The closing ceremony was marked by a contemplative silence that accompanied Cardinal Harvey to the Holy Door, whose three panels recall the three years of preparation for the Holy Year 2000, requested by St John Paul II and dedicated to the Father, rich in mercy “to the Holy Spirit, the principal agent of evangelisation” and to the Son, the Redeemer. The cardinal knelt before it and, after a few moments of prayerful reflection, closed its doors.
Hope in the ‘struggle of life’
Reaching a conclusion “is always a moment in time,” the cardinal emphasised in his homily, “while God’s mercy remains perpetually open.” The invitation is precisely to continue on the path of “conversion and hope” inspired by the Holy Year.
In the church dedicated to the memory of St Paul, the words from the Letter to the Romans resound with particular force: “hope does not disappoint”, which accompanied the entire Jubilee.
Much more than a mere “motto,” these words are a true “profession of faith”. The Apostle of the Gentiles entrusts these words to history in the awareness of the “hardship of life,” having experienced imprisonment, persecution, and “apparent failure.” Yet hope does not fail, because it is not based on fragile human abilities, but “on God’s faithful love.”
Entering the space of mercy
The Holy Door is therefore not merely a physical threshold, but a passageway to be crossed, leaving behind “what weighs on the heart” in order to enter “the space of mercy”.
Crossing it, the cardinal archpriest added, means renouncing all “pretensions of self-sufficiency” and humbly entrusting oneself to “the One who alone can give full meaning to our lives.”
The passage is also linked to the penitential journey, as a place of “return to communion” and “a sign of return to the Father’s house” — a gesture that, over the years, has not lost its symbolic power: “God never closes the door to man; it is man who is called to pass through it.”
Waiting for salvation already given
Hope, but also faith and charity, have been described by Pope Francis as the “heart of Christian life.” The virtue linked to the 2025 Jubilee, says Cardinal Harvey, goes far beyond “naive optimism” and any “escape from reality.”
As he himself recalled at the opening of the Holy Door on 5 January 2025, it is not an “empty word” or a “vague desire for things to go well.” Rather, hope means waiting with confidence for the “salvation already given” and still on its way to fulfilment: a fulfilment that unfolds in human history, to be traversed with our gaze “fixed on Christ,” facing pain in the certainty that “the last word belongs to life and salvation.”