On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis is set to open the Holy Doors at St. Peter’s Basilica to inaugurate the Jubilee Year of 2025, which Catholics throughout the world will celebrate and which will be dedicated to the theme of hope.
Here in Los Angeles, we will begin our local observance of this year of hope with the ritual opening of the holy doors at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on December 29, the Feast of the Holy Family.
In the year ahead we are planning several special celebrations, including a “24 Hours for the Lord” day when churches throughout the archdiocese will be open all day and night for Eucharistic adoration and confession.
We are also planning a six-mile procession through the streets of Los Angeles to bear witness to our hope in Jesus. There are more details about this holy year at our website: hope.lacatholics.org.
It is an ancient tradition for the popes to proclaim a jubilee every 25 years, and I am excited.
This Jubilee will be an occasion for many graces for all of us to go deeper in our friendship with Jesus and renew our commitment to live our faith with joy and confidence.
Jesus is our hope, as we remember in this holy season of Christmas.
God is with us! This is the beautiful truth that we celebrate in this season.
In God’s plan of love, he entered into our history, he came to share in our human experience. As we hear in our Christmas liturgies, at a certain time in history and in a certain place, the living God came to dwell among us, the Son of God became the Son of Mary so that we might be made the sons and daughters of God.
This is why for Catholics, hope is not just a feeling of optimism or some kind of wishful thinking. Our hope is true.
We hope in the promises of Jesus, who was born for us and died for us, and having risen from the dead now walks with us, as our friend and our leader.
“For this we toil and struggle,” St. Paul wrote, “because we have set our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all, especially of those who believe.”
Hope is hard sometimes.
As Pope Francis observes in his decree for the Jubilee, we are easily tempted to be “discouraged, pessimistic, and cynical about the future.”
We can look around at the world and see plenty of signs that things aren’t the way God intends them to be. There is injustice and inequality. There is war and poverty, the displacement and migration of millions of peoples, the violence and crime, the neglect of our natural environment.
The saints teach us that the suffering of others is a call to our conscience, and a call to solidarity and action. We are children of our Father in heaven, all of us brothers and sisters, and we have a duty by our common humanity to take care of one another.
So, this Jubilee Year calls us to renew the hope that is in our own hearts. But we are also called to proclaim the hope that we have in Jesus and to share that hope with our neighbors, and especially with those who are without hope.
God loves us with a love beyond telling and the apostles taught us that there is nothing in the world, no hardship or distress, not even persecution, that can separate us from the love of God.
Pope Francis writes: “Thus, we will be able to say even now: I am loved, therefore I exist; and I will live forever in the love that does not disappoint, the love from which nothing can ever separate me.”
This is our hope! And this is the hope that we are called to bring to our world.
This Jubilee coincides with the final year of the Eucharistic renewal in our country.
The Eucharistic renewal has opened our hearts and strengthened our awareness that Jesus is with us always, and that we are always in his presence.
We are never more aware of this than when we are at Mass. As we lift up our hearts, we know that we are praying in the company of the angels and saints, we know that heaven and earth meet on that altar and that the One who loves us and gives us hope comes into our midst.
Pray for me and I will pray for you.
And let us ask Mary, the Mother of Hope, to help us to grow in our hope in the promises of her Son, and help us to share his hope with everyone.
