As archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła had seen how Cardinal Wyszyński’s Great Novena and the celebration of the Polish Millennium in 1966 had helped preserve the country’s cultural identity and historical memory after two decades during which Poland had been ground between the totalitarian millstones of Nazism and communism. He also knew that the Polish Millennium in 1966 had not been merely a recovery of the past: to remember the nation’s origins was to give the nation a firm foundation from which to build the future. Thus 1966 was, for Poland, less about the baptism of the Piast prince Mieszko I than about celebrating a vision of the Polish future in continuity with the culture that had been born from Mieszko’s embrace of Christianity.
Immersion in anniversaries—the reclamation of the past as a platform from which to launch out into the future—was an integral part of Karol Wojtyła’s experience as a Pole. And if, as he sometimes said, the Holy Spirit had seen fit to bring the archbishop of Kraków to Rome as universal pastor of the Catholic Church, then there was something of importance in the Polish and Cracovian experience for the world Church, and just perhaps for the world.
So he would not regard “2000” as a calendrical oddity, but as an evangelical opportunity.
In early 1994, John Paul sent the cardinals of the Church a lengthy memorandum, “Reflections on the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000,” and requested written responses. The memorandum laid out an ambitious jubilee program: preparatory continental synods of bishops; new ecumenical and interreligious initiatives; a revision of the Church’s official martyrology to take account of the vast outpouring of Christian blood in the twentieth century; and an examination of conscience by which the Church would come to grips with its infidelities over twenty centuries. The Pope then summoned the cardinals to a special consistory, held in the Vatican on June 13, 1994, to consider the memorandum and the responses.
John Paul II must have sensed a certain lack of enthusiasm about the jubilee among the men who were supposed to be his senior counselors, for he began the consistory with a major address in which he reread the Second Vatican Council as a providential initiative intended to prepare the Church for its third millennium. He also stressed the millennial imperative of accelerating the quest for Christian unity: “We cannot come before Christ, the Lord of History,” he underscored, “as divided as we unfortunately have been during the second millennium.” In addition, the Pope emphasized the importance of a new martyrology and defended his generosity in giving the Church new saints, a practice which some had criticized: to ignore or minimize the gifts of the Holy Spirit in more recent centuries, he suggested, was to undercut the Council’s “universal call to holiness” in future centuries. The Church constantly needed conversion, he reminded the cardinals. And that, not some kind of ecclesiastical political correctness, was why the Church also had to prepare for the new millennium by seeking God’s forgiveness for the errors and betrayals of the sons and daughters of the Church over the previous 2,000 years.3
The cardinals concluded their two days of discussions by adopting two resolutions: one deplored the slaughters then under way in Rwanda; the other supported the Pope’s efforts to prevent the forthcoming Cairo World Conference on Population and Development from declaring an internationally recognized right to abortion. About the Great Jubilee of 2000, the College of Cardinals, among whom there was no little skepticism about the possibility of organizing (much less carrying out) a program as ambitious as the Pope had outlined, had nothing formal to say.
Having tried collaboration, an undaunted John Paul II now took the reins of the Great Jubilee into his own hands through an apostolic letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente [The Coming Third Millennium], which was signed on November 10, 1994, and issued four days later.
It was a document of great substance and deep lyricism, in which the Pope began by reminding the Church that biblical religion was not a matter of our search for God, but of God’s coming into history in search of us, and of our learning to take the same road through history that God is taking. Thus, as John Paul wrote, in God’s covenant-making with the chosen people of Israel and in the Incarnation of the Son of God, “it is not simply a case of man seeking God, but of God who comes in Person to speak to man of himself and to show him the path by which he may be reached.” In the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and above all in Jesus, “religion is no longer a ‘blind search for God’ (cf. Acts 17.27) but the response of faith to God who reveals himself.”4
That was why, in a biblical view of the world, time was of utmost importance. Time had been sanctified, because “eternity entered into time”:
In Christianity, time has a fundamental importance. Within the dimension of time, the world was created; within it the history of salvation unfolds, finding its culmination in the “fullness of time” of the Incarnation, and its goal in the glorious return of the Son of God at the end of time. In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is himself eternal … [and] from this relationship of God with time there arises the duty to sanctify time.5
