The Holy Year

As we celebrate it in the spirit of the Church, the Jubilee Year is nothing other than an extraordinary indulgence through which the Church remits to us all the temporal punishments that are due for those sins that have been forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance.

The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew Jobel, a term that means joy and which the Israelites used to express their joy in celebrating the miraculous deliverance from the long captivity under the tyranny of Pharaoh.

It was indeed a great cause of joy for them, since everyone recovered all their possessions and the slaves were set free. Above all, it was an excellent prefiguring of the grace that God was to grant one day to Christians through the merits of the Messiah, the true Liberator. Because the new law is the perfect accomplishment of the mysteries of which the Old Law was only a, the Church, the Church has adopted this holy custom of the jubilee.

Just as the jubilee years of the Old Testament celebrated the end of the slavery of the Hebrews and their entry into the Promised Land, those of the Church of Jesus Christ celebrate the liberation of men from the slavery of sin by the Incarnation and Redemption, and their entry into the Celestial City. In this time of mercy and remission of punishment, Christians can indeed return to all the spiritual goods that they have lost by their sins.

The jubilee is called a Holy Year because the Church makes a singular application of the merits of Jesus Christ, Who is the inexhaustible sources of all holiness. It is a year of grace and mercy, because more than all other times, it is a year of the liberalities and clemency of God the Savior.

It is also called a year of peace because true penitents are perfectly reconciled with God. These jubilee years are truly days of salvation because the Church offers us more abundant and more effective means than all the other plenary indulgences which she is accustomed to grant us throughout the year.