’t matter whether we believe in Christ or call for his crucifixion, follow him or betray him, worship God or idols, tell the truth or lie, sacrifice for others or sacrifice others for our egos, give alms or steal, save life or abort it, are faithful to spouses or abandon them. Don’t we all, this heresy suggests, basically end up in the same “better place” after we die?
Hope, with its focus on the kingdom of heaven and what Benedict XVI called the “great hope” of eternal life, has made it possible for us to remember the end of human life and the paths that Jesus said lead there and don’t.
In Pope Francis’ bull announcing the Jubilee, he said that Christian hope finds its “essential foundation” in the words, “I believe in life everlasting,” which are meant to order one’s whole life. This gives our every word, our every decision, meaning. Every time we choose to order our life to heaven, to holiness, to eternal happiness, we choose hope.
Fourth, the Jubilee has brought nearly 30 million to Rome as “pilgrims of hope” for the various events of the Jubilee or to make on their own the indulgenced passage through the open Jubilee Doors. This, in and of itself, is a cause of hope, since, despite the chronic Roman chaos, Rome, the heart of the Church, is a near occasion of grace: One is immersed in the beauty that has flowed from the Catholic faith over centuries and, while waiting in line, one cannot avoid meeting many whose faith is vibrant, life-defining and full of joy.
The fifth fruit has been the election of Pope Leo XIV. Not only has the first pontiff born in the United States brought freshness and renewal to the Petrine office and increased the crowds coming to papal events, but every papal election evidences the Church’s trust in God’s providence. The biggest cheers of the Jubilee Year happened when Cardinal Dominique Mamberti proclaimed on May 8, “I announce to you great joy: We have a pope!” well before anyone knew the new pope’s identity. The same God who always provides a holy father as an earthly vicar of Christ his Son is the one in whom Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church all bid us to trust and hope.
Astride these positive fruits, there are several things that could have gone much better.
First, in many areas, the Jubilee remained on the periphery of Catholic life. While a Jubilee is meant to influence everything the Church does during that privileged time, there were many parishes, Catholic schools and apostolates that showed no evidence that the Church was celebrating a holy year. Even in an information age when it’s so easy for Catholic faithful to know what’s happening in the Church universal, many remain ignorant of such graces unless their bishop, parish priests, chaplain, principals and other Catholic leaders really think with the Church and try to help those entrusted to them think and pray with the Church.
A case in point are the catecheses given by Pope Francis and Pope Leo over the course of the Jubilee. These had almost no impact on the Church, even on those attending the individual audiences in which they were given.
Pope Francis began on May 29 last year with various lessons on how the Holy Spirit “guides the people of God to Jesus our Hope,” taking us through creation, Scripture, prayer, the life of Jesus and the sacraments, but the Church’s communications effort to get this to the peripheries was highly ineffective. The same went for the cycle on “Jesus Christ our Hope” begun by Pope Francis last Dec. 18 and concluded by Pope Leo on Oct. 8; likewise for Pope Leo’s catechesis on the hope we receive from “the light of Christ’s resurrection on the challenges of the contemporary world” since Oct. 15; ditto, too, for the Saturday Jubilee audiences, which Pope Francis began on Jan. 11 and Pope Leo resumed on June 14, speaking to pilgrims about various aspects of hope and figures who illustrate those aspects.
At a time in which Catholics need to be strengthened in our witness to hope, it’s disappointing that the Church, particularly the Vatican, has not learned to communicate effectively and make consequential its message.
The last failure involves the Jubilee gimmicks, like the ambiguous rainbow-colored logo or the silly anime “mascot” Luce. The Church has the greatest patrimony of beauty in world history and should use it as an inspiration to people longing for God through the transcendent. However well intentioned, whenever the faith is infantilized, it suggests that the faith is childish, not childlike, and that the Church’s goal really isn’t to help people mature to full stature in Christ.
The Jubilee is not over, however, and these last days are opportunities for us to finish the holy year strong. There’s a reason why the Jubilee began last Christmas Eve and will conclude on the Epiphany, because hope is profoundly associated with the Advent and Christmas seasons.
As the Church ponders the meaning of the birth of Christ our Hope in Bethlehem, she is able to draw even greater hope from his continual accompaniment in the Church’s Eucharistic pilgrimage through time and better stoke our desire for the fulfillment of our great hope at time’s end.