A fresh start

     Since 1300 the Catholic Church has been celebrating a Jubilee Year roughly ever twenty-five years.  It is a year set aside for pilgrimage to sacred places -Rome or the Holy Land or great places of pilgrimage like Santiago de Compostela in Spain.  In making these pilgrimages, and offering prayer and sacrifice, a new beginning could touch the life of the pilgrim.  Graces from Reconciliation would touch their lives, and plenary indulgences could be received.  What this meant was that the residual effect of our sins, temporal punishment, could be dealt with and removed.  It would give a person a fresh start, a new beginning, an openness to the loving mercy of God.  I made my first Holy Year pilgrimage to Rome at Pentecost in 1975, as a young priest, to attend the international Catholic Charismatic Renewal gathering.  One of the highlights was concelebrating, along with hundreds of priests, a liturgy at the Papal Altar in Saint Peter's celebrated at the invitation of Pope Paul VI by Cardinal Suenens.  Following that liturgy, we welcomed the pope at a special audience.

     I mention it because the reading from Leviticus today gives the groundwork for a jubilee year to be declared and celebrated by God's people every fiftieth year.  This jubilee year would be one of celebrating the relationship that the people had with God, and to restore the freshness of the relationship that had been lost or complicated by the passing of time and our own limitations.  It was a dramatic moment.  It involved a literal restoration of everything.  For example, slaves were freed, debts forgiven, property restored, liberty  and freedom for all peoples guaranteed.  It would be a year of celebrating the blessings of God and the hard work of the previous forty-nine years.  Fairness and honesty would prevail. 

     The idea of a new beginning, a fresh start, is indeed refreshing.  We find that in the gift of Baptism, in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, in the transforming moments of our lives.  But rarely to this degree.  This is life changing.  What would the world be like if we trusted enough in the love of God and relied enough on his grace to make such new beginnings ... not every fifty years, but whenever our lives are in need of a new or renewed direction?


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    A CORRECTION ***  I mentioned yesterday that there would be a Memorial Mass for Archbishop Pietro Sambi on August 6th at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington and that EWTN would broadcast the Mass.  I understand the date has been changed, possibly to September.  I will inform you of the date when it is set.