Transcription
Thank you, everyone. Uh, so my name is Victor, and uh, my formal title is co-manager, faith and action, uh, here at the Franciscan Renewal Center. Um, and I'm happy to have coordinated this program, as Fred mentioned, uh, total staff, so with friars, liturgy staff, faith formation staff, um, etc. Um, and boy, wasn't Sister Diane Burgan's presentation so wonderful? Yeah, so good.
So I'm here today, uh, because I have the honor to introduce uh, Dr. Masimo Fajoli from Villanova University. Um, and I have this slide back here in case uh, you want to read a little bit about him while I'm talking. So Masimo Fajoli is a Catholic church historian and professor of historical theology at Villanova University. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and their two lovely children. He's a columnist in Laqua International, contributing writer for Commonwealth magazine, and contributing writer for the Italian magazine Il Reeno. His books and articles have been published in more than 10 languages. He is a member of the steering committee for the project Vatican 2 event and mandate for a multi-volume intercontinental commentary titled the Oxford Handbook of Vatican 2. His expertise is in the administrative inner workings of the papacy and the Catholic Church, including its history.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Masimo Faji.
Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here. Um, and it's my first time in Phoenix. It's it's it's my first time here at Franciscan. It's it's a great pleasure to be here in this very important moment in the life of the church. So it helps me being here think better about what what kind of moment we're living. Um, so my job, I mean, I have a very tough act to follow after so so my job is is is more pedestrian, if you want. So, to talk about the Jubilee um from an historical point of view, but also to give some theological insights on what the history of the Jubilee tells us for our life as as believers, as members of the of the church.
So the first part, historical—um, the Jubilee in the Catholic Church is an institution that uh takes the name from the biblical jubilee but has very little to do with the biblical jubilee. Um, it's a special year of grace and conversion that involves prayer, pilgrimage, and repentance, uh, that usually it's held every 25 years or or during other years that are are called by the pope. The first jubilee was the one of the year 1300, called by Pope Bonafas VI, uh, whom Dante puts in the inferno, by the way. So that says something to us. And so the frequency of the jubilees has changed over time. At first, they were celebrated only every hundred years. Um, shortly after, in 1343, Pope Clement V 6th reduced the gap uh to 50 years, and in 1470, Pope Paul II made it every 25 years. Um, but there have been many extraordinary holy years. Uh, for example, in 1933, called by Pope Pius the 11th to commemorate the 1,900 years of the redemption, and of 2015 by Pope Francis, who proclaimed the year of mercy. Um, so it's a very historical institution. It's a very Catholic, I would say even more, it's a very Roman Catholic institution uh based on the history of the papacy, which when the jubilees are instituted as an an institution of of the Catholic Church was at its apex, at its high point in asserting its primacy, its legislative primacy in the church in medieval Europe, of what what historians call uh Christendom, right? So this system of Europe where so there's no separation, no distinction, no light between the church and politics and and society, so there are many conflicts, but so there are no division, okay, no no separation of uh spheres. Okay.
Um, so one of the things that we usually associate with uh the jubilee is the experience of travel, of going somewhere, right, to Rome. uh, especially because in church history the jubilees become really part of of a certain economic system on which the Vatican supports itself, even today. Right? So this is important because it's something different from the biblical idea of of of Jubilee where you don't have to go somewhere to celebrate the the Jubilee. And it's really one of of those things that I mean puts Catholic historians or historians of Catholicism in a tough spot because it it exposes you to the to to the temptation of painting the past of of the church with a very dark dark brush and see everything in a certain light. Why is that? Because the element of travel in the in the Jubilee doesn't come from scripture. It comes from something more disturbing to us, which is the crusades. So the idea that you are granted spiritual uh the indulgence uh traveling to a certain place, which is Rome, it's a translation from something that had happened in the two centuries before the first jubilee. The first crusade is called in 1095, which meant you have to go to Jerusalem, do something, and if you die that you will have your reward. Okay. So this is it's one of those ways in which the papacy reunderstood, reignified that very strong element in medieval culture which was of pilgrimage, of travel, which is not travel as as we I mean experience it today, which it was was really a life-threatening experience, whether it was to go to war or to go to Rome for for pilgrimage. It was really at the risk of your life. There was really a a strong possibility that you you didn't make it. Right? So here Jubilee becomes a a spiritual crusade and not an unarmed crusade. Okay.
