Free Ebook – Jubilee: Much More and Much Better than a Holy Year

Resources to engage Roman Catholic friends journeying to Rome in 2025.

Where would you be if you could choose one city in the world right now? For me, it's an easy question to answer. I'd be in Rome. The city offers both a romantic allure and a la dolce vita (the sweet life) promise, as well as a historical gravitas and significance. Where else in the world can you sit next to ruins of great culture and importance and taste the heavenly sweetness of a pistachio and stracciatella gelato? Where else can you enjoy a plate of hot cacio e pepe pasta while viewing the greatest sporting arena ever? Rome's vibrance, history, beauty, and culture make it a city unlike any other. Perhaps it feels like heaven.

Yet, among all the history, art, and beauty, spiritual darkness and despair exist in Rome's central places and prominent squares. Heavy-hearted sinners climb "holy stairs" on their knees, hoping to release dead loved ones (or themselves) from the supposed punishment and cleansing of purgatory's fires. Church buildings throughout the city offer portrayals of triumph, power, beauty, and glory, all while obscuring the liberating truths of humility, service, simplicity, and sacrifice. Assurance of pardon and hope of life are abandoned for laborious duties, religious works, and sacramental practices with little promise you've done enough. Ecclesiastical leaders extort money and exact power over everyday people in exchange for possible salvation and unquestioned loyalty to a dogma that uses the language of grace but demands the energy of earning.

2025 will only amplify all the beauty and all the darkness of the Eternal City as the Vatican has issued a summons to the Roman Catholic faithful to journey in. The city has beautified popular tourist locations and historic monuments. Fountains have been polished, columns cleaned, art restored, and transportation systems improved. Religious pilgrims to the city are offered the hope of liberation from purgatory, divine forgiveness, reconciled relationships, and spiritual vitality in exchange for obedience to superstitious customs of walking through "holy doors" that are only opened every twenty-five years at the Pope's command. The "hope that does not disappoint" is only offered on the premises that one is penitent enough, sincere enough, and faithful enough to earn it through their works.

Jubilee 2025 holds out a promise that its hope will not disappoint, but the practices and meaning that undergird the offer of Jubilee convey something else entirely. The offer is for the good life, but only through the doors of obedience to a religious system of works-based earning. That sort of hope may very well disappoint.

How, then, should we think about the Jubilee? How should we talk with our Roman Catholic family members, friends, and neighbors? What can we offer to someone traveling to Rome this year hoping to obtain a blessing from God through their sincere obedience to a supposed representative of Christ? Maybe more fundamentally, how do we understand what the Bible teaches about jubilee and what the Roman Catholic practice of jubilee offers?

To answer those questions, Italian pastor and scholar Leonardo De Chirico has written a free ebook about the Jubilee concepts found in Scripture and how the Roman Catholic Church practices them today. Desiring to engage Roman Catholic followers as well as educate and equip evangelical believers, De Chirico writes to bring clarity to the true hope the gospel offers an insight into how we might experience God's ultimate jubilee promises.

I'm certain that most Roman Catholic congregations in the United States are talking about and encouraging pilgrimage trips to Rome for their leaders and parishioners. This awareness gives Protestant evangelicals a timely opportunity to ask questions, listen to our Roman Catholic friends, and engage them with the beauty of true grace, true hope, and true jubilee given by the free grace of God. Since our mission at GCD is to "cultivate writers and resources that make, mature, and multiply disciples of Jesus," we see this resource as a timely contribution to the cultural moment of over 35 million people journeying to Rome explicitly for Jubilee this year.