Episode 37: The Holy Year (May 8, 2025)

In this episode of Catholic Seasons, Fr. Leonard Obloy preaches on the Holy Year. (May 8, 2025)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Listening to WCAT radio, your home for authentic Catholic programming.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Greetings. Our opening prayer is from the Book of Leviticus.
This fiftieth year is your year of jubilee. You shall
not sew, nor shall you reap the aftergrowth or pick
up the untrimmed vines. Since this is the jubilee, it
shall be sacred for you. You may only eat what the

(00:28):
field yields of itself in this year of jubilee. Then
each of you shall return to your own property. Welcome
to this talk about the Holy Year. It's going to
be in three parts. The first will be about the
idea of a jubilee or a holy year, where we
get it from and what it means. The second will

(00:50):
be about the second part will be about the holy
doors that are an integral part of the Holy Year.
And then the third part will be about the document
from Pope Francis that inaugurated the Holy year. So let's
get started a jubilee year for us Catholics. A jubilee

(01:13):
year has its roots from our Jewish brethren. It's in
the Book of Leviticus where I've got our opening prayer,
and it's from the twenty fifth chapter of Leviticus. So
if you want to go to your bibles and look
up that chapter, you can read about how our Jewish
brethren celebrated a jubilee year, different rules for it and everything.

(01:35):
I'm not going to go through all of that for us.
I'm going to take what we need to know for
our own discussion here. But that's where it starts from.
It starts with our Jewish brethren back in the book
of Leviticus. But actually it starts even earlier than that.
Remember back in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis,
in the creation story and that first story, on the

(01:57):
seventh day, God rested, and so the seventh day, the
sabbath was special and really still for us is it's
in the Ten Commandments Keipoli the Sabbath day the third
Commandment for us, but the idea of God resting from
all his work, taking a sabbatical, and so that day

(02:19):
of the week, that one day of the week was
special for that. Then there would also be a sabbatical
year in the Old Testament that would be every seventh year.
So you had a sabbatical day, you had a sabbatical year.
And then also during that time of the sabbatical year.

(02:42):
The land was to be left alone. It was to
lie fallow. If you will, you only harvested what naturally
would grow. You wouldn't plant or till ay that It
was a way to replenish the nutrients of the year.
They didn't understand it as we understand everything culture and
such of the chemistry of it all. But they knew

(03:02):
how it worked from their own experience, and so they
would let the land take a sabbatical, okay for that time,
every seventh year. For that there was a sabbatical year.
Now in Leviticus it speaks of seven weeks of years,

(03:23):
so seven times seven is forty nine forty nine years.
And then the fiftieth year would be the jubilee year.
As our opening prayer said, which actually came from verse
eleven of that twenty fifth chapter, this fiftieth year is
your year of jubilee. So you have a sabbatical day

(03:44):
every week, you have a sabbatical year every seventh year,
and you have a sabbatical a jubilee year as they
called it, every fiftieth year. So that's where it comes from. Now,
also in Genesis, we have the promises that God gave
to Abraham. There were two great things that God promised

(04:06):
to Abraham, the two best things that anybody could receive.
There were land and descendants. You had land that would
be yours and given to you so that you would
be able to nourish your flocks, be able to grow crops,
to be able to survive, and to live you needed food.

(04:26):
You got that from the land. You also had descendants,
your family to be able to keep that land, pass
it down to the generations, and to defend it when
it was necessary. And so land and descendants were the
two greatest things anybody could receive at that time. Those

(04:48):
are the two things that God promised to Abraham, So
land and descendants. So this starts to come together for that.
So the jubilee year was also a time where land
could be returned to a family. If a family found
themselves in very dire straits and they might have to

(05:08):
have sold off some of their patrimony, some of their heritage,
some of this land in order to survive. In a
jubilee year, there were rules for how they could get
it back and it could be returned to them so
that their descendants could come back until it again. So
all of this is in that whole long twenty fifth chapter.

(05:30):
But I'm just mentioning it in brief to give you
the idea of the context, the frame of mind that's there,
that there is a special year that can be where obligations,
for instance, can be forgiven, debts can be forgiven, slaves
can be freed, things can be returned back to what

(05:52):
they should be done to be and it's all done
equably and in proportion. So Jubilee years were a time
for forgiveness. They were a time for repentance. They were
a time for giving the land the rest, and also
for a time of thinking about the great gifts from God.

