Pope Leo closes final Holy Door to end 2025 Jubilee

‘Let us ask ourselves: is there life in our Church? Is there space for something new to be born? Do we love and proclaim a God who sets us on a journey?’

Pope Leo closed the Holy Door at St Peter’s on the Feast of the Epiphany to end the Jubilee of Hope opened by Pope Francis on Christmas Eve 2024.

Before Mass in the basilica, Leo conducted the rite to close the door, “confident that the Good Shepherd will ever keep open the door of his heart to welcome us whenever we are weary or burdened”. 

In his homily, Leo said that during the 2025 Jubilee the door “has seen a stream of innumerable men and women, pilgrims of hope, journeying towards a new Jerusalem, the city whose doors are always open”.

Such people offer an example of spiritual searching “much richer perhaps than we can comprehend”, he said, and the cathedrals and shrines they visit “must diffuse the aroma of life, the unforgettable realisation that another world has begun”.

“Let us ask ourselves: is there life in our Church? Is there space for something new to be born? Do we love and proclaim a God who sets us on a journey?”

He continued: “The Jubilee reminds us that we can start anew, indeed, that we are still at the beginning and that the Lord wants his presence to grow among us as God-with-us. Yes, God challenges the existing order, for he has plans that inspire his prophets even today. God is determined to rescue us from both old and new forms of slavery.”

The Jubilee, Leo said, should teach Christians to abandon “a distorted economy [that] tries to profit from everything” and instead “to recognise a pilgrim in the visitor, a seeker in the stranger, a neighbour in the foreigner, and fellow travellers in those who are different”.

“If we do not reduce our churches to monuments, if our communities are homes, if we stand united and resist the flattery and seduction of those in power, then we will be the generation of a new dawn,” he said.

Speaking at the Angelus after the Mass, the Pope said that “the Jubilee has reminded us of the justice founded on gratuitousness, of the original jubilee prescriptions, which included a call for the integration of peaceful living, a redistribution of the land and its resources, and a restoration of ‘what one has’ and ‘what one is’ to the designs of God”.

“May his Kingdom grow, may his words come to fulfilment in us, may strangers and enemies become brothers and sisters,” he said. “In the place of inequality, may there be fairness, and may the industry of war be replaced by the craft of peace. As weavers of hope, let us journey together towards the future by another road.”

The Vatican said 33,475,369 pilgrims from 185 countries visited Rome during the year, exceeding a previous projection of 31 million. Of these, 62 per cent came from Europe and 17 per cent from North America.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation responsible for organising Jubilee events, said the city’s other pilgrimage sites reported “unprecedented attendance”. Presenting the figures on Monday, he insisted the visitors were not tourists but a people with “a great desire for prayer and conversion”.

That evening, more than 5,000 of the volunteers who assisted Jubilee pilgrims at St Peter’s made the final passage through the Holy Door before it closed the next morning.

Jubilee shows God’s plan is for ‘little ones’ says Leo at end of 2025

A pilgrim in the Eternal City on the Jubilee of Consecrated Life

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