So this is very important to to understand that there is a connection between two apparently, actually completely separated perceptions of what the church is about today. The Jubilee of today, it's about hope, it's about peace, and it's not natural to connect it to the crusades. Right? So, but I mean history is complicated, and that's why you need uh people doing sometimes boring uh research into documents because there are layers of things that um that it's hard to penetrate without having specialists who go through uh those documents. Um, so here I mean the Catholic Church now, when the pope calls a a jubilee, knows very well all all this history, but as every institution, it has a certain reluctance to tell the whole story, right? And so so in in the documents uh calling the jubilee, there are some references to its ear to its origins to the middle ages. Okay, but it doesn't quite tell the whole story, right? But that that's totally understandable. Okay, so this is one institution that I think he is already paying its debt towards the faults of of the past. And I don't expect the pope to issue a document on the jubilee uh as another opportunity to uh be exposed to the accusation of being in charge of an institution that sometimes is blamed for everything and anything that happens in the world.
Second thing that it's important is the so we have the translation of that element of travel from the crusades to uh the Jubilee, and then there's a second translation, a a a second placement of a concept which is this that how we perceive uh the Jubilee today has less to do with pilgrimage and more to do with tourism, obviously, right? So I mean we have seen in recent years a revival of the experience of pilgrimage, right, the camino of Santiago and so on, it it has become also very interesting for scholars of religion to to interview these people, what, why, okay, but clearly for the vast majority, majority of those who go to Rome for the Jubilee, it it's usually packaged as tourism more than a jubilee. Uh, no matter the good intention or the the spiritual uh disposition, there is a a certain way of traveling these days uh for most of us, right? And so this means what? That the jubilee has become in history and especially in these last couple of centuries or three centuries um a mass phenomenon. So the pilgrimage, I mean the crusades before, but also the pilgrimage to Rome used to be very challenging physically uh and only a certain kind of people could do that, and so that means fewer people, right? And so I've never seen my friends who live in Rome so afraid of the effect of Jubilee on the city of Rome because this this diff I mean it's it's the first jubilee that I think takes place in our conversation on over tourism, right? So that changes the the mood in which uh you look at this experience, right? um it's not totally new in actually because I mean again Dante in the divine comedy Um he captures in Canto 18 uh the all those pilgrim amassing near Castell Santangelo as an image of of inferno, of hell. So he had already some idea of that, it's not all fun, it's not all good there. Okay.
Um, so here tourism is a very modern phenomenon of our culture which starts in the 17th, 18th century, the grand tour of the aristocrats, of intellectuals of France, of England, of Germany to Italy. So it was a very mix of a cultural discovery of the Renaissance, of uh the humanism of ancient pagan Rome and of a religious kind of of of experience. This is it's still there. Rome. Whatever happens in Rome that has to do with the Vatican and the church has always been a mix of sacred and profane, of the religious and the commercial. It It's always been there. And so we I I think we shouldn't be moralistic about this. It's really part of this Catholic genius of seeing of trying to convert to something else almost everything, right? Um that's that's um so so that's one thing, and there's a second thing which means that in time the experience of the of the trip to the to the jubilee to Rome as the only place where you can really acquire the uh the indulgence, all that becomes u a mix of the religious, the spiritual, and of the secular, but becomes also more individualized, right? I mean, think about how different it is to travel today. Uh, when travel lasts a few hours, if you miss your connection, a couple of days, but it's a fairly short time, right? Pilgrimage. It means that you have to spend a lot of time together, suffer together, uh smell together in the end. No, it's a very physical experience. I mean, it has to do with the sacramental understanding that it it's typical of the Catholic idea of things. So here the jubilee becomes something different because it cannot become separated from the uh habits of uh travel of tourism in a um in a modern um way.
