Jubilee!

I have racked up quite a few sins over the past twenty-five years.

Fortunately, 2025 will be a Jubilee Year. Pope Francis made it official on Christmas Eve when he tore down the brick wall blocking the Holy Door to St Peter’s. Jubilees are a Catholic Church tradition dating to 1300, occurring every twenty five years. They are considered “a time for reconciliation and renewal”. Catholics who visit designated sacred sites and engage in redemptive activities can obtain a Jubilee Indulgence — a sort of spiritual deep cleaning and mega-pardon for earthly sins.

One of the sacred sites is St Peter’s Holy Door. You can’t cheat your way to an indulgence in non-Jubilee years since the HD is blocked. Popes have been doing this since 1300 and they know all the tricks that you might try.

It’s sort of like a Holy Scavenger Hunt, a Holy Progressive Dinner, or that Pokemon Seeking Thing that all the kids were doing a few years ago. Instead of a prize, a luscious dessert, or whatever you got in Pokemon, you get a clean slate sin-wise which means TSA pre-check statusfor your non-stop flight to Heaven. None of that Purgatory stuff for you.

That’s a pretty good deal. So good that it expected to draw a whopping 32 million visitors to Rome — 10 million more than 2024’s record high. You may get bored visiting those “sacred sites” and engaging in those “redemptive activities” though. In your spare time, you can witness aspiring gladiators going at it in the Colosseum for the first time in 2,000 years, sponsored by Airbnb who, not uncoincidentally are jacking up rates in Rome for the Jubilee. A little blood and gore adds spice to any Roman visit.

Catholic kids likely have not committed enough venal sins to make the trip worthwhile, but babysitting rates being what they are, most parents will want to bring the kiddos along to the Eternal City. Kids love meta stuff, so the Vatican is inaugurating an Epcot-like experience, in partnership with Microsoft. Buzzing drones mapped St. Peter’s Basilica, capturing 400,000 images. Artificial intelligence then processed the data into a big-screen 3D adventure that tracks the church’s evolution from swampland to architectural masterpiece, allowing visitors to glimpse minute details — including spider nests inside the basilica’s soaring dome. No doubt, Sacred Spiders will be prominently displayed for sale in the Vatican Gift Shop.

I’ll never make the next Jubilee Year, but I will take my chances and pass up a 2025 trip to Rome. If my sins relegate me to the TSA line where I have to take off my shoes for that flight to Heaven, so be it.

By Ed Dufton