My dear brothers and sisters in Christ: 

This past Christmas Eve at the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, Pope Francis opened the Ordinary Jubilee Year of 2025. The official opening of the Jubilee Year of 2025 took place in our diocese and in other local dioceses around the world on Holy Family Sunday, December 29. 

Jubilee years have ordinarily been proclaimed every twenty-five years since the thirteenth century, although there are occasional extraordinary jubilees, such as the Extraordinary Jubilee for the Year of Mercy proclaimed by Pope Francis in 2015. The last Ordinary Jubilee Year took place in 2000, when Pope John Paul II led the Christian faithful across the threshold of two millennia from the birth of Jesus Christ. Jubilee years provide special opportunities to receive the Lord’s mercy, especially through the practice of the Jubilee indulgence, and lead to the performance of works of mercy. More information about the meaning of an indulgence and how to obtain the Jubilee indulgence is on our diocesan website at https://dio.org/. 

The theme for this Jubilee Year is “Pilgrims of Hope.” The title given by Pope Francis to his document declaring the Jubilee Year of 2025 is Spes non confundit, Latin for “Hope does not disappoint,” taken from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Rom 5:5), in which Saint Paul offered these words of encouragement to the Christian community of Rome. Similarly, Pope Francis wrote, “Hope is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross … By his perennial presence in the life of the pilgrim Church, the Holy Spirit illumines all believers with the light of hope. He keeps that light burning, like an ever-burning lamp, to sustain and invigorate our lives. Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love.”

What does it mean to have hope? Hope is not the same thing as optimism. The word “optimism” comes from the Latin optimus, which means, “the best.” An optimist may seek to put the best spin on a bad situation. As such, optimism can be an attitude that looks for something good even when everything looks bad. There is nothing wrong with that, but optimism in that sense could also be superficial or even an act, pretending to look on the bright side of things while feeling miserable inside.

Hope goes much deeper. Hope is based on an interior trust in God and a belief that divine grace ultimately leads to good. It is no accident that hope is one of the theological virtues, along with faith and love. If we have a solid faith in God’s Providence, we will have hope for the future, and this will lead to a life of loving God and neighbor.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (par. 1817). 

The Holy Father makes the connection between the virtue of hope and our Blessed Mother, saying, “Hope finds its supreme witness in the Mother of God. In the Blessed Virgin, we see that hope is not naive optimism but a gift of grace amid the realities of life. … It is not by chance that popular piety continues to invoke the Blessed Virgin as Stella Maris [Star of the Sea], a title that bespeaks the sure hope that, amid the tempests of this life, the Mother of God comes to our aid, sustains us and encourages us to persevere in hope and trust.” 

The symbol of hope is an anchor, inspired by the Letter to the Hebrews, which says, “May we who have taken refuge in [Christ] be strongly encouraged to seize the hope set before us. We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered” (Heb 6:18-20). 

Commenting on this passage, the Holy Father says, “The image of the anchor is eloquent; it helps us to recognize the stability and security that is ours amid the troubled waters of this life, provided we entrust ourselves to the Lord Jesus. The storms that buffet us will never prevail, for we are firmly anchored in the hope born of grace, which enables us to live in Christ and to overcome sin, fear and death. This hope, which transcends life’s fleeting pleasures and the achievement of our immediate goals, makes us rise above our trials and difficulties, and inspires us to keep pressing forward, never losing sight of the grandeur of the heavenly goal to which we have been called.”

As we celebrate Catholic Schools Week January 26 – February 1, we pray that our Catholic Schools may always be beacons of hope promising a brighter future for our young people. 

May God give us this grace. Amen.