So this is a short history from 1300 to the to the 19th century. Now a few things on on the jubilees of the of the 20th century because so they're interesting to understand our jubilee of 2025. So the jubilee that really marks a a shift and it's really the beginning of in some sense of the church of the second Vatican council so on is the jubilee of 1950. The first jubilee of the postwar period. Right? So I I remember my mentor from Germany who was born in Berlin in 1929. And he said for for us it was the first moment when we felt we could we we could go back to Rome in a different way than our parents had been there as the occupying army. Right? And so that was a real moment of reconciliation, of a first reconciliation of peoples, of nations that had really fought each other, not just in World War II but also World War I uh Italians and Austrians first and Germans later. So, so that jubilee of 1950 was really a time of building bridges. At the same time, it was also the first jubilee of the cold war, where being Catholic meant a very precise kind of thing when you were thinking about Russia. Quite different from today. Close parenthesis. Um, so it meant you had a very bipolar understanding of the world. The good guys on the one side, the other guys on the other side. Okay.
Then the extraordinary jubilee of 1966 was called by Paul V 6th to give thanks for the celebration of the Second Vatican Council that was celebrated between 62 and 65. And it was the first time that the Vatican understood that the jubilee needed to be decentralized. So I mean some key events happen in Rome, but other things must happen locally. Right? So that's one of the theological ideas of the second council that there's an eminent dignity of the local church. I mean you belong to the church of Rome because you belong to your local church, not vice versa. Okay. And so so that's one of the first moments when there are some uh I mean uh all of the the cathedrals in the Catholic world receive some of the privileges that only the churches of Rome had.
Um, another jubilee that's important is the one of 1975. Why it's important? It's the first to be broadcast worldwide through television. Mass media have really changed Catholicism in ways that it's hard to measure, but that's the first time. um 1983, the extraordinary jubilee that was celebrating the uh 1,950 years from the uh redemption during John Paul II. Um a and then there is the jubilee of the year 2000, which I remember very well because between 98 and 2020 2001 I was I I spent many many months in the Vatican archives during research for for my dissertation, and you could really see a a church that had a sense of itself much more sure than the sense that the church has of itself today, in some sense a triumphant church, right? The church of John Paul II who had defeated communism. 2000 is before the beginning of the serious crisis on sexual abuse. It was uh earlier than than many things that um happened. Uh it was also very important because John Paul II started preparing for the jubilee of 2000 years before with a document of 1994. So six years before uh Tertio Millennio where he understood the jubilee of 2000 as a moment of uh what he called the purification of memory. So he was a European Catholic from Poland who had gone through World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War. He knew that there was something to be addressed uh in history, especially from the point of view of European history. And the time between 94 and 2000 was really a series of of steps to prepare the Catholic Church to the year 2000 as a moment when we could face history. Uh the Crusades, one of those things. um and come clean, right? Not just before God, but also before the the public opinion, be before the moral jury of the of the of the international public opinion. Right? So one of the incredibly important things that happens in those six years preparing for the Jubilee of 2000 is John Paul II's constant effort in continuing the the work of the Second American Council and going beyond in the relationship between the church and the Jews. That I think that's number one thing that John Paul II accomplished. So the year 2000 is a a very high moment when the church and the Jews and Judaism uh including the state of Israel back then, they can say, well, we have turned a page, this is a new relationship, we have solved the problem of anti-semitism, we have solved—just imagine how different it is from today, it's a very very different picture.