(06:15):
So for our Jubilee year, as we start to think
about it as Christians, the Jubilee year became a time
for reconciliation and a time to take pilgrimages. In the
Christian era, they don't actually officially begin the Holy Years
until the thirteen hundreds. Now they had other kinds of

(06:37):
celebrations in that earlier, but officially, as even Pote Francis
mentions in the document, they started about the thirteen hundreds
as a special year. They were first done every hundred years,
once a century, then every fifty years as it was
done in the Old Testament and the Hebrews scriptures. Then

(07:01):
every thirty three years, because that was the extent of
the time of the life of Christ, and then finally
it settled on every twenty five years. Now, our Jewish
brethren don't mark a holy year that much anymore now,
but we still keep up the tradition for it, so
that every twenty five years there is a holy year,
although the pope actually has the authority to inaugurate another

(07:27):
one at different times as well, but on a regular schedule,
they'd be every twenty five years or so, as we
do it now. And during this time it's a time
of reconciliation. It's also a time to go on pilgrimage
to holy places, to shrines. I remember back when maybe
you were in college or high school or that, and

(07:48):
you studied English literature and stuff and other literature. He
studied the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. The context of the
Canterbury Tales are a pilgrimage to a holy shrine, and
they're telling those stories of the Canterbury Tales while they're
traveling to these shrines and that. So the idea has

(08:10):
been with us for a while. So that's the idea
of taking a pilgrimage during a holy year. There are
many pilgrimage sites all over. Our Musslem brethren do it
on the very special one that you do sometimes only
once in your lifetime or that in the Maslem faith
in Islam. So others do it as well. But the

(08:32):
idea of going on a pilgrimage and the idea of
having a very special time reserved for that, now it
can be done at any time. You take a pilgrimage anywhere.
There are all kinds of sites in the United States
to go on pilgrimage to certain shrines, so that that
are holy places. There are places especially shrines to our lady,
think a Foudoma, think of lurids, think of Guadalupe. And

(08:55):
the other one says well, But as far as church
to do, there are these sabbatical years, these jubilee years
now every twenty five years. The idea now that I
want to move into is how are the holy doors
associated with this? The whole idea of a holy door
isn't until a couple of hundred years later from the

(09:19):
time of the jubilee when it officially starts. As I said,
in the thirteen hundreds. The Holy doors are a little
bit later about the year fifteen hundred for that. Now,
there are many different kinds of church buildings. You think of,
for instance, the churches that we have, the chapel that
we have here. You think of it a diocese. Each

(09:40):
diocese has its own cathedral, which is the main church
of the diocese. That's also the bishop's main church. And
there are also different churches that are called basilicas, which
are main important churches. There are several all over the world.
There's a couple here in the United States, for instance,

(10:03):
there's one in Emmitsburg or Mother Seton lived there's a
basilica there. Our main shrine to the Plus Virgin Mary
Washington and See is also considered a basilica. So there
are major and there are minor basilicas. Without going through
all the technicalities in that, but there are four major

(10:24):
ones for all of the Catholic Church that are in Rome.
First and foremost, the one you know about is Saint Peter's, okay,
with the colonnade of the arms that come around, and
that is probably the most famous. The other three in
Rome are Saint John Lateran, Saint Mary, Major and Saint

(10:46):
Paul outside the walls of the old city, and that's
such as called Saint Paul outside the walls for that. Now,
each one of those main for basilicas has a holy door.
If you go up and you look at the front
of the will take Saint Peter's because it's the most famous.
You've got these huge entrance doors that you would go

(11:08):
through at any time, the one over on the left
from my left, as I'm looking at you here on
this side over there, the doors are there. If you
looked around behind them, they'd be all bricked up. Same thing.
For instance, at Saint John Lattery, you've got the entrance
doors and on the one side it looks like a

(11:31):
solid concrete wall in front of the doors. The other
ones can be opened and people come and go, but
this one is pricked up. And it's the same true
for the other two burcas as well. For that. So
again we're talking about the four main ones that are
in Rome for that. Okay, so let's get back to
the one at Saint Peter's. It's all bricked up and

