COMMENTARY: A quarter century after the Jubilee of 2000, the Church is still asking why the evangelical hopes it kindled have yet to bear their full fruit.

On the first day of this new year, Pope Leo XIV quoted Pope St. John Paul II, speaking “at the conclusion of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, in terms that resonate with our reflection today.”

“‘How many gifts,’ [John Paul] said, ‘how many extraordinary occasions the Great Jubilee has offered to believers!’” Pope Leo recalled. “[John Paul] then concluded: ‘Christ asks of believers, to whom he has given the joy of meeting him, a courageous readiness to set out once again to proclaim his Gospel, old and ever new. He sends them to enliven our human history and culture with his saving message.’”

Twenty-five years ago, John Paul closed the Great Jubilee 2000 on the solemn feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6, 2001. He sincerely felt that “human history and culture” was ripe for a new encounter with “Christ’s saving message.” 

A century is a long time, let alone a millennium, so the Great Jubilee’s seeds may yet bear fruit. But the end of Jubilee 2025 is a time to go back again to the beginning of the century, as the intervening 25 years have seen the Church distracted from the great hopes of 2000.

As he closed the Holy Door at St. Peter’s, John Paul issued a lengthy apostolic letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte (“At the beginning of the new millennium”), that very day. 

In a pontificate of many documents, Novo Millennio Ineunte has the tone of both a valedictory and a charter. John Paul had fixed his eyes on the Great Jubilee from the outset of his pontificate, mentioning it at the beginning of his first encyclical in 1979, and later stating that the preparation for, and celebration of, the Great Jubilee was the “hermeneutic” of the entire pontificate.

The celebration of the Year 2000 had been a smashing success. The Holy Father stayed in Rome to welcome tens of millions of pilgrims, including an immense throng for World Youth Day and the International Eucharistic Congress.

He made an exception for two historic trips — one to the center of salvation history, his epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the other to the mystical center of the 20th century, Fatima. He canonized Sister Faustina Kowalska as the first saint of the third millennium, putting the seal of Divine Mercy on the jubilee and declaring the new liturgical observance of “Divine Mercy Sunday.” He canonized groups of martyrs from Mexico and China, as well as two great women who advanced racial equality, Sisters Katharine Drexel and Josephine Bakhita.

The commemoration of the new martyrs of the 20th century — some of whom were known personally to John Paul — and the request for forgiveness for the historic sins of Catholics were powerful acts of honoring memory and healing it.

Many of those signature events had echoes in Jubilee 2025 — the joint canonization of Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis, for example, and a commemoration of the new martyrs of the still young 21st century. 

John Paul had been speaking for decades about this century as a time of new graces, of the New Evangelization. He concluded his 1995 address to the United Nations in New York as a “witness to hope,” expressing confidence that “we can build in the next century and the next millennium a civilization worthy of the human person, a true culture of freedom … [when] we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit.” 

Thus, as the Great Jubilee concluded, it was expected that it would unleash “fresh energies” in the Church, as Novo Millennio Ineunte echoed Christ’s call to “put out into the deep.”

The Church, it seemed, was ready for a great evangelical outreach to a world that, after a dismal century, was ready to hear the gospel again. 

Then it all went sideways, or backwards.

If the Great Jubilee showed the world the joyful, inviting face of religious faith, nine months later, religiously inspired hatred delivered lethal violence on 9/11. The third millennium opened not with a springtime of the spirit, but with religious terrorism and the reaction of a “new atheism” — an intellectually fashionable rejection of God and ridicule of believers, animated in large part by the pathologies of religious fundamentalism. Only in recent years has the new atheism gone out of fashion.

It was an indication of how important the challenge of (Islamist) fundamentalism and violence was that Pope Benedict XVI’s most famous address in Regensburg dealt with that topic, in the context of the rationality of religious belief.

Not only external events, but internal developments, too, sapped much of the Church’s evangelical energy — sexual abuse, liturgy and synodality. Is it possible that now, 25 years later, the enthusiasm of Novo Millennio Ineunte can be recaptured as another jubilee comes to an end?

There was no hint in John Paul’s apostolic letter of the scourge of clergy sexual abuse. Yet during the Great Jubilee, John Paul had been working with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on addressing the problem. 

In April 2001, he issued new legislation assigning sexual abuse cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, traditionally the tribunal dealing with the gravest canonical crimes. New procedural norms were promulgated to centralize and standardize cases. All credible allegations had to be reported to Rome for instructions on how to proceed. Local sweeping-it-under-the-rug measures were no longer permitted. John Paul may well have thought that the necessary Roman reforms were firmly in place. 

Not exactly.

Precisely one year to the day after closing the Holy Door, the first wave of the global sexual abuse crisis crashed down upon the Church universal. The Boston Globe published the first of hundreds of articles detailing crimes and coverups on Jan. 6, 2002. The evangelical energy of Novo Millennio Ineunte was drowned in the flood.

Consider one example: In January 2001, Msgr. Timothy Dolan was rector of the North American College in Rome and was present for the glorious conclusion of the Great Jubilee. Eight months later, he was ordained an auxiliary bishop in St. Louis, in a ceremony that apparently showed the strength and vitality of the American hierarchy — most of whom seemed to be on hand. 

Six months later, Bishop Dolan was spending his days wading through historic cases of abuse. A few months after that, he was appointed to succeed Archbishop Rembert Weakland in Milwaukee, who resigned amid disgraceful revelations of homosexual affairs, hush-money payments and lies. 

When Cardinal Dolan retired last month in New York, it came the same month that he announced a $300 million fund for sexual-abuse settlements; he had sold the archdiocesan headquarters to raise part of the money. His entire episcopate, born in the aftermath of the Great Jubilee, was lived under the shadow of the sexual abuse crisis.

Is it possible that the crisis is now, if not definitively resolved, at least no longer absorbing the time, energy and resources that were thought available for evangelization a quarter century ago?

Dealing with the sexual abuse crisis was forced upon the Church, overdue though it was. Other distractions came as the unintended consequences of chosen priorities. 

Pope Benedict chose, in order to heal the rift with the Society of St. Pius X, a radical step. He gave priests permission to celebrate what he called the “extraordinary form” of the Mass independent, or even against, the wishes of their own bishops. He wrote at the time (2007) that it would have quite a limited impact on the life of the Church. 

He was right about that for the Church as a whole, but in certain places it marked a great turning inward, different in direction (literally) but similar in intensity to the energy-sapping liturgical controversies of the 1970s.

Digital media did not help in this regard. There emerged a clerical milieu where the choreography of liturgical processions was mastered with greater precision than the theology of the processions of persons in the Holy Trinity. For some, it was as if man were made for the Roman Missal, not the Roman Missal for man. 

It may have been something of what Pope Francis lamented when he repeatedly said that a Church confining herself to the sacristy soon becomes sick. Yet his great synodal project also became inward-looking, at odds with his early insistence on rethinking all of the Church’s activities through a missionary lens. The Church got out of the sacristy but found itself in a conference room.

While the synodal process on synodality bore the good fruit that always arises when people of common faith and purpose gather together, the sheer scale and mass of the synodal process diverted energy away from proclaiming the Word of God. Francis wisely instituted a Sunday of the Word of God (Jan. 25 this year), but the synods were weighed down by the words of men.

Jubilee 2025, for the first time since 1700, included a papal death and conclave. A new pope, whomever he may be, brings new energy, as does every jubilee. 

In 2026, the post-Jubilee question will be whether those energies will be more effectively harnessed than 25 years ago.

This article was originally published by NCRegister.