Um, so I think the way we should look at this jubilee is uh in in two ways. So one is to be conscious of how much more complicated the situation of of the church and and of the Vatican is today. Not just because we are now in the in a situation of sede vacante technically, but even during Pope Francis and even after Pope Francis, whoever the cardinals elect. This is a more complicated church than it was uh during the previous great jubilee of of 2000. uh 2000 again happens when John Paul II uh is a triumphant church leader but also a political leader. He is he is seen as the most decisive factor in the defeat of communism uh in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Um, it's a a church that uh has solved one of its major problems in history, anti-semitism, but it's also the church uh of the pre-abuse crisis, is the church of that lives in the pre-911 world. So 2000 we thought the worst is over. The 20th century was the worst century. World War I, World War II, the Holocaust. The 20 The 21st century will be better because we have learned that's hurts, right? To to think about um that. So, it was not just a very confident church, but also a very confident world. No one was talking about the environmental crisis. Uh, for everything there seemed to be a technological solution. It was when everyone had access to the internet, to the email. It was the end of the '90s, right? Um of the new promises of new technology and so on. So in some sense that jubilee came at a time when we thought in in the church but also in our western world I would say that in some sense history was over. I mean history as a series of of crimes, of wars, history maybe that's over. I mean we have learned something. We just need to settle in a peaceful way some accounts of of of our past. But we have turned a a corner, right? It's something that is already different in the first jubilee of Pope Francis, 2015, which he wants to be a jubilee of mercy. I mean remember that's the year in in the middle between the two uh synods on the family and marriage where mercy is at the center of Pope Francis uh program. Mercy in those two synods meant mercy for divorced and remarried Catholics, mercy for gay people in the church, mercy for irregular situations in the church in general. So already in in the 2015 you see something that u is already a little darker than in 2000, right, a pope who thinks that we need to emphasize mercy which should be naturally part of the Christian language uh which he it said something, right? um so this has become even um I think more complicated in the years um after because we have seen what one of the most important intellectuals in the Catholic Church uh today, the founder of the community of Santidio Andreardi called uh proposition to label Pope of the early 20th century. He said we live now in latistricog, in the sad age, right, age of sadness, of of of lack of hope. Okay. And that's why Pope Francis called his second jubilee the jubilee um of um of hope. There I mean there should be a whole study, a whole book on what it means when someone when the same person says we need mercy and then a few years later, well actually we need hope, right? It it it says something on his perception of the world um here so when Pope Francis calls the jubilee of 2025 uh with a bull that was was published in May 2024. He took inspiration from a passage of the letter to the Romans, chapter 5. Hope does not disappoint, in Latin spe unded. It's important in the Latin because sp hope is really one of the most important words in Pope Francis's language which was very rooted in the second Vatican council and in the last document of the second Vatican council, gaudium et spes 1965, the joys and hope of the humanity are the joys and hope of the church. So I mean hope, spes, is very much really one of of of the words that occurs more often in Pope Francis's um language. It's not the first uh jubilee um that has hope in the in the in the bull. But for for Pope Francis, it says something um very specific on how he understood um our world, and for Pope Francis, I'm coming back to this later. Hope is not a state of mind. Hope is not a feeling. Hope is is not something that um is is part of of a certain mood. It's something different. Not just because it's a theological virtue, but there's something um more profound. Um, it's interesting and I am embarrassed to say this in in front of of a biblical scholar, but it's interesting that when I mean that passage that Francis chooses from the letter to the Romans 5 um the word disappoint um has to do with a Greek verb, kascuno. You know, which means not just that hope doesn't disappoint, in Greek means something deeper. It means it's a hope that will never make you ashamed of being hopeful. Right? So this is important because if there's something that can sound embarrassing today is to say that you are hopeful. Right. It it goes against a certain expectation uh that people um have. Okay. So, and and for Pope Francis, the concept of shame was incredibly important. He had a very strong sense of shame. I I'm reading his autobiography these days um as a way to catch up with with with his life. He really had a non-bourgeois, a non-middle-class strong sense of shame. Very very interesting. Um, so uh this passage that Pope Francis chose from Paul is important to distinguish hope from an an attitude, a feeling, because for Paul hope is personified by Jesus Christ. That's the thing. Uh we could distinguish hope from optimism, hope from feeling good. Hope. But the theological concept is that um hope is founded in Jesus Christ because from a a mouse onwards um hope is reliable. Is something we rely on as we rely on God who's the
Protagonist of the history of salvation. It's the convict; it's the faith that every promise of God is brought to a fulfillment that exceeds the promise. So it's a christoologgical theological idea of, uh, of hope. Uh, it's it's not just different. It's the opposite from optimism. It's not just different; it's completely the opposite. Right? So that's something that I I believe that it's important for u us and it's important for us now because I I think that for for different reasons, uh, whatever your age, your state of life, and so on, we have—I mean, we live in a certain sense that we are, as Pope Francis said many times, we are at the end of a certain era, an end of of a certain era in our uh awareness of how much our environment can take, of how much our poor people can take, of how much uh our resources can do. Right? So there's a strong sense of limit, and that we have reached a certain point—again, completely the opposite of the 1990s, the limitless possibilities, the boundless uh horizon. Right? And so, as a French philosopher wrote in a recent book, we have this sense that we live in what he called expiration time, so there's an expiration date somewhere, and we're afraid to know what's what's that date.