(11:55):
can't get through it. People come and go through the
other ones. The doors on that the holy door are
about twelve feet high. They weigh about ten thousand pounds,
and they are totally bricked up. People come and go
through the other entrance doors. But in a holy year,

(12:17):
in a holy year, that door and the ones in
the other basilicas are opened up. The bricks are taken
away or the concrete wall comes down, and then it's
opened up and it stays open twenty four to seven
for the entire length of that holy year. And so

(12:39):
it's different. Now how does that happen? Well, first of all,
the doors are prepared. When the Pope announces there's going
to be a holy year, the Vatican Stonemasons and others,
the technical people start to get to work and they
make a huge framework with ropes and pulleys and everything,

(13:02):
and they start to chip away the mortar around the
frame of the door. They start to free it up,
and this takes some time for this, and then there
is a ceremony. The ceremony is what starts officially this
holy year and what happens. The Pope comes and it's

(13:27):
a great thing. Now with the conclave going, you've seen
on TV the cardinals coming together into the Sistine Chapel
to start the work of electing a new pulpe and
every all the ceremony in their beautiful red robes and everything,
and the processions in and that the ritual is great.

(13:47):
The same thing's true with the start of a holy year,
tremendous amount of ritual around it. It's a beautiful thing
to see. So they've loosened up the mortar and the
bricks all around the door ahead of time. They made
a framework, and they've put ropes and pulleys around and everything.
Everything is ready, and the pope comes through. He has

(14:08):
a very ornate silver usually with a silver plated hammer,
and he goes up to that brick wall and he
strikes it a couple of times, maybe about three times,
and that wall falls down. The doors are thrown open,

(14:30):
and he's the first one to walk through. That's what
starts the whole year. And again, as you can imagine,
it's a ritual that is impressive with these huge, gigantic
heavy doors being thrown open and he walks through. Now,
John Paul, the second one, he did one of his
whole years. He just pushed the wall. That was his

(14:53):
way of doing it, and Francis did it. Benedict at
the time was retired but was still alive, and one
of the holy years that Francis did, they walked in
together for it. So it changes a little bit. Now
the wall doesn't come tumbling down in a big mess.
They've got it figured out with all these ropes and pulleys.
It's all set up ahead of time so that the

(15:16):
wall gently comes down so that they can walk over
the mortar and everything in the bricks and then go
through and walk through for it. So again it's all
set up ahead of time, and it's always always impressive
for that, so he walks through. Now these doors will
remain open twenty four seven for the entire time of

(15:39):
the Holy Year, and at the end then the doors
will be closed. There's one set of doors, and the
Pope will have a very ornate trawl, and the mortar
and everything will be set up, and he'll take and
he'll lay the first brick down, and that close the

(16:01):
whole year with the start of the ceiling up of
the Holy Door. And then the Vatican Masons will come
through and they'll put fresh bricks up and mortar and
everything in the concrete over it, and everything that's there
for all of them, but especially of Saint Peter's. That's
the one that starts it ends that the other ones
do it. Usually another cardinal does the other doors, although

(16:22):
sometimes the pope does all four. But they start with
Saint Peter's, and so they go through before that, and
that will close it. Then, but the pope hits the wall,
it falls down or is brought down gently. He walks through,
he comes back, the door's closed. He puts down cementsa

(16:44):
in the first bricks, verse one or two. Then they
start up and that closes it. So that's how it works.
It symbolizes the idea of the open door of forgiveness
thinking the Gospel when Jesus says He is the gate
and you come in through the gate. So it represents
that the idea of coming to Christ, of coming to forgiveness,

(17:05):
and that forgiveness is there all the time, holy year
or not, but this dramatically emphasizes that opportunity for forgiveness,
for repentance, for reconciliation, for beginning again, for thinking about
these themes, and the idea of pilgrimage as well, for
doing something for this. And so people can enter the

(17:29):
basilica at any time, even though the forgiveness and reconciliation
is available at any time of the year, So the
Holy year is a way to emphasize these kinds of things.
It's a powerful reminder. Now I'm just going to give
you two personal notes about this before we move on

