The Pope announces the Holy Year 2025 and asks for amnesties and sentence amnesties: “I will open a Holy Door in a prison”

With the presentation and reading of the Bull «Spes non confundit» (“hope does not disappoint”), Pope Francis officially announced this afternoon the ordinary Jubilee 2025, which will begin with the opening of the Holy Door on December 24th and will close on January 6, 2026. And a crucial point of the Bull of indiction is the Pontiff’s request to governments to provide for forms of amnesty or sentence amnesties for prisoners during the Holy Year. With an announcement: «To offer prisoners a concrete sign of closeness, I myself wish to open a Holy Door in a prison, so that it may be a symbol for them that invites them to look to the future with hope and with a renewed commitment to life», he makes know the Pontiff.
Attention to the lives of prisoners proves to be central for Pope Bergoglio, who last Holy Thursday performed the ritual of the Washing of the Feet of 12 inmates of the Rebibbia women’s prison, while in his visit to Venice at the end of April he visited another institution of female punishment, at the Giudecca, home of the Vatican pavilion at the Art Biennale. Requests for “acts of clemency” are certainly not new for Popes on the occasion of Jubilees. However, the initiative will cause discussion, especially in Italy where the issue of justice is at the center of the political debate.
«I propose to governments that in the Year of the Jubilee they take initiatives that restore hope; forms of amnesty or sentence remission aimed at helping people regain confidence in themselves and in society; paths of reintegration into the community which correspond to a concrete commitment to the observance of the laws”, we read in the Papal Bull symbolically delivered this afternoon, in a ceremony in the atrium of St. Peter’s, right in front of the Holy Door, to the archpriests of the papal Basilicas, to various representatives of the Church throughout the world, and to the apostolic prothonotary Leonardo Sapienza who read it before the celebration of Vespers.
«In the Jubilee Year we will be called to be tangible signs of hope for many brothers and sisters who live in difficult conditions. I think of the prisoners who, deprived of freedom, experience every day, in addition to the harshness of imprisonment, the emotional void, the restrictions imposed and, in quite a few cases, the lack of respect”, underlines Francis. «In every corner of the earth, believers, especially Pastors, should act as interpreters of these requests, forming a single voice that courageously calls for dignified conditions for those imprisoned, respect for human rights and above all the abolition of the death penalty, a provision contrary to the Christian faith and which destroys any hope of forgiveness and renewal”, he adds.
The extensive document announcing the Jubilee places the theme of “hope” at its center, hoping that the Holy Year itself can be an opportunity to “resuscitate” it, in a world characterized by strong pressures in the opposite direction. And for the Pope, this hope must be accompanied by another virtue, patience, despite “in the age of the internet”, it is not “at home”, “put to flight by haste”. And “signs of hope” the Pope invokes them first and foremost for “peace for the world, which once again finds itself immersed in the tragedy of war”: “the need for peace challenges everyone and requires us to pursue concrete projects. the commitment of diplomacy to courageously and creatively build spaces for negotiation aimed at lasting peace is lacking”.
The Pope asks us to concretely combat the birth rate (tomorrow, among other things, he will speak for the second time at the States General of the birth rate). He also implores signs of hope for the sick, the young, the elderly, the migrants, the “billions of poor”. And finally he renews his appeals for a fund against hunger to be set up with money for weapons and for the cancellation of the debts of poor countries.