Towards the Jubilee

Towards the Jubilee 7. Saint Mary Major

Early in the 2000s, a renewed interest arose around the figure of Paul of Tarsus. Sensational discoveries brought to light, first the oldest portrait of the Apostle to the Gentiles in the Catacombs of Santa Tecla, Rome, subsequently a roughly hewn ...

An invisible line runs straight down from the summit of Michelangelo’s dome, through the light and into the darkness below, through centuries of history and phases of construction. Peter’s remains were buried in the bare ground below, after the ...

“But I can show the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church” (Eusebius, Church History, 2,25, 6-7). Some time around 200 A.D. ...

In order to better understand what is meant by indulgence, we have to take a step back. In the ancient Church, the faithful did not have confession as we do today. The forgiveness of sins was a “social event”: one declared oneself a sinner (without ...

Apostolic Penitentiary

For the medieval man, “Jubilee” was synonymous with “indulgence”, and before Boniface viii announced the great pardon to the world in the year 1300, medieval Christianity had never celebrated a Jubilee as we understand it today. The statements ...

The word jobel appears 27 times in the Hebrew text of the entire Old Testament: six of those times there is no doubt that it means the ram’s horn, whereas the remaining 21 times, it has to do with the jubilee year. In Jesus’ words, the horizon of the ...