(17:49):
to the Document of Francis. In the nineteen eighties yearly
nineteen eighties, some of you know, I was over in
Rome doing my research work and studies at the Punic
Biblical Institute. I was at the Biblicum, and in nineteen
eighty three I was there and a friend of mine
who was also at the Biblicum, we took a little

(18:11):
break from our studies and we went over to Saint
John Lattering and we went through there, and it was
in the off season, so there weren't allow of tourists around.
It was later in the afternoon and we were taking
a break before dinner, and we walked through there and
we happened to run into the curator of Saint John Lateran,
and he wasn't doing that much for that again, it

(18:33):
wasn't a busy time, so he gave us a little tour,
just the two of us, and he took us down
into the crypt and everything underneath in the basement of
Saint John Latter in this huge basilica, showed us all
these things and everything, and of course we spoke Italian,
and we were able to understand what he was saying.
Everything was wonderful. When it was all over, we went
through and we came out. We went to the Holy Door,

(18:54):
which at that time, in nineteen eighty three, it was
all breaked up. It looked like a solid wall of concrete.
And we said a prayer there, and then we started
the mutes. Where will we be the next time this
door gets opened? The last time it had been in
nineteen seventy five. The next time would be on the
regular schedule in two thousand. Where would we be in

(19:17):
two thousand, back home in our own diocese, maybe teaching,
maybe in a seminary, maybe in a Paris, who knows.
We talked about these things for a little bit, and
we went and went back home. That very same week,
John Paul the Second announced an extraordinary Holy year that
was going to take place that very year. It was

(19:41):
the one of the Redemption, supposed to be on the
traditional anniversary of the passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ.
It was the Holy year of redemption. Where were we
when that doors opened? We were right there. We saw it.
We were able to be a part of it. Who knew,
but we were able to be there. I was able
to go through all four of the Holy doors over

(20:02):
the time that was there, when that Holy year was
in nineteen eighty three. For that. Now, as I said,
new bricks are put in when the doors are closed,
and they're going to be closed up and bricked up
again for that another personal note. Then the old bricks

(20:24):
are all cleaned up, and then there's a possibility that people, churches, museums, others, whoever,
can petition for one of them. So there I was
in Rome at the Holy year of nineteen eighty three,
and they were accepting petitions for the ones from the
previous year nineteen seventy five, the old saying nothing ventured,

(20:50):
nothing gained. I'd put in a petition and it was accepted,
and I got one, and I've got it here with
me today. Okay, if you take a look at it,
I'll show it to you a little bit later. I
will put it on display maybe for part of this
Holy year or that. It's one of the bricks, it's handmade,
it's from the nineteen seventy five holy year. Paul sixth

(21:14):
was pontiff at that time, was the pope, So his
coat of arms are on it, it's number, and it's registered.
The documentation is all there. It's a very prized possession. Again,
it was from that who a year which they had
cleaned it all up and everything and made new bricks
and put those up for nineteen eighty three when they

(21:34):
closed it up. So those two personal notes I would
just like to share with you. I've got the full
documentation there and everything, and it's very prize possession. You
think of it almost like a relic in some ways,
at least I do. Okay, Now I'd like to move
on to the document that started the announcement of the
holy year was done by Pope Francis for this holy

(21:56):
year of twenty twenty five, and it's the name of
the doc is simply Hope does not disappoint. It comes
from the Scriptures. It comes from the New Testament, from
Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans. In chapter five, verse five,
he says that hope does not disappoint. And so there
are two main ideas in a holy year that, as

(22:19):
I said, of repentance and pilgrimage, and it starts with
the holy doors being open for that, and so hope
becomes the main theme for this holy year. We need
to be pilgrims of hope. Whether we go out of
pilgrimage or not, all of us as followers of Christ

(22:41):
are called to be pilgrims of hope. And so these
ideas are all connected, the ideas of repentance, the idea
of pilgrimage, the idea of hope altogether. And so what
I want to do is just briefly go through some
of the thoughts of Pope Francis in this document that
he he gives an ideal. He leaves the details up

(23:04):
to others, especially to governments and world leaders, how they
would work out these kinds of things. But it's for
everybody to think about. And again he's giving what is
the ideal, what we should strive for. Those are the
kinds of words that he's speaking. How it's going to
work out, how we can make it happen for others

(23:26):
to try to determine. So one of the things that
Transis does is he tries to define what is hope?
What is it? And he says it's a desire and
an expectation of good things to come. We don't know
the future, and we can have mixed feelings about it.

