Category: 2025 News

ROME (CNS) – During the Holy Year 2025, Catholics are called not only to grow in the virtue of hope, but also to share it with others, said U.S. Cardinal James M. Harvey, archpriest of Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

Pope Francis’ call to the whole church during the Jubilee Year is “both pressing and challenging. It is a call not to be satisfied just with having hope, but to radiate hope, to be sowers of hope,” the cardinal said at Mass Jan. 5 after opening the basilica’s Holy Door.

The golden bronze door, installed for the Holy Year 2000, was the last of the Holy Doors at the papal basilicas of Rome to be opened for pilgrims.

With the theme, “Pilgrims of Hope,” Pope Francis inaugurated the Holy Year Dec. 24 by opening the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, and he opened a Holy Door Dec. 26 at Rome’s Rebibbia prison. The archpriest of the Basilica of St. John Lateran opened the Holy Door there Dec. 29, and the coadjutor archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major opened the Holy Door at the Marian basilica Jan. 1.

In his homily at St. Paul Outside the Walls, Cardinal Harvey said hope “is certainly the most beautiful gift the church can give humanity, especially at this moment in history.”

The opening of the Holy Door, particularly during the Christmas season, he said, “marks the salvific passage opened by Christ with his incarnation, death and resurrection, calling all members of the church to reconcile with God and with their neighbor.”

Cardinal Harvey told the congregation of close to 3,000 people that the words, “Spes Unica,” meaning “our only hope,” are written at the base of the cross on top of the basilica.

During the Jubilee Year, he said, Christians in Rome and around the world are called to hold tight to the cross and set off as pilgrims, journeying together, supporting one another and sharing with all people the hope for eternal salvation accomplished in Christ.

Quoting the Letter to the Romans of the Apostle Paul, whose tomb is under the basilica’s main altar, Cardinal Harvey said his Holy Year prayer is: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

ROME (CNS) – Opening the Holy Door of the oldest Marian shrine in the Western world, Cardinal Rolando Makrickas prayed that the world would entrust itself to Mary, “the door to heaven.”

“Let us offer our prayer to the Father so that, like Mary, we may be pilgrims of hope who bring Christ into the world,” said the cardinal, coadjutor archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, before pushing open its bronze door Jan. 1.

As the bells rang out from the summit of Rome’s Esquiline hill, Cardinal Makrickas became the first pilgrim to cross the door’s threshold during the Holy Year 2025.

Among the pealing bells was one originally placed in the basilica’s bell tower — the highest point in the center of Rome — which was used to announce the Catholic Church’s first Jubilee in 1300 and had been housed in the Vatican Museums since 1884; it was returned to St. Mary Major last year ahead of the Jubilee.

Celebrating Mass on the feast of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, Cardinal Makrickas reflected on the mystery of Jesus’ incarnation in Mary’s womb, calling it the “fullness of time” as it united earthly time with eternity.

Today, the cardinal said, humanity often seeks to “perfect time” by saving or enriching it through technology, but “every effort results in its loss.”

“One cannot, however, ever feel lost, wasted or tired from time spent with God,” he said. “It will not be ideas or technology that give us comfort or hope, but the face of the Mother of God.”

Cardinal Makrickas also spoke about the significance of the relics of Jesus’ crib housed in the basilica, “the first, humble, poor home of Jesus,” from which humanity began to mark time itself.

Each pilgrim entering the basilica during the Jubilee and praying before the icon of the Marian icon “Salus Populi Romani” (“health of the Roman people”) — which Pope Francis visits before and after each of his international trips — and the Holy Crib “will not be able to leave here without a deep and particular feeling, a feeling and certainty that the heavenly Mother is with him,” the cardinal said.

“Each person will go from here with the assurance of being accompanied by the grace, the protection, the care and motherly tenderness of Mary,” he said.

St. Mary Major is especially significant to Pope Francis. He has said that he often visited the basilica when traveling to Rome as a cardinal and, breaking with recent tradition, has said he will be buried there rather than in the Vatican after his death. Six popes are buried in the basilica, and the last pope interred there was Pope Clement IX in 1669.