Pope: May Jubilee offer opportunity for ceasefire on all war fronts

Vatican News

The Holy Year and the Pope's dream look with hope to a world marked by peace, where weapons are locked away in arsenals, those who manufacture them have stopped profiting from the deaths of others, the death penalty has no executions scheduled, and prisoners are granted "forms of amnesty or pardon." Pope Francis underscores these points in the foreword of a new book entitled, "Jubilee of Hope," written by Italian journalist Francesco Antonio Grana who covers the Vatican, a book for release by the publisher Elledici.

A Jubilee lived fully

"I truly hope that the upcoming Jubilee marks an opportunity for a ceasefire in all the countries where war is being waged!" the Pope emphasises, as he has in many of his appeals. "From war, from every conflict, this must be clear, everyone always comes out defeated, everyone!" and "there are no winners and losers, only the defeated!" he stresses, recalling what he said in the Bull of Indiction for the Holy Year "Spes non confundit" ("Hope does not disappoint").

He explains that hope is not "optimism, nor a vague positive feeling about the future," but "something else": "It is not an illusion or an emotion. It is a concrete virtue, a way of life, and it involves concrete choices. Hope is nourished by each person's commitment to good." "Nourishing hope," Pope Francis continues, has the value of "a social, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, and political action in the highest sense of the word. It is putting one's abilities and resources at the service of the common good."

An instrument of grace

This means focusing on the common good, as it relates to migrants who experience the paradox of odysseys called "journeys of hope," which often "turn into true journeys of despair," with the Mediterranean becoming a "great cemetery." Or the good for those imprisoned, as the Pope has called for "dignified living conditions" alongside the abolition of the death penalty, judged "unacceptable because it violates the inviolability and dignity of the person."

The Holy Year, Pope Francis writes in a passage from the foreword, "is not exclusively an event dictated by a calendar, but a true pastoral instrument that the popes, since 1300, have used according to the needs of the times in which they were called to lead the Church."

A time of rebirth

The forthcoming Holy Year in 2025 will see millions of pilgrims crossing the threshold of the Holy Door of St. Peter's and the other three Papal Basilicas. The Pope hopes, however, that this pilgrimage is not simply a touristic visit or the achievement of a goal, as in the Olympics. "I hope it is truly an occasion for conversion, for looking at one's life in light of the Gospel," and that "this pilgrimage is always accompanied by a charitable act carried out in secret."

The book also remembers Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis, two young people who will be canonised during the Jubilee. The Pope recalls their examples and words, urging us not to "waste away" on the couch of our lives, but to embody, with Jesus in our hearts, the beauty of love that turns into service.