Introduction to Rome jubilee and pilgrimage

INTRODUCTION TO ROME JUBILEE AND PILGRIMAGE

When you are coming to Rome and decide to tour the vatican, we can not miss some very important details about the Jubilee and its origins.The first jubilee year of the Catholic Church have come as something of a surprise to the pope Boniface VIII and his clerical counselors.

Having noted an exceptionally heavy flow of pilgrim traffic to Rome in 1300, Boniface declared that the year as the start of what was to become one of the most spiritually important and politically fortifying traditions, the Jubilee or Holy year. To make the most of an opportunity to consolidate Christian's fidelity to their church, on February 22, Boniface VIII proclaimed 1300 to be a year in which plenary absolution would be granted to all the faithful who made a visit to Rome and to the tombs of the Apostles.

Especially from the perspective of the new millennium of 2000, the motivation of an unprecedented influx of travelers to Rome in 1300 seems self-evident. Thirteen-hundred was, after all, the start of a new century and like 2000, a critical moment to prepare to confront the future on earth and beyond in a state of spiritual wholeness and cleanliness. To acheive that purity, one had to expunge from one's soul the taint of all past sins visiting also the catacombs and the main churches of Rome located in the vatican. Though new in Christian vocabulary in the thirteenth century, the concept of the Jubilee, like Christianity itself, had ancient roots in Judaism. Indeed, the very word Jubilee has a hebrew root and means the imperative need for regular bodily rest and spiritual cleansing.

For pope Boniface, whose papacy spanned the turn of a new century, a one-hundred year period seemed fitting for a Christian Jubilee cycle. The pontiff declared that Jubilee would be celebrated at the start of each new century.

In the year 1300, hundreds of Churches stood in Rome, many serving particular groups, various orders of monks and nuns, or foreigners residing in the city or just visiting. These were governed by the bishop of Rome, called by the latin word for " father", papa, or "pope". For centuries, popes had taken the title Pontifex maximus, Supreme pontiff, the ancient epithet of the city's chief pagan priest; and they perpetuated the myth that they presided over a single community of faithful, moving from church to church to say Mass in what was known as the stational liturgy.

But if we want to know where the Jubilee in Rome was declared, we have to go to saint John in Lateran basilica where a fresco of the painter Giotto represents Boniface VIII declaring the Jubilee year from the loggia balcony of saint John, because the popes did not live yet in the vatican at that time.