Recently, members of the LGBTQIA+ communities and their families made a pilgrimage to Rome to participate in the Jubilee Year. Around 1400 members of this community and their families walked through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica with joy and reverence. This jubilee was approved by Pope Francis before his death. To culminate this sacred gathering of members of the LGBTQIA+ persons, Bishop Francesco Savino, the vice president of the Italian Bishop’s Conference celebrated Mass with the pilgrims at the Jesuit church in Rome, the Church of the Gesù on September 6, 2025.
The fact that the Successor of Peter, Pope Leo XIV was welcoming of these members of the Catholic faith speaks to a theology on Jubilee that ought to be unpacked and embraced for what it is. I do intend to do that in this article.
In his homily, Bishop Savino noted that “we are all a pilgrim people of hope and we want to leave this celebration more joyful and hopeful than ever.” One must thus ask, what has being a pilgrim people who are oriented towards hope have to do with a Jubilee Year? To address this question, I will shed light on four instantiations of a graced awareness that are closely linked to a Jubilee Year. First, the theology of the Jubilee Year is closely linked to a disruptive grace of awakening. As ancient Jewish tradition of the practice of Jubilee commands in Leviticus 25: 1-55, Jubilee helps God’s people to become aware of the tapestry of social injustice that shapes their social interactions. In other words, Jubilee is not so much about encountering God in abstraction. Rather, it is about encountering God in the faces and bodies that the social system has reduced to living at the peripheries of society. Consequently, Jubilee Year becomes a year of a turn to social justice that helps to invalidate the current social structures embraced by God’s people. It is an embrace of a grace that is grounded in “questioning, challenging, and insisting on embracing the gift that promotes a culture of liberation.”
One can say that the same applies to the hospitality shown by the Church of Rome to its siblings in the faith who came to pray at the holy sites of the Catholic faith. Just as the disruptive grace of Jubilee awakens society to their social structures of exclusion, while insisting on liberating all who are reduced to the peripheries, this Jubilee Year allows the presence of LGBTQIA+ persons to disrupt the ecclesial and religious structures of exclusion playing out in the Church as it pertains to how the Church’s LGBTQIA+ members are treated in some regions of the global Catholic Church. Their embodied presence is one that ought to orient the Church to a site of freedom that is inclusive of all persons.
Second, the disruptive grace of Jubilee Year is itself the instantiation of illogicality as the loci of divine-human encounters. Social logic demands that society operate in a certain manner. But during the Jubilee Year, all social norms as they pertain to rights and duties are themselves upended. This is because Jubilee Year is grounded in the fact that human social systems are not free from errors. As Leviticus 25: 39-43 notes, though one may owe another some debts and is unable to pay it, the debtor must not be reduced to slavery because at the end of the day all persons, debtors and debtees are children of God. The illogicality here seems to be pronounced especially when the one who is owed a debt has a legitimate claim to it. Yet, the clam is delegitimized because the system that produces debts is itself fundamentally problematic. Consequently, the Jubilee Year becomes God’s insistence of creating an alternative option for interpreting the law to allow for a pathway for embracing abundant life by all involved. Similarly, in a Church that has spent centuries articulating a type of anthropology that is grounded in a heteronormative bias, Jubilee Year serves as a decolonial approach for instantiating a richer anthropology that goes beyond a monologic as it pertains to belonging via sexual preference. It speaks to the fact that the Church is submitting itself to the supreme logic and law that guides the Church – the praxis of mercy and hospitality that is grounded in hope itself. In this case, hope becomes a prophetic awakening to that which is beyond human logic. One can thus say that the praxis of a Jubilee Year points to a truth that is beyond the canonical truths that the Church is familiar with. It is a truth that comes from God and which the Church surrenders to allow itself to be led to a deeper understanding. This is exactly what Pope Leo was ritualizing when he met with Fr. Martin in a private audience. And when on August 7 instructed Bishop Savino to “go celebrate the Jubilee organized by La Tenda di Gionata and the other associations that accompany you,” as accounted by Bishop Savino himself.
Third, Jubilee Year is all about the reclaiming of fellowship. As Leviticus 25:46 mandates, “you shall not lord it harshly over any of the Israelites, your kinsmen.” In other words, the grace of Jubilee Year that awakens the community to its own social sins and exclusionary cultures is also the grace that fosters a sense of community that transcends old logic and patterns of behaving. Consequently, Pope Leo’s hospitality and audience with Fr Martin along with the eucharistic celebration officiated by Bishop Savino, in his capacity as Vice President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, speaks to the fact that the Church is intentionally ritualizing fellowship with all its members and rejecting old patterns of biases that have previously defined its sense of self in the world. In the words of Fr. Martin, “I am extremely grateful and deeply consoled by my meeting with the Holy Father. He encouraged me to continue my ministry.”
Fourth, Jubilee Year is not just about a particular moment or an event that interrupts the status quo and when it is all done, all persons go back to their old exclusionary habits. No! Jubilee Year is by its nature liberative and disrupting of old habits, old imaginations, old logics, and old vices to allow for a new horizon to open for all so that together, they can journey together to deepen the bonds of fellowship. Jubilee Year is about a Kairos moment of encounter that projects al towards the horizon of the future where new meanings of ecclesial identities are embraced, where new inclusive habits are formed, and even where new theological traditions that are rooted in a social justice consciousness are crafted. As Francis DeBernardo noted, “not only are LGBTQ people marching and walking to say that they’re part of the Church, but official Church institutions are welcoming them and helping them to tell their stories.” An example of such is told by Kaitlyn, who travelled from London: “We have been overlooked for so long. It is very good to show it is possible to both LGBTQ+ and Catholic.” In other words, the new fellowship that is crafted during a Jubilee Year is one where all voices are joined together in a polyphony of love and hospitality. All are transformed. This is the power of being a pilgrim during a Jubilee Year. All persons embark on mutual journey of transformation so that they can embrace a new language of acceptance and a prophetic grounding of their faith to ensure that old habits of exclusion do not resurface.
Finally, it is worth repeating the significance of a Jubilee Year in Catholic religious imagination. It is an invitation to embrace hope that instantiates new beginnings. For both the LGBTQIA+ members of the Church it is a year of a new ritualization of ecclesial hospitality and the beginning of belonging.