“Go to Rome where the streets are stained with the blood of the saints and where, because of the indulgences merited by the Pontiffs, the way to Heaven is shorter.” It was to follow this invitation, addressed to her by Christ and referred to in one of his Revelations, that St. Bridget took the road to Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee of 1350. The pope who opened the “shortest way to heaven,” with the proclamation of the first Holy Year, had been Boniface VIII, fifty years earlier, in 1300, with the Papal Bull, Habet fida relatio. Previously, plenary indulgence had been granted only to crusaders leaving for the Holy Land and the Pardon of Assisi. In truth, Celestine V, the pope of the “great refusal,” had also granted it in 1294 to those who went to L’Aquila on August 29, the feast of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist and the day of his coronation. But Pope Caetani, taking up the Jewish tradition of the Holy Years, extended the possibility to an entire year and tied the grace to the city of Rome, thus emphasizing the universality and catholicity of the concession.
1300 would be a year of special “pardon” for those who, repentant and confessed, went to visit the two basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul thirty times if Roman, and fifteen times if foreigners; it was also established that the Holy Year would be repeated every hundred years. Already Clement VI, however, in 1350, at the request of the Romans, made the wait half as long. Then, Urban VI narrowed it to 33 years, in memory of the life of Jesus. It was to be Paul II, finally, who introduced the 25-year interval, moved by the desire to offer every generation the chance to gain the great indulgence. Thus, beginning in 1475, Jubilees were held regularly every quarter of a century. One exception was the 19th century, when the only official Jubilee was that of Leo XII in 1825, due to historical events involving the papacy and the Church State. In 1800, the See had remained vacant after the death of Pius VI in exile in Valence; in 1850 the experience of the Roman Republic had just ended. Eventually Pius IX called the one in 1875, but there were no pilgrimages in a Rome in which the pope was locked in the Vatican Palaces after the breach of Porta Pia (1870).
Regarding the visits to the basilicas, Clement VI added St. John Lateran to the Jubilee in 1350, and Gregory XI added St. Mary Major in 1373. Later on, Leo XIII, for the Holy Year of 1900, reduced by a third the number of visits while Pius XII in 1950 brought it down to only one per basilica. In 1975, Paul VI established that to gain the indulgence it was necessary to pass through only one of the Holy Doors of the four major basilicas of Rome.
The Holy Year responds to a deep need in the human heart
Some Holy Years left a deep mark on the history of the Church. For example, that of 1950, during which Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven, or that of Benedict XIV in 1750, with the invention of the devotional practice of the Way of the Cross by Brother Leonard of Port Maurice, to whose word and action the “Great Benedict” had entrusted the organization of the Holy Year. The Franciscan filled Rome with images of Christ’s Passion and at the end of the Jubilee year fixed the Cross in the center of the Colosseum with the 14 chapels all around it.
It must also be remembered how, alongside ordinary Jubilees, there are also extraordinary ones, promulgated by popes for special circumstances, needs or recurrences, without a fixed periodicity and duration, being able to last from a few days (usually 15), up to the whole year, as was the case in 1933 for the Jubilee “extraordinary among ordinaries,” called by Pius XI on the occasion of the 19th centenary of the Human Redemption, and the 2015 Jubilee of Mercy, 50 years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, which saw the opening of a Holy Door in every diocese. History teaches how the tradition of Jubilees is not rooted in the early centuries of the Church and was born out of an intuition of Boniface VIII, a happy interpreter of the desire for conversion and renewal present in the Christendom of the late 1200s. Nonetheless, it had great success right from the start: it is estimated that in that fateful 1300s, some two million pilgrims reached Rome, and over the centuries the devotional practice became increasingly consolidated. This is because the Holy Year responds to a deep need in the human heart: to find a privileged place and time where grace, forgiveness and conversion can flourish more easily. It also expresses God’s method: the predilection of a place and time for His work in the world. As we have seen, Rome was chosen precisely because it was “stained” by the blood of Saints Peter and Paul.
