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.

And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years.

Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.

And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed.

For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field.

In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession.

Leviticus 25:8-13, King James Version

In 1300, over two millennia after Sargon’s conquest of the Kingdom of Israel, and twelve centuries after Rome’s brutal sacking of Jerusalem led to the great Jewish diaspora, the pope decreed the first Jubilee year of the Catholic Church in the former imperial city.

The medieval fresco in its seventeenth century setting by Borromini, just by the Holy Door on the outside of the first pier on the right as one enters the Lateran Basilica.

Pope Boniface VIII, of the baronial Caetani family, issued a papal bull (though an animal with a ring through its nose always springs to mind, the term in fact comes from the medieval Latin bullare meaning to mark with a wax seal). The Bull was called Antiquorum Habet Fida Relatio —A Report Worthy of the Faith of the Ancients—and was issued on 22 February 1300. The reference to antiquity (which in this context refers to early Christianity) was an attempt to give historical weight to the declaration which was in no small part motivated by the need to boost the lucrative business of pilgrimage in the beleaguered Caput Mundi.

Medieval inscription of the first part of Boniface VIII’s Bull of 1300, now set above and to the left of the Holy Door at St Peter’s Basilica

Plenary indulgence was issued retroactively from Christmas of 1299 to those who visited the Roman Basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at least once a day for thirty (not necessarily consecutive) days within the Holy Year to seek confession with reverence and penitence.

The Holy Door of St Peter’s and, top left, the bottom of the inscription of the Bull of Boniface VIII

There were exclusions to this promise of pardon from sin: Christian merchants who traded with Saracens were denied, as were Frederick III of Sicily, the Colonna family, and their supporters.

Ceremonial bricks, hammer and trowels for the opening and closing of the Holy Doors. Vatican Museums

The second Jubilee took place fifty years later in 1350, albeit in the absence of the pope, the French Clement VI whose court was established at Avignon and who was represented in Rome by Cardinal Gaetani Ceccano. For the Jubilee of 1350 visits to St John Lateran were required, in addition to the Basilicas over the tombs of Peter and Paul.

Subsequent Jubilees would be celebrated more or less every thirty-three years—there was one in 1390, another in 1423—to recall the lifetime of Christ. In 1470 Pope Paul II declared that they were to be held every twenty-five years. Thus it remains, though extraordinary Jubilee years are on occasion declared: most recently in 1983 and 2016.

The Holy Door of St John Lateran, this iteration was made by the Lombard sculptor Floriano Bodini for the Jubilee of 2000.

Santa Maria Maggiore would be added to St John Lateran, St Peter in the Vatican and St Paul outside the Walls. Today each of those churches, the four patriarchal basilicas, have a Holy Door which will be opened to receive pilgrims and offer indulgence. The first Holy Door was opened at the Lateran Basilica in 1423, and this year (as then) the walled up doorways will be broken open.

The interior of the Holy Door of Saint John Lateran, most definitely closed until Christmas

In the sixteenth century, promoted by Philip Neri, the numbers of canon pilgrim churches increased to seven: the four patriarchal basilicas plus San Sebastiano and San Lorenzo, above the tombs of the early martyrs, and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, on the site of the Sessorian Palace which had once been home to St Helena, mother of Constantine. Testament to this demanding pilgrim route is found in the name of via delle Sette Chiese (road of the seven churches), which runs between St Paul outside the Walls and St Sebastian. Other names that recall the routes taken by pilgrims include via del Pellegrino and via dei Coronari (the road of the rosaries) which both lead towards the Vatican Basilica.

Large numbers of visitors to Rome are nothing new, and pilgrimage weighed heavy on the city’s infrastructure. For example during the Jubilee of 1450 the vast numbers of pilgrims led to the collapse of the wooden balustrades of the Ponte Sant Angelo, and many drowned. In response to this tragedy, in preparation for the Jubilee of 1475 Pope Sixtus IV built the new Ponte Sisto to spread the load.

Ponte Sisto, January 2024

The imperial city had fallen, Rome had shrunk in size dramatically, and the new centre of gravity had shifted across the Tiber. The Forum had been abandoned, cows and sheep grazing amid the rubble of the most powerful Empire ever to have existed, and pilgrims at the end of long and arduous journeys, intent on visiting the tomb of Peter, were funnelled down streets which turned their back on the heart of the ancient city, reflecting the reincarnation of the city of the emperors as the city of the Popes.

As the city prepares for next year’s Jubilee, restoration work and new infrastructure are once again underway in anticipation of a tradition which has been repeated for seven centuries. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.