People of biblical faith had fulfilled this duty to sanctify time in various ways: sabbath observance, recurring feasts in the liturgical calendar, and jubilees. The jubilee tradition among the people of Israel was permeated by themes of liberation, reconciliation, and the restoration of justice, all of which were reminders that the human path through history had been illuminated by the divine presence. Those themes carried over into Christian jubilees, to which was added the conviction that history had reached its axial moment in Jesus Christ: for in the Incarnation of the Son of God, we are shown both the face of the merciful Father and the truth about our own humanity.6 So the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul wrote, would be both an act of thanksgiving for the past and an act of consecration for the future, in which the Church would commit itself to a “new springtime of Christian life.”7 Throughout the letter, the Pope underscored the linkage between the Great Jubilee and Vatican II, citing the four principal documents of the Council in order to describe a jubilee focused on the worship of God (Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), the word of God (Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), the mystery of the Church (Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), and the Church’s encounter with the world (Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World).8
John Paul then laid out the program for the Great Jubilee of 2000. There would be three years of preparation, each focused on one of the divine Persons and one of the theological virtues: thus 1997 would be the Year of Jesus Christ and a period of reflection on faith; 1998 would be the Year of the Holy Spirit and a time of reflection on hope; 1999 would be the Year of the Father and a year of reflection on love. The Pope would continue his own pilgrim journeys throughout the world, while planning for a jubilee pilgrimage to the central places of salvation history—those associated with God’s call of the people of Israel; those associated with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; and those first touched by the Christian mission to the world. He also challenged the Church to a deeper cleansing of historical conscience, and to intensified action on behalf of both Christian unity and interreligious dialogue.9
All of this required a considerable amount of organization, so a Central Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 was appointed. The president, French cardinal Roger Etchegaray, was joined by a presidential council consisting of Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the papal vicar for the Diocese of Rome; Nigerian cardinal Francis Arinze, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue; Australian cardinal Edward Cassidy, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; and Cardinal Virgilio Noë, the archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica. The membership of the Central Committee included prelates from throughout the world Church: the theologian of the papal household, Father Georges Cottier, O.P. (who also served as president of the jubilee’s critical theological-historical commission); several curial figures; and three laypeople
, including Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon.10
The Central Committee’s general secretary would be the man responsible for coordinating the planning for the Great Jubilee of 2000 and then overseeing the jubilee events. This crucial position went first to an Italian curial diplomat, Archbishop Sergio Sebastiani, who was replaced in November 1997 by a more efficient Italian curialist, Archbishop Crescenzio Sepe.11 A jubilee logo was commissioned, as was a jubilee hymn; the logo’s design and the hymn’s tune reflected the conviction, widespread in some Italian Catholic circles, that the Church made itself more attractive by appealing to tastes formed by contemporary popular culture.12 A glossy journal, Tertium Millennium, was created to keep those interested informed of the work of the Central Committee’s commissions and committees: the commission for the new martyrs, charged with preparing the updated martyrology; the pastoral commission; the artistic-cultural commission; the social commission; the mass-media committee; the Rome committee; the Jerusalem committee; the technical committee; and the theological-historical commission, formed to address the delicate questions raised by the Pope’s insistence that the Church cleanse its conscience in preparation for a new springtime of evangelization in the third millennium of its history. In addition to this preparatory work, the Central Committee (and the relevant Roman curial offices) were responsible for organizing the jubilee year in terms of vocational groups, such that virtually every state of life in the Church would have its own particular jubilee celebration during the year 2000—another innovation of John Paul II’s jubilee.
As the Holy See organized itself for the Great Jubilee, the city of Rome prepared for a tidal wave of jubilee pilgrims, and the facade of St. Peter’s was given a cleaning that papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls called “the restoration of the century.”13 Concurrently, the continental Synods of Bishops in preparation for the Great Jubilee were held over two busy years so that the Church could reflect on the distinctive accomplishments of the past two millennia, and the unique challenges of the twenty-first century, in each region of the world.14
Mysterium Incarnationis [The Mystery of the Incarnation], the Bull of Indiction or papal decree formally convoking the Great Jubilee of 2000, was issued on November 29, 1998, the First Sunday of Advent. Its title, taken from the first words of its Latin text, summed up John Paul II’s answer to the question, “Why 2000?” The answer, John Paul wrote, had been given by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians and its great hymn to the mystery of the Incarnation:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual gift in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.… For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to the purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and on earth [Ephesians 1.3–5, 9–10].
