Pope Francis has inaugurated his Holy Year at Rome’s main prison, taking a message of hope to inmates and involving them in the Catholic Church’s once every quarter-century celebration which is expected to bring about 32 million pilgrims to Rome.
Francis stood up from his wheelchair, knocked on the door to the chapel at Rebibbia prison and walked across the threshold, re-enacting the gesture he performed at the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica two nights earlier on Christmas Eve.
The opening of the Holy Door at the basilica officially kicked off the jubilee year, a church tradition dating to 1300 that nowadays occurs every 25 years and involves the faithful coming to Rome on pilgrimages.
With the doors open to the public, a steady stream of pilgrims was filing into the basilica.
“The first Holy Door I opened at Christmas in St Peter’s. I wanted the second one to be here, in a prison,” Francis told the inmates before he entered.
“I wanted each of us here, inside and out, to have the possibility of throwing open the door of our hearts and understanding that hope doesn’t disappoint.”
Francis dedicated the 2025 jubilee to hope and made clear that prisoners would be an important part of it. The final grand event of the jubilee is a special Mass for inmates at St Peter’s on December 14 2025.
Francis has long made prison ministry an important part of his priestly vocation and has made several visits to Rebibbia since becoming Pope in 2013 while also including prison visits in many of his foreign trips.
His message is always one of hope, believing that people who are serving prison sentences need something to look forward to more than most. That is especially true in Italy, where prison overcrowding and inmate suicides are at record highs, according to the Antigone Association, which tracks prison conditions.
According to Antigone’s 2024 report, 88 prisoners killed themselves in Italian jails this year — more than any other year — and the inmate population was 132% over the system’s capacity.
In his homily, Francis suggested the prisoners think of hope as an anchor fixed on the ground and that they try to hold tight to the rope that is attached to it, even if it sometimes hurts their hands.
“Hold on to the rope of hope, hold on to the anchor,” Francis said. “Never let it go.”
Speaking to reporters outside, Francis said that whenever he speaks to prisoners, the first thing he asks himself is “why them and not me”.
“Because we all can fall, the important thing is to not lose hope, to hold on to that anchor of hope,” he said.
Back at the Vatican for his noon blessing, Francis called prison “a cathedral of pain and hope” as he repeated his message. He also reiterated his 2025 wish for peace in the world and for wealthy countries to reduce or eliminate the debt owed by poorer countries.
“One of the things that characterises jubilees is the remission of debts,” Francis said, calling the debts owed by many poor countries “unsustainable”.
Francis’s outing to Rebibbia on a frigid morning was his final big event of the week after he celebrated Christmas Eve Mass on Tuesday evening at St Peter’s Basilica and delivered his Christmas Day blessing from the loggia overlooking the square.
The 88-year-old Pope, who often suffers from respiratory infections in winter, has a few days to rest before gearing up for New Year’s Eve vigil and Mass the following day.
Francis’s 2025 involves a dizzying calendar of events that will test his stamina, with special Masses for all the main groups of pilgrims who are being celebrated during the year: adolescents, migrants, teachers and law enforcement, among others.
So far, he has only one foreign trip planned – a May visit to Turkey to commemorate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, Christianity’s first ecumenical council.
