What is a Jubilee year and why are Catholics celebrating in 2025?

We are quickly approaching 2025, which will be celebrated as a Jubilee Year for Catholics. How is this calculated, and what makes it unique to Catholic tradition?

The Catholic version of the Jubilee is described as a “special year of forgiveness and reconciliation, in which people are invited to deepen their relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation,” said Fintan Monahan, the Bishop of Killaloe. 

The concept of the Jubilee is, of course, not original to the Catholic Church but finds its source in a mandate given by God to Israel.

The instructions for a Jubilee are laid out in the Torah, in Leviticus 25, verses 8-17, in particular. God tells Israel that they need to count 49 years and then blow the ram’s horn (also known as a ‘yovel,’ the Hebrew word for Jubilee) throughout the whole land on the tenth day of the seventh month, which is Tishrei in the Jewish calendar. That date is Yom Kippur, the biblical "Day of Atonement" for the Jewish community.

The year after that, the 50th year, is then dedicated to God: “You shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan” (Leviticus 25:10).

The Jubilee year is considered holy, during which farming is prohibited. Similar to the shmita years, when the land is given a Sabbath rest every seventh year, the Jubilee year is seen as an even greater sanctification - seven times as holy and much more than a 'super-charged' shmita year. It includes powerful social and economic resets: debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, and all land is returned to its original owners.

Verses 23 and 24 are key: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the country you possess, you shall allow a redemption of the land.

This is repeated also in Leviticus 27: 24, which reads, “In the year of jubilee the field shall return to him from whom it was bought, to whom the land belongs as a possession.”

The land is the Lord’s, and we are merely sojourners on it. This is a key principle of the Jubilee. It’s a powerful antidote against the greed and materialism many so easily fall into.

The Jubilee is a radical equalizer to counteract the nation’s wealth being monopolized by a few, but has hardly ever been properly carried out. In fact, God gives the reason for the exile to Babylon as a consequence of Israel’s failure to carry out even the shmita year instructions, never mind Jubilees.

2 Chronicles 36:21 says the exile was “to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.”

Resisting the need to till the land – to sow and reap a harvest – demands extraordinary faith to see God provide in the absence of human labor. The Jubilee then is an even greater opportunity for radical blessing but it requires even more radical faith.

Perhaps due to the great practical challenges involved in actually carrying out the biblical Jubilee, it has largely been reinterpreted and spiritualized to the point of becoming almost obsolete. Today, rabbis even find it difficult to agree which year it might be, as counting months and years has become complicated and contested after long seasons in exile.

It has been suggested that 1917, 1967, and 2017 were all Jubilee years, marked by significant developments related to the freedom of the land. Still, it’s hard to say with any certainty when the next true biblical year of Jubilee might be. 

With this background behind the general concept of the Jubilee year, why do Catholics seem so certain it will take place in 2025?

While the biblical Jubilee occurs every 50 years, the Catholic Church has reinvented the concept and time frame completely. Initially designating it to occur every 100 years on the Gregorian calendar, the Vatican’s Jubilee 2025 website says the first Catholic Jubilee was celebrated in the year 1300, after which Pope Boniface VIII “fixed the frequency of Jubilee celebrations to every 100 years.”

The explanation continues: “Following a plea from the people of Rome to Pope Clement VI (1342), the frequency was reduced to every 50 years.” The gap between Jubilees was, then, subsequently shortened to 33 years, highlighting the age of Jesus when He was crucified, and then later reduced further to 25 years. 

Today, Catholics have their Jubilee year every 25 years, neatly corresponding to round numbers in the Gregorian calendar, quite different from the biblical mandate. However, traces of the theme of God’s ownership of the land come through: “The Jubilee 2025 year’s theme is ‘Pilgrims of Hope’, and Pope Francis is inviting Catholics to renew hope and discover a vision that can restore access to the fruits of the earth to everyone,'” Bishop Monahan relays. “We are also invited to rediscover a spirituality of God’s creation in which we understand ourselves as ‘pilgrims on the earth’, rather than masters of the world.”

Unlike the biblical Jubilee, which starts in the fall with a blast of the ram’s horn on Yom Kippur, Catholic Jubilee celebrations will commence when the Pope opens the “Holy Door” at the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome on Dec. 24, 2024, following a tradition that began in 1425 by Pope Martin V.

More than 30 million Catholic pilgrims will travel to Rome for the celebrations but the Vatican also encourages devotees to visit other holy sites, many of which are in Israel.

The director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, Dani Shahar, has met with Vatican officials in Rome “to promote the idea of obtaining forgiveness in the Holy Land,” according to Ynet News.

As distant as this version of Jubilee may be from its ancient Hebrew origins, it is hoped that this Jubilee of 2025 will be a much-needed boost to Israel’s struggling tourism industry. The number of tourists visiting Israel has plummeted and billions of dollars have been lost due to Israel's war against Iran's regional terror proxies.

The Ynet report noted that “an international campaign was also planned” to encourage Roman Catholic tourism to Israel, and that the Israeli tourism ministry “has started improving infrastructure at key holy sites, such as Yardenit (the Jordan River baptismal site), Capernaum, and the Old City of Nazareth” in preparation.

Although the biblical Jubilee year doesn’t begin at the start of the Gregorian calendar, it doesn’t start at the beginning of the biblical new year in the spring either. Halfway through the biblical calendar, the Jubilee horn is blown on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) in the fall, a day signifying the complete absolution of Israel’s sin as a nation, giving a blank slate and a new start.

The Jubilee, then, takes that same concept and broadens it more radically, wiping out debt and slavery and restoring things to the way they were. 

Hebrews 9 explains how the symbolism in the Day of Atonement finds its fulfillment in Jesus. The motif of the horn also harks back to the ram caught in the thickets by its horns in the story of the beginning of Isaac in Genesis 22, both pointing to the substitutionary sacrifice of the Messiah who paid for sin once and for all.

This Yom Kippur theme of absolution is amplified all the more in the year of Jubilee. For those who believe in Jesus, the deeper meaning of Jubilee ripples out beyond land owned and money owed, and speaks of liberty from spiritual debt and slavery: The Jubilee blast of the ram's horn signals total freedom and complete forgiveness.