(23:46):
In some ways, there's trust, but there's also anxiety. There's
conviction about it and God's providence, but there's also doubt.
We don't know. There's a lot of un certainty about
the future. We've seen that in our own lives. But
the Jubilee year is a chance to think about these things,

(24:08):
and especially to renew our hope. God gives us reasons
for hope, and they can be found in sacred scripture.
But Francis decided to choose Saint Paul as our guide
for this year of hope, and hope is one as

(24:29):
we know. Of the main theological virtues, Faith and love
are the other two, and they come from the Holy Spirit.
And Saint Paul tells us in his Epistle to the Romans,
hope does not disappoint because it is a gift from
God through the Holy Spirit. And Saint Augustine tells us

(24:49):
that we cannot live without hope. We are tested by trials,
but hope gives us patience in those trials. But Francis
notes that it's hard to have patients in our modern world.
We want everything now, instant this instant that put something

(25:09):
in a microwave, zap, it's done. We want it right now.
But hope doesn't work that way. We need patience. And
he goes on to remind us, you know, even God
has the virtue of patience. He has patience with us,
a lot of patients with us as a matter of fact.

(25:33):
And so a pilgrimage, even if it's one we don't
actually physically go anywhere, but if we go on a
spiritual pilgrimage and within ourselves and think about these things,
it's a time perhaps to reflect on this. A pilgrimage
going somewhere, even if it's just a short place, there's
a chance to see other parts of creation, to visit

(25:54):
a holy place. It's an idea time and opportunity to
reflect on things. As if you think about it, our
whole life is a journey. Every one of us is
on pilgrimage. We are pilgrim people throughout our whole lives.
This is a chance to focus that a little bit,
and so we can make a small pilgrimage, might be

(26:16):
just to the cathedral in our own diocese, perhaps maybe
we can work out something here. You can go down
to Chapel. There are other ways to make pilgrimages now.
But Francis goes on to say that the final sign
of hope will be peace in the world, and he
says that world leaders oftentimes do not see this, and

(26:40):
they don't see the universal significance of just regional events.
That a regional strife can have global consequences. We know
that firsthand in our own world today as we see
what's going on. But also too, he notes that a
fear of future and a lack of hope can cause

(27:03):
us many problems in our society and in our world,
and he points out some of these. There are certainly others,
but he wants to highlight some. One of those that
he does is to say that because of our fear
of the future, that's one of the reasons for it
decline in the birth rate, for instance, that we need
an openness to life and responsible parenthood, but our fear

(27:27):
of the future and what kind of world we're going
to leave to our descendants will oftentimes affect people. But
that it is part of God's plan for us to
be fruitful and to give life, and so This is
part of what is intrusted to spouses that they have hope.
That Christian communities also need to foster hope and to

(27:51):
show a joy in living. Sometimes we can lose. That
Christians should be signs of hope for those who feel
a lack of responsact and dignity from others. And then
he starts to note some difficult situations, the ill, the elderly.
He points out those who lack freedom, those who lack dignity.

(28:16):
He goes on to single out the young. They should
embody hope, but rather they feel fear and frustration. But
Francis says they lose their enthusiasm, they lack hope in
their dreams because of the world they live in. They
become discouraged. They turn to drugs and other risky behaviors

(28:42):
for momentary pleasures. He also notes teens, students, and young
couples especially. He mentions them because they're the rising generation
and they are the hope of the church as well
as the hope for the world itself. For that, he
moves on then to speak of exiles and refugees. The

(29:04):
Christian communities need to defend the rights of those who
are most vulnerable so that they can hope for a
better future. And then he comes back to the idea
of spotlighting the elderly, and he says we need their
wisdom and experience. He mentions grandparents is that they need

(29:24):
the support and gratitude of their children and their grandchildren,
because the elderly grandparents can be a source of encouragement
to the young. He notes then the poor and the hungry,
that they are often sometimes very near and close to us,
not just far off someplace, but even within our own neighborhoods.

