As the Holy Door Closes

 

In his Urbi et Orbi Address on Christmas, Pope Leo referenced today's solemn closing of the Jubilee Year's last Holy Door.

In a few days’ time, the Jubilee Year will come to an end. The Holy Doors will close, but Christ our hope remains with us always! He is the Door that is always open, leading us into divine life. This is the joyful proclamation of this day: the Child who was born is God made man; he comes not to condemn but to save; his is not a fleeting appearance, for he comes to stay and to give himself. In him, every wound is healed and every heart finds rest and peace.  “The Lord’s birth is the birth of peace.”

Closing a door obviously lacks the symbolic religious resonance of its opening a year earlier. Opening the Holy Door expressed an invitation - literally an invitation to come to Rome on pilgrimage, figuratively a challenge to undertake a spiritual journey in hope. In contrast, closing the door seems almost somewhat sad. Fittingly it falls on Epiphany, which marks the end of Christmas, after which we will soon dismantle the decorations that have brightened this season and so set it apart from the drab rest of the year. I am always saddened to see the Christmas Tree stripped of its ornaments and thrown out into the street. Yet, as the Christmas Tree disappears, I also know that it is time to start a new year and get on with the important business of living Christmas daily in an undecorated and drab world.

So too, the closing of the Holy Door invites us to renew the world on this side of that Door.

In his Homily for the Epiphany, at the Mass which immediately followed the closing of the Jubilee Door, Pope Leo said, all of our lives are a journey. The Gospel challenges the Church not to be afraid of this phenomenon, but to appreciate it, and orient it toward God who sustains us. He is a God who can unsettle us because he does not remain firmly in our hands like the idols of silver and gold; instead, he is alive and life-giving, like the Baby whom Mary cradled in her arms and whom the wise men adored. Holy places like cathedrals, basilicas and shrines, which have become Jubilee pilgrimage destinations, must diffuse the aroma of life, the unforgettable realization that another world has begun.

It is that another world that has begun that we now are privileged to inhabit even on this side of the Door, even now in this sad saeculum, even now in this troubled year of our Lord 2026.