Um, um, the the jubilee of hope is important in this moment in the life of the church and in the world, and it's really part of Pope Francis' pontificate, which was incredibly uh theological and spiritual, not shy about saying certain things. Um, but it was also convinced that in this expiration time, in this sense of a of the end of of a of an era, uh the solution of looking back with nostalgia to a certain past is a total delusion. First, the solution to uh solve some problems with um uh an assertiveness that is the the contrary of meekness doesn't work. So here he—this is his jubilee, even if he died in the middle of it—because it's really part of how he understood the Christian proposal. That's a proposal. It's not an ideology. It's not a system. And most importantly, it's not an intellectual option. It's not something that you embrace because it convinces you. Because on the board, that equation works. Yes, I'm convinced intellectually that this is actually the truth. That's that's a a form of heresy that he he he criticized many times—is a form of agnosticism that if I have the right knowledge, if I have access to the right knowledge, I'm one of the few who got Christianity. I'm one of the few. Okay? Because the few is the important part, right?
And so the jubilee is one of those things that naturally, by default, academics like me have been educated to stay away from because academia works in in in a certain way. Uh, it has worked in a certain way in this last couple of centuries. We will see if it survives and how. But certainly, so there's a certain tension between an intellectual um mental—but I mean intellectual—approach to the faith and what Pope Francis has really told us that gives meaning, which is a spiritual practice that involves your entire being; your body is something that you do and you do not just with yourself. It's not something that you think and then you spread as the gospel, uh, but it's something that you do with others and for others. So there's a whole physicality, a physical dimension of the Christian experience that is central in Francis' uh life and in Francis' vision of the church. I mean, Francis was not afraid of looking an overly pious Catholic. Uh, it's interesting. I mean, in recent papal history, you have the allegedly most liberal pope in the last century, Pope Francis, was incredibly devout to the Virgin Mary, and he was buried a few a few hours ago in St. Mary Major. And allegedly the most conservative popes of all who stayed away—Pope Benedict who stayed away from that stuff—as a German academic, he didn't feel that he needed to show that—I mean, maybe he—I mean, I'm sure he had a devotion for the Virgin Mary, but he—it was not part of his public persona, of of his public proposal. Right?
Um, so this is important—why? So the jubilee is an old institution. Uh, it's very stratified, so many symbols, meanings, it is embarrassing features—again, the legacy of of of the crusades and so on. But it's something that serves much better the way in which Francis—and not just Francis, but many others—understand that the gospel works. It's not by convincing someone of the intellectual argument with the best book or the best podcast, but it works by attraction, right? By showing with your life and creating what a physicist might call a gravitational pool that brings you in—like like in this room, right? So that so that pulls you in, right? Uh, intellectual arguments these days are not likely to convert—um, not on on a long-term basis. I I I think—um—um, this is important at this time, and and I'm shifting slowly here to the theological part.
Um, because Pope Francis listed in the bull of vindication of of the jubilee a long series of signs of crisis to be converted into signals of hope: peace and the end of wars, the promotion of life as a response to existential nihilism, the redemption from prison of those who have fallen victim to their own weakness, and develization of those who are socially discarded—young people, the elderly, the sick, the poor. So this jubilee happened, I mean, started at the end of a very particular time in the life of the church, which was um the end of the synodal process. So here there are many ways of using ancient institutions in in in the Catholic church. You can replicate those institutions as they were seven centuries ago, five centuries ago. Uh, which some people are convinced that they still work in exactly the same way. Um, or there is the Pope Francis way to reuse, in a very Catholic way—we don't discard anything. We reuse everything. We recycle everything in a modern or postmodern uh fashion. So here the jubilee, I think for Francis, understood that as really part of a synodal conversion of the church, trying to save the religious experience of many Catholics today from an individual—uh, Jesus and me, and Jesus, we settle our things bilaterally, and and is—I mean, no one else should be involved in this because it's it's one-on-one. Right? So the jubilee—yes, it's a big toll on the city of Rome—it's also a very human way to experience that we are all connected. I mean, the worst possible thing I can imagine is a jubilee on Zoom. Right? You don't touch anybody. You don't you don't smell anybody. You don't—but that's not real life, right? I mean, that says a lot about the future of teaching, of school, of academia. It's an an entirely different thing. It's the first step to the to the destruction of the very idea of teaching, I think.
