What is a Jubilee Year?

On Christmas Eve this year the Jubilee Year of the Roman Catholic Church, the Giubileo, will begin. A year of pilgrimage which will see Catholics making the journey to Rome, as they have for two millennia.

Fresco showing Boniface VIII Caetani making a proclamation, usually considered to be that of the first Jubilee in February 1300. Saint John in Lateran.

The word jubilee, with its overtones of jubilance and joyousness, has its root in the Hebrew yobel. This was the archaic name for the ram’s horn trumpet (more usually called the shofar) which was used on the Feast of Yom Kippur to herald the arrival of every fiftieth year. Before the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel by the neo-Assyrian king Sargon II in the eighth century BCE—when Rome was but a semi-legendary nascent kingdom—this fiftieth, holy, year followed “seven sabbaths of years”. These seven cycles of seven years, detailed in the Book of Leviticus, saw some debts forgiven, liberation of those in servitude, a fallow year for agriculture, and the return of people to their homes: a year of pardon and contemplation.