(29:48):
And he sees hunger as a scandal. The goods of
creation should be available to all, and that even in
the most prosperous of countries, that there is hunger and
that there is poverty. He doesn't come up with detailed
answers of how to do it, but he reminds us
of the obligation we have not to neglect those and

(30:11):
not to put them off, but to remember them. Now
going on in the document, but Francis makes a note
of the Consul of Nicea, because it's the seventeen hundredth
anniversary of death Consul. That's the creed that we say
at mass, different from the one with the Rosary. There's

(30:33):
a need for evangelization and a need for unity at
the Last Supper. Setting in John's Gospel, Jesus in his
Great Prayer, the priestly Prayer speaks and prays that may
they all be one. That was his prayer at the
Last Supper before he died, and the Holy Year can remember,

(30:53):
can remind us of that and be a remembrance to
emphasize this. And it was one of the themes at
the consul of Nicea, and one of the things that
the Pope points out, it's kind of fortuitous, a bit
of happenstance. One of the things that the Council of
Nicea settled was the date of Easter, and it changes

(31:13):
between Eastern and Western churches, but sometimes it coincides. And
this year, twenty twenty five year, this whole year, it
did coincide, and we celebrated Easter on the same day
as our Eastern brethren. And so Francis mentions all of
this for that, and so these are all helps for us.

(31:38):
It helps us and to rekindle our hope. Hope will
help us now in our lives now and give us
a vision. And it will also help us too as
we think ahead, even to the time of death. Hope
can help us to face death. Jesus died, was buried, rose,

(31:59):
and appeared in the flesh. The jubilee helps us to
realize that we too have a vision beyond just this world,
and to remind us of that that this has offered
to us as well. Then we will suffer and die,
but if we are faithful, we too will rise again.

(32:21):
It's not automatic. We need to do our part. But
Francis goes on and he gives us a fine example,
a very powerful example. He said, think about the martyrs.
Where would they be if they didn't have hope? There
would be no reason. Their faith and their hope, their

(32:42):
love for Christ. Those three theological virsues help them to
sacrifice their lives for something much greater. The hope, the trust,
the confidence they had. And so he gives the example
of the martyrs. We will not suffer as they do,
but the sufferings we do have, and the trials and

(33:05):
the tribulations we do have, should be offered up because
we have hope. We have faith in Christ, that what
he said about himself came true, what he says for
us will also come true. We have that hope, and
it comes out of His great love for us, and
out of that we should have love for one another.

(33:28):
And so the prope reminds us of God's mercy. We
will all be judged, but what can sustain us when
we think about our final judgment is that it will
come out of love and out of God's mercy, and
that should help and be a contribution to our hope
for that judgment to be for us to be with

(33:50):
Him forever. All of this, the faith, hope and love
helps us to pray for others, both the living and
the dead, and that is what we pray in the
other Creed in the Apostles Creed. When we talk about
the communion of Saints, as I mentioned before, I always
like to go into the schools and talk with the

(34:11):
kids of the classrooms and in the elementary schools as such,
and for some of the younger ones if there are
learning parts of the Creed or something as their religion class,
and that it was interesting that several of them they thought,
if we asked him, what do you mean by the
communion of saints? They thought, what that means? The saints
up in heaven received communion every day? Makes sense to
them to a child. Yeah, that's logical. But what we

(34:34):
mean by the communion of saints is our bond with
those who have gone before us. And so for those
who we knew, because we don't know, those who were
our friends, our relatives, our closest family, who have died,
we have hope for them and then a hope for ourselves.
And we have this spiritual connection that in love, all

(34:56):
of us are together, and that can't be broken. Even
death itself cannot break those bonds that we have with
those gone before us, those who are here, and that
we will have with those who come after us. All
of this comes together. The sacrament of reconciliation is a

(35:18):
part of this. It's a good thing to think about
during the time of reconciliation and of a wholy year.
With the sacrament of penance confession, we have the assurance
that our sins are forgiven. Now, it's not automatic. Again,
we need to have the spirit of contrition and repentance
and such. But the sacrament is powerful and it gives

