Thoughts on the Holy Year of Mercy

From the newly-published DICI no. 316, we offer an informational report about the upcoming Holy Year of Mercy followed by a news piece about reactions to the announcement.

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Holy Year of Mercy

The Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy will open on December 8, 2015, and run until November 20, 2016, and will extend to all the dioceses in the world, according to the Bull of Indiction for this Extraordinary Holy Year, which was signed by Pope Francis and published on April 11. On Sunday, April 12, the First Sunday after Easter, the pope solemnly delivered the bull Misericordiae vultus (The Face of Mercy), in front of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, to the four cardinal archpriests of the papal Basilicas of St. Peter, St. John Lateran, St. Paul Outside the Walls and St. Mary Major.

The bull is divided into 25 paragraphs. The first part treats in depth the recurring Gospel theme of mercy, which “needs to be proposed… with new enthusiasm and renewed pastoral action” since the credibility of the Church is at stake. Pope Francis justifies the date of the opening of the Jubilee, December 8, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom God willed to be “holy and immaculate in love”, so as not “to leave humanity alone in the throes of evil”.

Furthermore, the Supreme Pontiff explains, “I have chosen the date of December 8” because it corresponds to the “50th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council”, which tore down “the walls which for too long had made the Church a kind of fortress” (sic), leading it “to proclaim the Gospel in a new way” by using, as John XXIII said, “the medicine of mercy rather than taking up the arms of severity”. The motto of the Jubilee is: “Merciful like the Father”, taken from the Gospel of St. Luke.

In a second section, the pope gives practice advice for celebrating the Jubilee:

The practice of pilgrimage has a special place in the Holy Year…. To reach the Holy Door in Rome or in any other place in the world, everyone, each according to his or her ability, will have to make a pilgrimage. This will be a sign that mercy is also a goal to reach and requires dedication and sacrifice.”

The document also asks Christians not to judge and not to condemn but to forgive and to give [generously], to avoid “gossip” as St. Luke teaches (cf. Lk 6:37-38). The pope recommends that the faithful perform “the spiritual and corporal works of mercy” and go to confession during Lent so as to put back at the center of our lives this sacrament that “will enable people to touch the grandeur of God’s mercy with their own hands”.

The Supreme Pontiff announces that he will send priests as “Missionaries of Mercy” during the Lent of the Holy Year, who will have “the authority to pardon even those sins reserved to the Holy See”. He asks that, at the same time, “missions to the people” be organized in the dioceses so that these missionaries might be “the heralds of joy and forgiveness”.

Francis recalls that justice and mercy “are not two contradictory realities, but two dimensions of a single reality”. This does not mean that justice is superfluous or devalued; he notes: “anyone who makes a mistake must pay the price. However, this is just the beginning of conversion, not its end.”

The term “indulgence” is explained since it “will acquire an even more important meaning in the Holy Year of Mercy”. Through the sacrament of reconciliation, sins are blotted out by God’s forgiveness; through an indulgence the sinner is freed from the “negative effect”, “from every residue left by the consequences of sin” that remain in “the way we think and act”. [Editor’s note: a plenary indulgence is the total or partial remission of the temporal punishment due to sins that are already forgiven, depending on the dispositions of the soul.]

Next, the pope makes several appeals. He asks the members of criminal organizations to “change their lives”, explaining to them that

Violence inflicted for the sake of amassing riches soaked in blood makes one neither powerful nor immortal. Everyone, sooner or later, will be subject to God’s judgment, from which no one can escape.”

Similarly he addresses “those who either perpetrate or participate in corruption”, reminding them that corruption is “a work of darkness, fed by suspicion and intrigue”.

Finally, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the Supreme Pontiff declares that Judaism and Islam “consider mercy to be one of God’s most important attributes”, calling on Catholics to “foster an encounter with these religions and with other noble religious traditions” and to participate in interreligious dialogue.

At the conclusion of the bull, Pope Francis turns to Mary, “the Mother of mercy”, who, at the foot of the cross, “attests that the mercy of the Son of God knows no bounds and extends to everyone, without exception.”

The website of the Jubilee of Mercy is now open at the address: www.iubilaeummisericordiae.va. The text of the Bull of Indiction is published there, together with the official calendar of scheduled events. Also some photos of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, which will be open throughout the jubilee year.

Pope Francis announced the convocation of a Holy Year of Mercy back on March 13, 2015, during a penitential ceremony organized by the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization (“24 Hours for the Lord”) in the Vatican Basilica. The Supreme Pontiff declared that he had entrusted the organization of the Jubilee to this Dicastery “so that it could present it as a new stage in the Church’s journey on its mission to bring the Gospel of mercy to each person”.

Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, described in detail, on May 5, 2015, the initiatives proposed to the faithful throughout the world. For the first time in the history of jubilees, every cathedral or shrine in the diocese will open its own Holy Door, called “the Door of Mercy”.

On Ash Wednesday, February 10, 2016, Pope Francis will send to dioceses throughout the world “Missionaries of Mercy” who will be responsible for hearing confessions and forgiving the most serious sins that are ordinarily reserved to the Apostolic See. These missionaries will be chosen by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization. The criteria for selection? “Having a lot of patience, being good preachers and confessors of mercy,” Archbishop Fisichella explained. “Bishops emeritus”, by virtue of their experience, could also be among these missionaries.

