From the triumphalism that marked the Catholic Church’s celebration of the Great Jubilee of 2000 to the upcoming jubilee that will take place in our present “triste epoque”
Once the second assembly of the “Synodal Process” is concluded in October 2024, the next big event the Vatican will be focusing on is the “Jubilee of Hope” in 2025. Preparations are already underway for what looks to be a very Rome-centered Holy Year. It will begin in December 2024 and conclude on Epiphany in January 2026.
This is the first Holy Year since the Great Jubilee of 2000 and it comes nearly a decade after the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy of 2015-2016. The person responsible for preparing it is Archbishop Rino Fisichella, one of the two pro-prefects of the Dicastery for Evangelization, a position he got from Benedict XVI in 2010 as president of the now-defunct Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization. Fisichella, who will be 72 in August, was also a member of the central committee of the Great Jubilee of 2000 and vice-president (under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) of its theological-historical commission.
Among other positions this former Gregorian University professor held was serving as chaplain to Italy’s Parliament from 1995-2010. This made him one of the country’s most important prelates entrusted with building an entente between the right-wing coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi and the pontificate of Benedict. Now that the Italian government is in the hands of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Berlusconi’s successor on the right, Fisichella appears — at least to some — to be the right man in the right place at the right time.
A big money event between the sacred and profane
Coordinating jubilee preparations between Vatican and Italian authorities is important because building and updating infrastructure in order to accommodate the 30-40 million people who are expected come to Rome means that lot of money will be changing hands. A large part of that will come from Italian taxpayers but funds will also come indirectly from the European Union. The Holy Year is always a typically Catholic mix of the sacred and profane. This has been the case since the very first jubilee in the year 1300, a very Roman Catholic institution that survived the Protestant Reformation and got a boost from 19th-century ultramontanism, which promoted supreme papal authority and the Vatican’s role in matters of spirituality and governance.
This tourist/business aspect of jubilees is nothing new. What is new is that today we live in a world that has changed significantly since even the past two jubilees. Jubilee 2025 will be quite different than the “Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy” that Pope Francis called less than three years into his pontificate, the most energetic phase of his time at the helm of the Church. The sexual abuse crisis had not yet hit the pontificate in a way that it has since 2018.The mood among Catholics at the time of Jubilee 2025 will be even more different from the “Great Jubilee” of 2000, which showcased a triumphant and overconfident Church, led by an already visibly ill John Paul II, the pope who was credited with helping to topple communism and revive Catholicism as a global force. It was a celebration of faith, that had important moments for many Catholics, especially for young people.
And now “la triste époque”
But the Jubilee of 2000 was also an illusory moment for the institutional Church and its influence both in the world and the ecclesial community. Less than a year after it was over, the world witnessed the horror of 9/11 — the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Then, just a few months later, in January 2002, the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” reports exploded Catholic Church’s abuse crisis at the global level.
Andrea Riccardi, the Italian historian and founder of the Sant’Egidio Community, said in 2011 that the post-2001 period should be known as “la triste époque” in contrast to the “belle époque” of the early 20th century, as well as to the 1990s illusion of the magnificent and progressive fortunes of globalization.
Recall that in 2000 the wars in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia and the formerYugoslavia looked more like blips on the screen than harbingers of things to come. But the COVID-19 pandemic and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine have cemented the impression that the first quarter of the 21st century is indeed “la triste époque” marked by the disruption of globalization.
Confessing the sins committed by certain Catholics, not the Church itself
The Jubilee of 1950 under Pius XII highlighted the Catholic Church’s role in helping to reconcile peoples after World War II. In a similar way the Jubilee of 2000 did the same aft the Cold War. Both were post-war celebrations of a newly found unity in the world and in the Church.It is hard to see how Jubilee 2025 will be celebrated in the same mood. And what the preparations will look like – other than what is in the hands of administrators and businesspersons. John Paul II tried to shape the “Great Jubilee” as a moment of conversion and examination of conscience for the Church, beginning with his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio millennio adveniente. The Vatican set up a theological-historical commission that organized colloquia on some troubling pages in Church history, especially on the roots of anti-Judaism in Christian circles (1997) and on the Inquisition (1998). The historical archives of the Holy Office were also opened to scholars.John Paul II’s insights inspired initiatives by several national episcopal conferences to look critically and humbly into their own past — the Czech Republic regarding Jan Hus, and Poland and France regarding anti-Semitism. The Polish pope’s desire for a “purification of memory” culminated in a symbolic liturgy on March 12, 2000 in St. Peter’s Basilica. He and a number of his cardinals requested pardon, on behalf of all Catholics, for the sins that some members of their Church committed against other Christians, “the people of Israel”, “women and the unity of the human race”, the fundamental rights of the human person, other peoples, cultures, and religions.
Between 1998 (Memory and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the Past) and the 2000 international colloquium held in Rome on the Second Vatican Council, it became clear that apologetical instincts had prevailed over a true “purification of memory”. In the initial years following the Great Jubilee, we saw how the Vatican of John Paul II failed to deal with the abuse crisis by shielding Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Marcial Maciel, the founder and longtime leader of the Legionaries of Christ. The rest is history.
What of theological and spiritual preparation?
The almost decade-long preparations of the Jubilee of 2000 were also an effort to help the Church reckon with its past and prepare its future from a theological and spiritual point of view. It was not just about building new infrastructures in Rome. But today it is not quite clear if and how anything like that will take place between now and 2025.
Pope Francis hinted briefly at the need to rediscover the documents of Vatican II in February 2022 and exactly a year later Archbishop Fisichella announced the publication of a series of 34 small volumes dedicated to the Second Vatican Council. They were titled Giubileo 2025 – Quaderni del Concilio. If this was a serious initiative to connect Jubilee 2025 to a rediscovery of Vatican II, it’s been kept a great secret. This series seems to exist only in Italian!At more than twenty years after the “Great Jubilee” of 2000, the abuse crisis has completely swept aside that triumphant image of Catholicism – but also a certain triumphant image of Vatican II. It is striking to look today at the shortcomings in the Catholic Church’s attempt from the late 1990s to the year 2000 do have a “purification of memory”.
Those times are gone
Today a very different and sweeping “purification of memory” is underway. It concerns abuse, gender, race, and colonialism. And it’s not controlled by the Vatican. Indeed, it is more than a purification. At times it looks like a dissolution of memory and a collapse of historical consciousness. This is happening already in the media, in academia and in the public perception. And because of its “presentism” it’s often changing radically (especially in the West) not just the perception of the Church by non-Catholics, but also the self-perception by Catholics.
Reflecting on how to read our past is an ecclesial task, that of the whole Church. But it also needs institutional leadership and prophetic voices. This is another difference from the Jubilee 2000. Back then there was an assumption that Church leadership was firmly in control of the narrative. That illusion is gone and now, at the institutional level, many Church officials are afraid of the untold different directions in which such a soul-searching could go.It will be a very interesting couple of years (to say the least) for the Church in the period between the Synod assembly on synodality next October and the beginning of Jubilee 2025.
From an ecclesiological point of view, the “synodal process” spanning 2021-2024 and the Jubilee of 2025 seem to belong to different centuries or millennia. The reckoning with past in the lead-up to the Great Jubilee of 2000 took place under the strict control of the Vatican and John Paul II. The institutional Church was defendant, judge, and jury back then. But those times are gone.
Follow me on Twitter @MassimoFaggioli
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