My Dear Friends,

This year is a Jubilee Year. To better understand what a Jubilee means, it is useful to go back to the Jewish roots of our faith. A Jubilee is a special year of repentance, conversion, and forgiveness. Conversion as a remedy for sin was part of the providential plan of God since before the beginning of time. On this is point, it is interesting to read a brief paragraph taken from the Zohar, a Jewish mystical commentary on Scriptures: 

When the blessed Holy One desired, when it arose in His will, to create the world, He gazed into Torah and created it. For every act of creation throughout the world, the blessed Holy One gazed into Torah and created. . . . As He was about to create Adam, Torah exclaimed: “If a human being is created and then proceeds to sin, and You punish him, why should the work of Your hands be in vain, since he will be unable to endure Your judgement?” He replied, “I have already prepared teshuvah, returning, before creating the world.” (Zohar 1:134a) 

Here we see a fundamental point, which is the immense respect that God has for our freedom. In fact, if God wanted man not to sin, He would have had to restrain our freedom. On the other hand, after humanity had sinned, He would have had to start from scratch to fix everything. Yet, He took another path: the path of forgiveness. God let men and women free to sin so that He could exercise forgiveness towards them. God’s mercy and forgiveness, God’s grace, precedes everything. 

Conversion is humanity’s response to God’s love. It arises from coming to know that there is someone who loves us as we are, someone who has forgiven our sins, someone who, after we messed up, never stopped looking for us. The good news of Christianity is precisely that after Original Sin, God did not remain passive but He actively chose a man, Abraham, to begin a history of Salvation which culminated in Our Lord Jesus Christ, God mase man, who died in our flesh so that you and I may have access to eternal life, so that our sins, which keep us away from God, may be destroyed. If our ears were truly open, we would want to run toward God again, we would truly hate sin with our whole heart, because we would see the misery in which sin leads us. 

Unfortunately, many times we live totally alienated. We don’t truly understand the magnitude of our sins and their consequences. We justify everything that we do because in the end “everybody does it”, or “no one has seen me”, or again “I’m not killing anybody”. For this reasons God has to allow events that may “open our ears”. At times these events are painful, yet they provide a great service to us. Without them we would never want to convert, and we would never go back to God, which is our ultimate happiness. 

For this reason, the Church gives us this Jubilee year as a time in which we can stop and look at our lives. In this, the practice of the indulgences comes to our help. An indulgence is a special form of forgiveness that helps us to get rid of the unhealthy attachments that sin leaves behind despite confession. I always like to make this example. Imagine that I were to spend my whole life stealing money by running a huge Ponzi scheme. Then imagine that I would have a massive heart attack, and, on my death bed, I would ask for forgiveness to God. I would be forgiven, because God’s mercy is totally gratuitous, but I would still not be ready to go to Heaven because, you know, I want to be with God, but I also still love my money. So, I need a time to get rid of the residue love of money that I have, so that I may love God with all my heart, soul, and strength. This time is called Purgatory. However, before I die, I can receive a special pardon, the indulgence, that also purifies me of the consequences of my sins. 

Nevertheless, indulgences are not magic. I can take all the necessary steps to get one, I can cross a Holy Door as many times as I want, but if I still don’t see the consequences of my sin it won’t do any good to me. That is why the key to enter into the Jubilee is first of all to contemplate the love that God has for us, to ask God the grace to believe in the good news, to believe that my sins have been forgiven, that alle the consequences of my actions have been nailed on the Cross of Christ, so that I may enjoy the freedom promised to me by the Jubilee.

God bless you all,

Fr. David Zallocco