(35:41):
us that assurance that we can begin again. That can
be a source of hope, a sign of hope for us. Again,
it's not automatic. In the sense of that it's going
to happen no matter what. No, it will happen with
our devout reception of the sacrament, which wipes the slate

(36:03):
clean and we can begin all again. So another thing
to think about during the time of the year of
the Jubilee. God forgives us, and out of that forgiveness
we should forgive others. It doesn't erase the past. It's
not going to take away the hurt of those who

(36:23):
may have hurt us deeply, but it does help us
to leave that behind all right, and then it doesn't
fester within us. You know that hurt can hurt us
in many ways. Again, we can't forget it, but if

(36:45):
we can't move behind it, it's often like a cancer
growing inside of us spiritually. And so our hope, our forgiveness,
our love for others, our faith, our realization what Christ
has done for us can help us so that revenge
does not consume us and hurt us and keep us

(37:09):
down and make us unhappy and take away our hope. Now,
hope is not a naive optimism. Every it is going
to be fine, but it's a gift from God, a
theological virtue to help us cope with the realities of life. Again,

(37:31):
it's not going to take them away. It's not going
to take away all those realities, all that suffering, all
of that hurt, doesn't just wipe everything clean, but it
helps us to cope with those realities. One of the
best examples we can use, of course, is about the
Virgin Mary. She didn't have all the answers at the
time of the annunciation, but she had faith in God,

(37:55):
trust and hope, and of course her heart was filled
with love. So when gab came and said this, she
was open to it. She didn't know how it was
all going to work out. Neither did Saint Joseph. But
they had that trust, and they had that hope that
God would be with them and would help them alone.
And so it was, and so she said yes for

(38:18):
that again a great example for us. And of her
many titles Mother of God, she's also known under the
title Mother of Sorrows, and she is comforted of the afflicted,
as we say in the Litany. For that, and so
she can be an example for us. She hoped, in
God's promises, was able to do that. And so we're

(38:40):
in a holy year. We've got an entire year to
think about these things. Think about it anytime, any year
of your life. But this is a special time. It's
an extraordinary one. It's one of hope. It is one
of hope, not disappointing us to remind us of that.
It's part of our tradition of doing one on a
regular basis, and sometimes an extraordinary one. Okay, there are others.

(39:07):
There are have been others through and maybe you've lived
through several of them. But the whole year is that
one time when those doors that had been bricked up
are thrown open and stay open the entire year, to
remind us that always, always, always, faith, hope, and charity

(39:27):
are always these gifts, these virtues present to us, given
to us as our gifts. We can make a spiritual
pilgrimation if we can't make a physical one. We can
think about those doors, think about what's open and available
to us, Think about what God has done, what we,
out of our gratitude, need to do for our neighbors

(39:48):
as well. So part of the Jubilee year in the
Hebrew scriptures was that of the obligations we head to
each other, the forgiveness of debts, the forgive this of injuries,
the reclaiming of land. All of that was part of it,
but it became part of their tradition, and it was

(40:09):
part of the realization of what God had done. He
himself rested on the seventh Day. It was a sabbatical
year every seven years, and then there was a jubilee
or sabbatical time of every fiftieth year, and it was
very much tied in with thanksgiving to God for all

(40:29):
the great gifts and what that meant then for what
you did for your neighbor. To show that these are
all tied together, we keep up the tradition and that's
what we are doing. So this truly is a special time,
and so we should rejoice in it. We get a
part of our lives and do what we can to
go on pilgrimage in our own way and to rejoice

(40:52):
because hope does not disappoint.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
Hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabelle Moseley, author, professor of theology,
and host of Then Sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood
on WCAT Radio. I invite you to listen in and
find inspiration along this sacred journey. We're traveling together to
make our lives a masterpiece and with God's grace, become saints.

(41:20):
Join me Annabel Moseley for then sings My Soul and
Destination Sainthood on WCAT Radio. God bless you. Remember you're
never alone. God is always we feel.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Thank you for listening to a production of WCAT Radio.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
Please join us in our mission of evangelization, and don't
forget love lifts up when knowledge takes flight.