Cardinal James Michael Harvey, Archpriest of the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, opened the fifth and final Holy Door of the Jubilee of Hope 2025.
The Holy Doors of this Jubilee Year, initiated by Pope Francis on December 24 when he opened the first in St. Peter’s Basilica, are also in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major and that of Saint John Lateran. And on this occasion, by a special request of the Holy Father, in the Roman prison of Rebibbia.
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“Open the doors of justice for me, I will enter and give thanks to the Lord,” was the final invocation that the cardinal pronounced before entering through the Holy Door of the basilica where the remains of Saint Paul, the so-called “Apostle of the Gentiles,” rest. , and where the portraits of all the Popes are: from Saint Peter to Francis.
After the opening rite of the Holy Door of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, Cardinal Harvey, the concelebrant priests and faithful present, entered the Basilica to participate in the Holy Mass.
“We have crossed the threshold of the holy temple with immense joy because, in an emblematic way, we have crossed the door of hope: joy and hope is the binomial that outlines the liturgical rite,” the American cardinal of 75 years old, born in Wisconsin.
“The joy because the Savior has been born, the hope because Christ is the Savior, is our hope. It is the joy that characterizes the Christmas season,” stressed the cardinal who has served as Archpriest of Saint Paul Outside the Walls since 2012.
Cardinal Harvey explained that the Child Jesus came into the world and was incarnated “not only to be admired or welcomed as a companion but to communicate to us his own filial life, to bring us into an intimate relationship with God. In Jesus we receive adoption as children, which gives us an exceptional dignity, which leads us to an unsurpassed plenitude.”
“Joy,” the cardinal continued, “is also the appropriate feeling for the gift of redemption in Jesus Christ: the Father rich in mercy sends his Son to save us, the Son of God humbled himself, voluntarily accepting death on the cross to take us away. the sins of the world and makes us enter into the perspective of blessed hope.”
In that sense, the cardinal highlighted, “the opening of the Holy Door marks the salvific step opened by Christ with his incarnation, death and resurrection, calling all members of the Church to reconcile with God and their neighbor.”
“Crossing with faith the threshold of this Basilica we enter the time of mercy and forgiveness so that, in the words of our patron saint, Saint Paul, the path of hope that does not disappoint is opened to every woman and man, which today more than ever we need.”
In this “post-pandemic” period and wounded by crises and wars, the Archpriest continued, we need that hope that Pope Benedict XVI speaks of in his encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope) “which offers an original perspective on the relationship between the present and the future.”
“The present, even if it is tiring, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal and if this goal is so great that it justifies the effort along the way. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality, does the present also become bearable.”
With Christ, Benedict XVI highlights in his encyclical, “the dark door of time, of the future, has been opened wide. Those who have hope live differently; “It has been given a new life.”
Cardinal Harvey then recalled a recent catechism by Pope Francis on hope, in which he stressed that “hope is not an empty word, nor our vague desire for things to go well: it is a certainty, because it is based on the fidelity of God to his promises.”
For this reason it is called theological virtue, “because it is infused by God and has God as its guarantor. It is not a passive virtue, which is limited to waiting for things to happen. It is a supremely active virtue that helps them happen.”
According to the open Hope is not confused, with which Pope Francis called the ordinary Jubilee 2025, the Holy Doors of the basilicas of Saint John Lateran, Saint Paul Outside the Walls and Saint Mary Major will close on December 28 of this year.
The Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica will close on January 6, 2026, on the Epiphany of the Lord, thus ending the Jubilee Year of Hope.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.