Now written all over the Catholic and papal pentagram, the jubilee has been the object of jokes and scepticism for long: ‘un solo jubileo pe’ tanti ladri è ppoco’ (one jubilee for so many thieves is too little), said Belli; and in the age of Tangentopoli the definition of “mother of all bribes” was not far from the truth. And yet, precisely because it is so impure, clothed in career aspirations and measured forms of papolatry - the jubilee seems a necessary evil not only for Catholics, but for our times. Because it touches an inescapable knot: a political and spiritual, economic and psychological, diplomatic and theological knot that is that of  ‘remission’, ‘enfranchisement’, ‘forgiveness’. And anyone does see that at a certain point - after the blood has ceased to irrigate the land, when the exploitation of the land will have nothing left to rob, when the third chapter war will have exhausted its destructive potential - after all this, nothing will suffice that does not live up to the jubilee promise that Leviticus expresses in deliberately mythical language: ‘You shall sanctify the fiftieth year and proclaim deliverance in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a yobel for you: each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family'.

Yobel (transliterated by Jerome into the Latin iubilaeum), like the ram, like the horn that proclaims it: that restores God to his place as sole lord of the earth and of the living, through the cancellation of debts, the liberation of the insolvent and the annulation of existential and territorial mortgages. The Bible (which then fails to mention its implementation) fixes this jubilee year using a mystical metric: seven times seven years, thus marking a rhythm in which justice gives way to grace.

While the rabbinic masters discuss much about the meaning and details of the jubilee, in the tradition of Israel there is no record of a jubilee practice: which leaves room for the church to appropriate (one of the many expressions of replacement theology defined as ‘supersessionism’, i.e. that Christianity completes Judaism) the indulgence of the jubilee and write it down for centuries in the sacraments, penance, and the discipline of pilgrimage. Including since the 11^th century the armed pilgrimage of the Crusade, which offered (eternal) forgiveness to those who fight for God.

A system that from the 13^th century admits some exceptions of free and unarmed remission: Honorius III grants the same indulgence to Francis for pilgrims to the Porziuncola (1216), to those who go to the tomb of Thomas Becket (1220), or to those who, by decision of Pope Celestine V, go to Collemaggio and obtain ‘pardon’ (1294). His successor, Boniface VIII, revokes that way of indulgence and re-bans the crusade, but stumbles over a popular Roman conviction. Rumour has it that those who go to St Peter's on 1^st January 1300 will have all their sins forgiven, without paying and without killing: and in front of the ‘popular faith’ he decided in February to take possession of devotion, to make it lucrative, to discipline it, giving way to what the ‘Roman’ jubilee is and always will be: a conglomerate of business and devotion, triumphalism and corruption, power and piety, public works and good works. Ingredients amalgamated by an extraordinary popular and populist participation, which profits to all.

It profits to the papacy: to the point that the jubilee rhythm will be intensified with jubilees every 25 years (such as 2025), the extraordinary jubilees and, from the 20^th century, those of 33 and 88 (the supposed anniversary of Jesus' death on the cross).

For those who administer Rome, the jubilee is an occasion of great expense, from the 14^th century to our own century, and of bizarre choices ranging from bullfights in St. Peter's Square to the Jubilee 2025 mascot, which has caused a social frenzy and the alarm of Catholic neurotics who consider the puppet designed by Simone Legno - an author also active in works that are no less kitsch, but much more profane - blasphemous. Insofar it profits to Rome, selling rooms and picturesque souvenirs. The highlight of which was in 1900 the straw on which the pope ‘prisoner in the Vatican’ slept.

It profits to the faithful: to those who decide to take advantage of the jubilee to do a bit of tourism, and to those who, in the shadow of merchants and merchandise, express that need to enfranchise (enfranchise God above all from the use made of him by those who use his name to sacralise his ferocity and his complexes) and to be enfranchised (from guilt, from stigma, from loneliness).

It will be the same in 2025: a year that brings with it great anniversaries, such as that of the first Council of Nicaea, where a formula of baptismal catechesis became the Creed that East and West professed together and will profess together on 24 May, with Francis' visit to the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomeus; and sharper anniversaries, such as the sixtieth anniversary of the end of Vatican II, which sees on the Peter’s throne the first pope to become a priest after the Council.

And which brings with it the need to look beyond the predictable gamble whereby war is said to undermine democracies while autocrats re-propose it as an instrument for solving crises. When Pope Francis chose ‘hope’ as the keyword of the jubilee, one could still think of it as one option among many. Today it appears as a letter for a tomorrow where we will all arrive as ‘ragged and tired veterans’ and some with the insignia of ‘useless heroes’ (Gaber): and therefore with the need to believe that in a mysterious corner of time (seven by seven plus one) there is a horn, a yobel that transports us into a tomorrow we only need to know that it does exist. In spite of everything, it does exist.

See, Viaggio attraverso i secoli: origini del giubileo (che oggi conviene a tutti)