By Communications Department - Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily at the closing Mass of the Jubilee Year on Dec. 27, 2025, at St. Mary Cathedral in Miami.
The Jubilee Year 2025 will conclude in Rome on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, but in all the dioceses outside of Rome, the Jubilee concludes on this weekend’s feast of the Holy Family. Celebrating the 2025 anniversary of the Incarnation and the birth of Christ, the jubilee’s theme was simply, “pilgrims of hope.” Throughout the world millions of the Catholic faithful set off on pilgrimages – if not to Rome itself then to one of the designated pilgrim sites in their local dioceses. I thank the parishes and shrines in the Archdiocese who welcomed hundreds of pilgrims throughout this past year. If you haven’t made a pilgrimage yet, you can count on your participation at this Mass here at St. Mary’s Cathedral, one of our pilgrimage sites, as your last chance tonight to take advantage of the indulgences associated with these pilgrimages.
As Catholics, we call ourselves a “pilgrim people” because we are just “passing through” this “vale of tears,” and we do hope to “pass over” with Jesus into the Kingdom of his Father. A “pilgrimage” is a way of reminding us of this: we journey to holy sites as a way to remind ourselves that life is a journey whose destination is God in the Kingdom of Heaven, where our hope in Jesus Christ will be vindicated. For we walk by faith, confident that Jesus Christ is the hope that will not disappoint.
The Jubilee Year, which began on Christmas Eve last year, could not have come soon enough. Perhaps because of the ascendant secularism of our times, perhaps because of the mediocre witness or even counter-witness of too many Christians, many people today have lost hope – or perhaps they never had it in the first place.
For many, politics has become a "replacement religion," and it attempts (unsuccessfully) to fill a void for belonging, moral clarity, and meaning that once was the role of religion in society. And aren’t the various “woke” ideologies today substitute religions, peddling an ersatz or false hope that will ultimately disappoint their adherents as the last century’s false religions of Marxism and Fascism disappointed theirs? And isn’t the false anthropology of human autonomy divorced from our responsibilities to be “our brother’s keeper” also a dead end that does not lead to human fulfilment and happiness but to loneliness and despair?
A world without God is a world without hope; without hope, there is no future. When the Word became flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary, hope was born – for Jesus, who came into the world to save it, is the hope of the world.
As pilgrims of hope, we also need to remember that hope is nurtured in the domestic Church, the Church in the home: the family, which explains why we conclude the year with the feast of the Holy Family. Economic, social, and cultural forces have put great strain on our families today, causing no little dysfunctions in family life. Tolstoy’s famous novel, Anna Karenina, begins with these words: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Family stability is the foundation for joy and is based on mutual affection, respect, and security, qualities present in the Holy Family of Nazareth.
Thus, Jubilee 2025 has called each one of us to spiritual renewal and to the transformation of the world by reintroducing hope to the world.
Whether directly related to the activities of the Jubilee Year or not, many have observed an upsurge in interest in faith, especially among young people. Secularism, with its cold rationalism and materialism, has led to disenchantment and many to rediscover in the Church’s celebrations of the Sacred Mysteries and her Sacramental life a new sense of wonder. These celebrations, especially the Holy Eucharist, which is a foretaste of future glory, are essentially celebrations of hope.
Hope is born of love and is based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross: “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life” (Rom 5:10). That life becomes manifest in our own life of faith, which begins with Baptism, develops in openness to God’s grace and is enlivened by a hope constantly renewed and confirmed by the working of the Holy Spirit. By his perennial presence in the life of the pilgrim Church, the Holy Spirit illumines all believers with the light of hope. He keeps that light burning, like an ever-burning lamp, to sustain and invigorate our lives.
As St. Peter urges us in his epistle: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (Peter 3: 15). Through our witness, may hope spread to all those who anxiously seek it. May the way we live our lives say to them in the words of Psalm 27: “Hope in the Lord! Hold firm, take heart and hope in the Lord!” (Ps 27:14). May the power of hope fill our days, as we await with confidence the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and glory, now and forever.