Here, John Paul wrote, was the poetic heart of Paul’s proclamation that “in Jesus Christ, the history of salvation finds its culmination and ultimate meaning.” The Apostle’s hymn also taught us that “the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem is not an event that can be consigned to the past,” for “the whole of human history in fact stands in reference to him: our own time and the future of the world are illumined by his presence.” Thus “in the encounter with Christ,” who is “the genuine newness which surpasses all human expectations,” every human being, in every time and place, “discovers the mystery of his own life” and learns that “no one can be separated from the love of God, except through their own fault,” for “the grace of mercy is offered to everyone.”15
The Pope then reviewed several aspects of the jubilee tradition as it had evolved in the Catholic Church: the tradition of pilgrimage, “which is linked to the situation of man who readily describes his life as a journey”; the tradition of the Holy Door, which “evokes the passage from sin to grace which every Christian is called to accomplish”; and the tradition of the jubilee indulgence, which is an “expression of the total gift of the mercy of God.” Indulgences—pious acts leading to the remission of “temporal punishment due to sin” in that experience of purification Catholics traditionally called Purgatory—had been a point of bitter controversy during the Reformation. In Mysterium Incarnationis, John Paul presented the indulgence tradition as one that recognizes the “surfeit of love” left to the Church by the saints, on which the men and women of today can draw through a “spiritual communion,” which itself testifies to the truth that “no one lives for himself alone.”16
To these traditional “signs” of a jubilee, John Paul then decreed a cleansing of the Church’s conscience for the past sins of her children, an intensification of charity (particularly with reference to international debt), and a renewed focus on the memory of the Church’s martyrs, especially its modern martyrs—three facets of the Great Jubilee he had been stressing since 1994.17 The Bull of Indiction concluded with an explanation of the conditions for gaining the jubilee indulgence, which were expanded to include acts of penance and generosity, such as work for, or contributions to the support of, homeless children, troubled teenagers, or the needy elderly.
In late 1999, with the preparatory process under the control of Archbishop Sepe, Bishop James M. Harvey, the prefect of the papal household, and Bishop Stanisław Dziwisz, the Pope’s longtime secretary, John Paul II agreed to make some adjustments in his own schedule for the jubilee year.18 Ad limina visits—the quinquennial visit that every Catholic bishop in the world makes to Rome, and on which John Paul had previously expended as much as 40 percent of his time—were suspended for the year 2000; the last national group of prelates the Pope received were the bishops of the Dominican Republic, whom he met as a group on December 11, 1999. (Previously, that fall, John Paul had received the bishops of Zambia, Malawi, Chad, Burundi, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Latvia, Canada, the Central African Republic, Germany, and Portugal.) Given that he would preside over each of the vocational days that would be celebrated almost weekly throughout the jubilee year, in addition to an International Eucharistic Congress in June and World Youth Day in August, the Pope also agreed to reserve each Tuesday during 2000 as a day of recreation: a day in the hills outside Rome, when weather permitted, was particularly welcome.
AN OPEN DOOR
While the Catholic jubilee tradition traces its deepest roots to the Hebrew Bible, the origins of “holy years” celebrated at St. Peter’s in Rome can be dated with some precision: on February 22, 1300, Pope Boniface VIII published the Bull Antiquorum habet fida relatio convoking the first holy year, which Boniface intended to be repeated every hundredth year thereafter. The jubilee proved so popular that it was repeated in 1350, 1390, and 1423, before returning to mid-century in 1450 and then continuing in a rhythm of every quarter century, beginning in 1475. In 1423, Pope Martin V opened the first jubilee Holy Door at the papal cathedral, the Basilica of St. John Lateran. The first recorded opening of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s took place at Christmas 1499, to inaugurate the jubilee year of 1500; the tradition of opening holy doors at the three other major Roman basilicas (St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul Outside the Walls) also began in 1499–1500. The ritual for opening the Holy Door of St. Peter’s was codified by John Burckhard, master of papal ceremonies, for the ceremony on Christmas Eve 1499 and remained essentially the same for five centuries. The principal changes in the rite took place in 1975, when the exterior of the bronze holy door was no longer bricked up; only the interior was closed with masonry.
In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, John Paul II had written that “the Holy Door of the Jubilee of the Year 2000 should be symbolically wider than those of previous Jubilees, because humanity, upon reaching this goal, will leave behind not just a century but a millennium.”19 That fact, as well as the Pope’s desire that the Great Jubilee emphasize
God’s mercy, led to a further development in the symbolism of the rite on Christmas Eve 1999: the Pope would not knock on the interior wall blocking the Holy Door with a hammer, as in the past; rather, the interior masonry, which at the end of the previous jubilee had sealed off the Holy Door from the inside of the basilica, would be removed beforehand so that the Pope could open the two great bronze doors by gently pushing on them. The Great Jubilee of 2000 would begin, not with knocking down a wall, but with opening a door: Christ, the door through which the sheep of his flock enter in order to meet the Father of mercies in a land of good pasture (John 10.9).
And so, at 11 P.M. on Christmas Eve 1999, John Paul II came to the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, vested in a shimmering, ultramodern red, blue, and gold cope, the patterns of which were replicated in the decoration of the chasubles and miters of the prelates who would concelebrate Christmas Midnight Mass with him. He began the rite of opening the door, and the Great Jubilee of 2000, by invoking the Holy Trinity and thanking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for the gifts of grace that had been poured out upon the Church during the previous three years of preparation. A deacon proclaimed that passage of Luke’s Gospel in which Jesus, in the synagogue of Nazareth, takes the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, reads the passage proclaiming a year of favor in which prisoners are freed, the blind see, and the oppressed are given freedom, and then announces that “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4.21). John Paul then walked to the Holy Door and prayed antiphonally with those present:
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