The Holy Father has decided that 2025 will be a year of Jubilee, something which happens every 25 years.The theme is “Pilgrims of Hope”.
At St Illtyd’s, along with the rest of the Catholic world we will be celebrating this year of Jubilee.
As we celebrate we will update this website with the events, starting with our launch on Thursday 23rd Janaury.
On the Archdiocese of Cardiff and Menevia website, Archbiship Mark introduced the year. https://rcadc.org/jubilee-home/#
‘We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God…and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.’ (Romans 5:2,5)
We are all on a pilgrimage towards Heaven, towards ‘sharing the glory of God’, as St Paul puts it. Any pilgrimage or journey is sustained by hope: hope in the destination.
We are currently preparing for the Jubilee Year 2025, which Pope Francis has given the theme, Pilgrims of Hope. We might say that this Jubilee Year, and our preparations for it, are another pilgrimage within that great pilgrimage of our faith, one in which we seek to deepen our sense of hope in God’s promises, in ‘sharing the glory of God’.
As we look at the world around us, hope is something that is very much needed in these times. We need it, too, in our personal lives, in the lives of our families, and as a virtue cultivated in all of our relationships. It is important that we share the hope we gain in faith, with others, a hope borne of the knowledge of God’s love and the experience of knowing Jesus Christ.
Our Year of Preparation for the Jubilee Year is to be a year of prayer, focusing, in particular, on the Lord’s Prayer, in order to foster our relationship with God our Father. This will open us up to receiving the graces and blessings that He wishes to bestow on us during the Jubilee Year.
These pages contain resources to help us in our task of growing closer to the Lord and deepening our sense of hope as we journey together towards and through this Jubilee Year. I hope you will find them useful. Be assured of my prayers, and please pray for me, as together we prepare for and enter into this Jubilee Year as Pilgrims of Hope. May we truly encounter God’s love which has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, and manifested in the Person of Jesus Christ, and thus come, one day, together to ‘share the glory of God’.
+Mark O’Toole
Archbishop of Cardiff
Bishop of Menevia
