On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis opened the Holy Door of Saint Peter’s Basilica, thus inaugurating the Ordinary Jubilee, 2025. This year is a gift the Church is offering to each of us to experience on the journey of our lives, in which to pause, strengthen “the feeble knees” (Is 35:3), and commence once again from where we are.
To start again with hope. In the Holy Year, this is precisely the virtue that should accompany us Knights and Dames of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre the most, along with all Christians.
During his Christmas Eve Homily, Pope Francis said, “There is hope for each of us. And do not forget, sisters and brothers, that God forgives everything, God always forgives. Do not forget this, which is a way of understanding hope in the Lord.” Let us therefore accept the invitation to open our hearts to God’s forgiveness, which gives hope to our eyes with which we look at our pettiness, sometimes even our falls, as well as the poverty and suffering of the world.
We await you in Rome during this year, especially for the jubilee pilgrimage that we will experience together as Members of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in October. I heartily wish you a time of grace with the words left to us by Pope Benedict XVI in the 2007 Encyclical Spe Salvi: “The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.”
Fernando Cardinal Filoni
(Grand Master)