Um, so here Pope Francis, and in his autobiography, it's very interesting how his whole life was an attempt—until the very last few years when he was Pope—to reconnect some dots, to reconnect some some uh threads that were broken in his life; a constant attempt with some members of of his family, some members of his own Jesuit order with whom the history is very complicated, and we will know more in the next few years. I I I think. So a really artisan work, a craft of rebuilding relationships. Um, this is important. I mean, Pope Francis uses this image of of of of a of the craft of an artisan for many things—also for peacemaking, right? Um, it was his way to say that hope is not something like a lightning bolt that you have hope—that's it. Hope is like a muscle. It can be exercised. It can be uh it can become more flexible, more uh able to extend, to to take blows, to overcome uh moments of of crisis. It takes practice. It takes uh it takes self-discipline. Hope is—and this is one of the most unpopular words of today—hope is a commitment. It's a commitment, and you don't give up at the first crisis—um, in all kinds of commitments. Um, hope is very important because it keeps us human because it's the—hope is the refusal. I mean, hope acknowledges defeat—okay, when that happens—but it refuses to say that defeat is the end, which is a denial of the Christ event—that defeat is the end. So Jesus Christ uh event says something um else. Um, hope—it's uh the ability to to remain steadfast um in in moments of of of of tribulation. One most important thing that made me think a lot is this: Hope is not about the restoration of a previous situation. Hope is not—let's go back to some moment that it was—everything was fine. Um, hope is not about asserting yourself. Hope is about the future. It's about something else and something more. And hope is not about me. It's about us. Um, it's it's a really challenging idea of hope, which again is very different from optimism. Um, living in hope means living not in the past but looking forward to a different future on which we must acknowledge we don't have control. Uh, it it's faith in something that's more than what I expect, but it's about what we expect. Uh, it's about a faith that doesn't bear witness to my identity but to something uh communal.
So to conclude here, so this is a very uncertain jubilee because we have a a jubilee during the sedakante. Um, it's a jubilee in in a time of uncertainty for the church and for the world. Um, so but Jubilee from a human point of view is very important because—and at this—Catholicism still is good. I mean, just if you have—if you look later today at the images of Pope Francis's funeral—what kind of theater of the world that still is after so many centuries. So, so there's a sense of what's important. So, the Jubilee is not about helping the Vatican with their finances because they need desperately money. I mean, that's important, but but it's the idea that's very—that we have to be ready to entertain uh different ways of imagining the time—time. So that there are interruptions in time, there are accelerations in time, there are suspensions in time, and ultimately there is a time that we don't know, and that's what we need to be ready um for.
Um, so here I think ultimately, finally, uh hope is not something that we can choose not to have. Uh, one of the greatest thinkers of the of the 20th century, um a Marxist Jewish thinker, Walter Benjamin, uh who killed himself in 1940 during World War II because he knew—he thought he was going to be captured by the Gestapo the day after—he wrote one of the best definitions uh that I know of hope, which is which which sounds like this: Those for whom we are given hope are those without hope. So we hope not because I have to hope for myself. We hope because we have to hope for those who don't have hope. So it's a bit extreme. Okay, I think. But so there's another way to look at the sentence. It's this: that we all hope because others have already hoped. It's not something we can give ourselves, right? Um, so that's why there is a work of education to hope that needs to happen. Uh, replacing a culture of despair, culture of revenge, a culture of payback, a culture of—you name them. Okay. So this is—it has so many dimensions that are ecclesial, religious, human, political. So I believe that this is really the last legacy that Pope Francis gave us. Uh, that says a lot about his pontificate, uh his ministry, and and and I think it's u—it it says a lot on how many possibilities there are uh in the church and for the church to say something to our world at this time. Thank you very much. Thank you, Massimo.
Uh, so right now, uh it is 11:15ish, if I'm reading that clock right. Um, and I'm going to have Fred come up to uh lead uh this section since uh we are ahead of schedule, which is great because uh imagine that means that we'll get into Q&A first. Awesome. Uh, so while uh people are getting their questions answered, uh we just want to remind you uh to please fill out your evaluations. Uh, Michelle has a little basket of pens to pass around if anyone