(Sources: apic/imedia/vatican—DICI no. 316, 6-5-2015)

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Contrasting reactions to the announcement of the Holy Year of Mercy

Italians did not have to wait long for the reactions to what has been described as a “putsch of mercy” by Professor Patrizia Fermani, a founding member of Giuristi per la Vita (Lawyers for Life) and founder of the Comitato Nel Nome dell’Infanzia (Committee on Behalf of Infancy).

Back on March 13, 2015, the Italian journalist Antonio Margheriti Mastino wrote on his website papalepapale:

A while ago, a well-known, hypochondriac cardinal, who is perhaps suffering from a permanent state of anxiety that causes this psychosis, had declared in private that the IOR [the Vatican Bank] was in a very bad state, and that it was only a matter of months until it failed. Was he exaggerating? Maybe. However this is not the first time that similar financial situations have occurred, and the Holy See has often responded to them with an extraordinary Jubilee.”

By that he meant that the offerings generously made to go with repentance and conversion could help make up for a budget deficit. Nevertheless Antonio Mastino went on to say:

The fact is that the last penitential jubilee did not bring in much, and they had bet everything on the extensive media coverage. To those like me in Rome who experienced it live, it seemed like a sort of huge country fair in which all sense of limits had been lost, and in which general purification was the last thing on the minds of the participants throughout the year 2000. So much so that Cardinal Ratzinger, in paging through the psychedelic program of the Jubilee, had lifted his eyes to Heaven and said with a sign of resignation: ‘Once every 25 years, all right… but no more often than that.’”

On March 15, the Italian journalist Antonio Socci wondered on his website antoniosocci:

Will the Holy Year that has just been announced be centered on Jesus Christ, like the preceding ones, or on Pope Bergoglio? …The Jubilee—ever since the first one in 1300—has always been set on dates that refer to the years of the birth and death of Jesus Christ. Including the (very rare) Extraordinary Jubilees.

The one in 2016 is the first Jubilee in the history of the Church that is not centered on the historical event of Jesus Christ, of His earthly life. Since they had to find some reason to convoke it in 2016, Bergoglio decided that it would be held for the 50th anniversary of the closing of Vatican Council II.

But what sort of an anniversary is that? They have never held a Jubilee for a Council. Then, too, the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965, not in 1966, and therefore they are not celebrating the 50th but the 51st anniversary of the conclusion of the 21st Council of the Church.

Therefore this is a pretext that is more than anything else ideological and even self-referential, because it is centered on an ecclesial event rather than on Christ. (If we had to consider similar events in the history of the Church, we could organize a Holy Year every year.)

The first Jubilee in history that will not be centered on the Christ-event will have, as its undisputed media protagonist, Pope Bergoglio, the pope who incidentally does not greet the faithful with the traditional phrase, ‘Praised be Jesus Christ,’ but rather with ‘Good day’ and ‘Good evening,’ so that the media salute him as the ‘agreeable pope’.

This will therefore be a year of Bergoglian triumphalism. Even the theme of mercy selected by the pope is along these lines. The Corriere writes in a front-page story: 'It will be dedicated to mercy.' But that is redundant, because all Jubilees, by their very nature, are dedicated to divine mercy. The Cathedral in Siena has over its portal an engraved slab that records the words with which Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Jubilee in history, in 1300, and the key word is precisely “mercy”.

Why, then, did they decide to say that the 2016 Jubilee will be particularly centered on mercy and is characterized by that?”

On March 17 Professor Patrizia Fermani explained on the website Riscossa Cristiana:

This is where the sleight of hand comes in. Here we have the formidable idea of giving a sacramental form to the revolutionary political program. All they have to do is give it the solemn form of a jubilee. This will disguise, even for those who are dazed, obtuse or confused, the reversal of the Church’s mission under a load of religious pathos. Bergoglio’s mercy, general amnesty with a retroactive blotting out of sin, has to have a theological and sacral form capable of vanquishing all resistance.

In primitive religions, mystical exaltation was also the sublimation of what is irrational and carnal. Bergoglio’s jubilee aims at the sublimation of the new rites of modernity that have become the rites of the ecumenical, atheistic and popular New Church of the third millennium, and by its momentum it will produce the definitive consecration thereof.”

Answering questions from the news agency I.Media on April 9, 2015, Cardinal Walter Kasper recalled that with this theme Pope Francis is aligning himself with Vatican Council II by quoting the opening speech of John XXIII to the Council: “Today, the Bride of Christ [i.e., the Church] prefers to use the remedy of mercy instead of taking up the weapons of severity.”

In the apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, he adds, Francis mentions the obligation for a pastoral conversion. “The Church must become a house open to all,” he explains. “The Church as the sacrament of Salvation is also the sign and instrument of God’s mercy.” However, in “enlarging in this way on a central, fundamental theme of the Bible and of the Church’s spiritual tradition”, the pope has made mercy the key theme of his pontificate, the President Emeritus of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity emphasized; in his opinion the Year of Mercy is indeed part of the reform program of Pope Francis.

(Sources: radiovatican/ papalepapale/ antoniosocci/ riscossacristiana/ benoitetmoi/ imedia—DICI no. 316, 6-5-2015)