The Vatican on Tuesday unveiled the logo for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, which will be celebrated from 8 December 2015 to 20 November 2016.
Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelisation, presented in the Vatican press hall the image of Christ having taken upon his shoulders the lost soul.
It was designed, Archbishop Fisichella said, “to express the profound way in which the Good Shepherd touches the flesh of humanity and does so with a love that has the power to change one’s life”.
The logo, with its motto “Merciful Like the Father” (Luke 6:36), is the work of Fr Marko I. Rupnik, a Jesuit born in Slovenia in 1954.
The scene is enclosed in a mandorla, an element typically found in ancient and medieval iconography, that recalls the coexistence of the two natures, divine and human, in Christ.
The yearlong extraordinary jubilee also include several individual jubilee days, such as for the Roman Curia, catechists, teenagers and prisoners, said the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, the office organising events for the Holy Year of Mercy.
One way the Pope wants to show mercy is to send out "missionaries of mercy" – specially selected priests who have been granted "the authority to pardon even those sins reserved to the Holy See," the Pope wrote in the document officially proclaiming the Holy Year.
Archbishop Fisichella said the priests will be chosen on the basis of their ability to preach well, especially on the theme of mercy, and be "good confessors," meaning they are able to express God's love and do not make the confessional, as Pope Francis says, like "a torture chamber."
The priests will also have to "be patient" and have "an understanding of human fragility," the archbishop said.
More than a dozen individual jubilee celebrations will be scheduled in 2016, such as a jubilee for consecrated men and women on 2 February to close the Year of Consecrated Life; a jubilee for the Roman Curia on 22 February; a jubilee for those devoted to the spirituality of Divine Mercy on Divine Mercy Sunday, 3 April; and separate jubilees for teenagers; for deacons; priests; the sick and disabled; and catechists.
A jubilee for "workers and volunteers of mercy" will be celebrated on Blessed Mother Teresa of Kolkata's feast day, 5 September, and a jubilee for prisoners will be celebrated on 6 November.
Archbishop Fisichella said the Pope wants the jubilee for inmates to be celebrated not only in prisons, but also with him in St Peter's Basilica. He said the council is discussing the possibility with government authorities and is not yet sure if it can be done.
The Vatican is asking bishops and priests around the world to conduct "similar symbolic gestures of communion with Pope Francis" and his vision of reaching out to those on the margins.
A iubilaeummisericordiae website – www.im.va for short– has been launched in seven languages.
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