I’m going to Rome. Who’s coming with me?
Why go to Rome? Because it’s a jubilee year! It’s a time of special grace, an opportunity to manifest to ourselves and to the world that this lifelong pilgrimage we call life has a goal: heaven. Ever since Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, humanity has been searching for a way back into paradise. All of human history is the story of mankind trying to find or create paradise and failing.
The Tower of Babel? A wrong-headed attempt to build our way into paradise. So God scattered that. Then he set in motion his own plan to turn our aimless exile into a true pilgrimage.
It began with Abraham: “Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1). It carried on with Moses: “I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Ex 3:10). After Kings David and Solomon, it looked like God’s kingdom – some taste of paradise – might finally arrive on earth. But no. Then came division and defeat and exile. So the prophet carried on the mission of proclaiming that, although humanity had not yet reached paradise, there would be a way: “Make straight the way of the Lord” (Is 40:3). The psalms sang of it, using Jerusalem and the temple as a symbolic stand-in for paradise:
“I rejoiced when they said to me,
‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’
And now our feet are standing
within your gates, Jerusalem.” (Ps 122:1-2)
Then came Jesus, who every year made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem like observant Jews of his day. On his last pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, he was taken prisoner, tortured, murdered, and buried. But then he rose from the dead. And what came next? His Ascension into heaven. For the first time since the sin of Adam and Eve, a human being entered into paradise. The pilgrimage finally had a conclusion.
It didn’t take long for the Church to make use of this imagery of pilgrimage. Sacramental confessions sometimes required penitents to make literal pilgrimages to holy sites like Jerusalem, Rome, or the tomb of some important saint. By the year 1300, the Pope felt confident he could call a year of jubilee and ask people to make pilgrimage to Rome. And people did. And it caught on. Pope Boniface thought it would be worth doing every 100 years, but by 1350, Pope Clement VI decided it would be every 50 years, echoing the ancient Israelite requirement of Jubilee after a “week of sabbath years” (7 x 7 years). By the year 1470, Pope Paul II decided it would be every 25 years, concerned more that every generation would get a chance to observe than with being a literal parallel to the Old Testament. And here we are, almost 500 years after that, carrying on the practice of Jubilee and Pilgrimage.
So the Pope has invited us to go to Rome. I’m going. Will you come with me? While I’m there, I’ll stop by Turin to see Jesus’ actual burial shroud and visit the relics of soon-to-be-St. Pier Giorgio Frassati. We’ll swing by Assisi to visit soon-to-be-St. Carlo Acutis, who was 3 years younger than me and has already stepped up as the saint of my generation. I’ll visit St. Clement’s burial site in Rome, named after him, to thank him for my baptism, which took place in 1988 in a parish in Metairie also named after him. And of course, we’ll go to the Major Basilicas, go through the Holy Doors, and visit the tombs of many saints
Pray about it. Consider it. Join me if you can.
https://www.holytravels.org/diolafitaly