What Is Rome’s Holy Year And The Indulgences That Go With It?
(ANALYSIS) The Religion Guy’s Answer: Italy’s tourism agency expects 35 million pilgrims to visit Rome during the Catholic Church’s current “Holy Year” or “Jubilee” that runs through Epiphany on January 6, 2026. In modern times, Holy Years usually occur in 25-year intervals, though Pope Francis called an “extraordinary” one in 2015 and has announced a 2033 Jubilee will commemorate the approximate 2,000th anniversary of the redemption won in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Although Rome is the traditional destination, Catholics will join innumerable local versions worldwide.
The Roman ritual includes prescribed prayers and visits to St. Peter’s Basilica and other sacred sites, and worshippers are urged to perform works of charity as well as piety. Since pilgrimages and prayers are available for visitors any day of any year, the factor that distinguishes Jubilees is the popes’ grant of “plenary indulgences” to lift participants’ penalties due for sin. More on this belief below.
The practice of special periodic pilgrimages to Rome was originated in 1300 by Pope Boniface VIII (who alas was memorably assigned to the eighth circle of Hell in Dante’s “Inferno” for selling church offices). Indulgences provoked a formal complaint in 1517 from university professor and priest Martin Luther that soon burgeoned into the Protestant Reformation with a far broader set of differences with the papal church. Luther was quickly excommunicated and given a lifelong death sentence by the Holy Roman Empire as the disputes over church doctrine and governance divided Christians — and still do.
Indulgences For sale
At the start, Luther was irate that clergy were raising money by selling indulgences that parishioners could apply to themselves or to deceased persons existing in the afterlife. The papal church declared in 1563 at the concluding session of the Council of Trent that indulgences would continue but “without corruption” that had been “a most prolific source of abuses among the Christian people.” Trent taught that “the power of granting indulgences was conferred by Christ on the Church” and condemned “with anathema” those who denied this.
The current Catholic understanding was defined just after the Second Vatican Council in Pope Paul VI’s 1967 apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina (“The Doctrine of Indulgences”) and the detailed Enchiridion (manual) issued the following year by the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary. Both documents should be consulted for numerous details that an article of this length cannot treat.
The teaching is summarized as follows in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Some media accounts mistakenly say an indulgence forgives sins. Rather, it forgives the punishment due for sins that remains after they have been forgiven through confession in the sacrament of Reconciliation, a.k.a. Penance. Even ‘venial” (minor) sins “must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. The purification frees one from what is called the ‘temporal punishment’ of sin.” This process involves “works of mercy and charity as well as by prayer and the various practices of penance.”
Keys of the Kingdom
The church bases this practice on Christ telling St. Peter that “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19). In Catholic belief, Jesus commissioned Peter as the first pope in a line that extends to the present day, and among other roles the papacy controls recompense for sin. (Protestants contend that Jesus thereby did not establish the popes’ singular powers but the collective authority of the Christian church and its leaders.)
The Catholic Church, “by virtue of the power of binding and loosing granted her by Christ Jesus, intervenes in favor of individual Christians and opens for them the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints to obtain from the Father of mercies the remission of the temporal punishments due for their sins.” Indulgences can apply either to a Catholic in this life or to “the faithful departed now being purified.”
A ”partial” indulgence removes some punishment, while a “plenary” indulgence such as that being bestowed upon Holy Year pilgrims “removes all of the temporal punishment due to sin” under a right exclusive to the pope. In addition to Holy Years, indulgences are linked with special days in the church calendar.
On one former aspect of the system, the Catholic Encyclopedia explained in 1917 that church statements that an indulgence covers “days or years” means “it cancels an amount of purgatorial punishment equivalent to that which would have been remitted, in the sight of God, by the performance of so many days or years of the ancient canonical penance. Here, evidently, the reckoning makes no claim to absolute exactness; it has only a relative value. God alone knows what penalty remains to be paid and what its precise amount is in severity and duration.” Pope Paul’s 1967 decree abolished the traditional listings of days or years of removed punishments in Purgatory.
‘Raccolta’ no more
In past times, the Vatican periodically issued the Raccolta (“Collection”) listing the indulgences with the days and years that were attached to hundreds of specific rituals and good works in papal edicts. A typical Raccolta, available online, ran to 684 pages, vastly longer than the 1968 Enchiridion, of which one-fifth covered honors and prayers to the Virgin Mary.
Another Raccolta online, for instance, listed the 1876 papal grant of seven years for spending the last half-hour of New Year’s Eve and the first half-hour of New Year’s Day “in thanksgiving to the Holy Trinity for benefits received.” In the 1968 manual, a “partial” indulgence (no years specified) is granted to those who invoke the “Te Deum” in a spirit of forgiveness, while the same practice if undertaken on December 31 brings a “plenary” indulgence.
In each instance, an indulgence grant requires that a believer undergo sacramental penance, receive communion at Mass, pray for “the intentions of the pope” and, as the canon law code states (see #s 992-997), be truly penitent and “in the state of grace” at completion of “the prescribed works.”
Importantly, Pope Paul’s decree teaches that under canon law when a parishioner is “in danger of death” a priest can provide the sacraments and “the apostolic blessing with its attendant plenary indulgence.” If no priest is available, the church mercifully grants a plenary indulgence if believers “are properly disposed and have been in the habit of reciting some prayers during their lifetime.”
This article was originally published at Patheos.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.