A Jubilee Year is a special holy year of pilgrimage and grace in the Catholic Church, proclaimed by the Pope every 25 years. The 2025 Jubilee Year will begin on Christmas Eve 2024 with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica. The theme of the Jubilee is “Pilgrims of Hope”
In SPES NON CONFUNDIT. “Hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5) his official document announcing the Year of Jubilee 2025, Pope Francis wrote: “Everyone knows what it is to hope. In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future may bring. Even so, uncertainty about the future may at times give rise to conflicting feelings, ranging from confident trust to apprehensiveness, from serenity to anxiety, from firm conviction to hesitation and doubt. God’s word helps us find reasons for that hope. Taking it as our guide, let us return to the message that the Apostle Paul wished to communicate to the Christians of Rome.”
As we walk through a world full of transition and division, The Basilica is eager to engage this timely and important theme of Christian Hope. To that end The Basilia will host a monthly lecture by different speakers highlighting various facets of hope in our lives and hope in our times.
Sunday, December 8, 2024, 11:15, Lower Level of The Basilica: Join Fr. Daniel Griffith for the inaugural lecture on The Virtue of Hope: Foundations and Applications. Leading us in an exploration of the virtue of Hope through the lens of Catholic Tradition he will help us uncover ways we can live this important virtue in our lives today.
Sunday, January 19, 2025, 11:15, Lower Level of The Basilica: Join Dr. Cara Anthony, Professor of Theology at University of St. Thomas on her talk about Christian Hope at the Brink of Environmental Collapse. Anyone who is paying attention knows that humans are rapidly destroying the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth as we know it. What does Christian hope mean in the face of this reality? We’ll first consider the difference between Christian hope and fake optimism, then turn to what one author calls a “feral hope” – a hope that dares to grieve what is lost, and to vision a wildly renewed future. Pope Francis calls us to cultivate three interconnected relationships: with God, other people, and all other beings. We’ll look to biblical, liturgical, and spiritual resources to ground this renewal.
Sunday, February 9, 2025, 11:15, Lower Level of The Basilica: Join Ellen Koneck, Executive Director of Commonweal, a Catholic magazine that covers politics, culture, and religion as she presents Hope, Not Handwringing. Headlines around the disaffiliation of young people from the church and polarization in the US today are often presented as bleak stories of waning trust, declining belief, and lack of community. While those narratives are true in part, they aren’t the whole story: bringing theology and story to bear on wider sociological trends in the religious and cultural landscape, Ellen Koneck will make a case for hope — the kind of hope born, first, of facing hardship.
Sunday, March 2, 2025, 11:15, Lower Level of The Basilica: Join Cynthia Bailey Manns, Director of Adult Learning at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Community, and one of four laypeople from the United States participating in the global Synod in Rome as she shares her experiences of the global Synod, the implications of Synodality and some outcomes in the Final Document. She will also discuss important information included in the Final Document about women’s fuller participation in the Church ~ “ By virtue of Baptism, women and men have equal dignity as members of the People of God…Scripture attests to the prominent role of many women in the history of salvation…There is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church: what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped…the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.” (Paragraph 60)
Sunday, April 6, 2025, 11:15, Lower Level of The Basilica: Join Johan van Parys, Basilica Managing Director of Ministries, and Director of Liturgy and Sacred Arts as he presents, Beauty that Saves. Art that Heals. Architecture, art and music have benefitted the liturgical and sacramental life of the church from the beginning. The powerful ability of the arts to beautify and lift up, to sooth and to heal, to invite and to instruct is of the greatest importance to the mission of the church. This workshop will evaluate how art supports our specific mission to bring hope and healing to this world.
Sunday, April 27, 2025, 11:15, Lower Level of The Basilica: Join Dr. Shawn Colberg, Dean of the Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary on his talk about Pilgrims of Hope. More details on his lecture will be added soon.
As the Universal Church looks toward the Jubilee Year 2025 (the 2,025th anniversary of the Incarnation of our Lord), the USCCB is thrilled to support the Holy Father in this “event of great spiritual, ecclesial, and social significance in the life of the Church.”