Jubilee 2025: World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly

 In 2021, as the world began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, the first World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly was marked by Pope Francis. It is a celebration that reflects something of Pope Francis' charism of appreciation for the more everyday aspects of the living of the Christian life. He had a particular sense of the role that grandparents can play in the life of their families, in relation to their children and in relation to their grandchildren. He spoke optimistically of the wisdom that the older generation could share with the younger generation, especially with regard to the handing on of the Catholic faith. Perhaps Pope Francis had an awareness of a generational gap in terms of catechesis and practice of the faith that affected parents, and saw in grandparents a resource to bridge this gap; perhaps he was speaking from a cultural background that still retained a lived experience of family life less affected by the disruption of family break up of some more developed countries. 

In his message for the first World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, Pope Francis referenced the words of Pope Benedict XVI during a visit to a home for the elderly. Pope Benedict was visiting a "casa-famiglia", or "family home" of the St Egidio Community, where he described himself as "an old man visiting his peers" and insisted that "it is beautiful to be old!".

From the outset the Community of Sant’Egidio has supported so many elderly people on their way, helping them to stay in their own living milieus and opening various “casa-famiglia” in Rome and throughout the world. Through solidarity between the young and the old it has helped people to understand that the Church is effectively a family made up of all the generations, where each person must feel “at home” and where it is not the logic of profit and of possession that prevails but that of giving freely and of love. When life becomes frail, in the years of old age, it never loses its value and its dignity: each one of us, at any stage of life, is wanted and loved by God, each one is important and necessary.

 As people grow older and become more infirm, I think it is good that they maintain independence in living and in sustaining a social life as long as that is possible. But I think it is also valuable to recognise the point at which the help of others becomes necessary, and to then accept that help with graciousness rather than with resentment. That graciousness represents a gift of the person who is infirm towards the person who cares for them, and is a sign of regard for the person who, by caring, expresses a key dimension of their own dignity as a person. Pope Benedict XVI touched on this idea during his visit with the elderly:

Dear friends, at our age we often experience the need of the help of others; and this also happens to the Pope. In the Gospel we read that Jesus told the Apostle Peter: “when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go” (Jn 21:18). The Lord was referring to the way in which the Apostle was to witness to his faith to the point of martyrdom, but this sentence makes us think about that fact that the need for help is a condition of the elderly. I would like to ask you to seek in this too a gift of the Lord, because being sustained and accompanied, feeling the affection of others is a grace!

 In the Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee 2025, Pope Francis indicated that the elderly and grandparents might be shown particular signs of hope (n.14):

The elderly, who frequently feel lonely and abandoned, also deserve signs of hope. Esteem for the treasure that they are, their life experiences, their accumulated wisdom and the contribution that they can still make, is incumbent on the Christian community and civil society, which are called to cooperate in strengthening the covenant between generations.

Here I would also mention grandparents, who represent the passing on of faith and wisdom to the younger generation. May they find support in the gratitude of their children and the love of their grandchildren, who discover in them their roots and a source of understanding and encouragement.

And Pope Leo XIV reminds us, in his message for the fifth World Day of the Elderly and Grandparents, to be marked on 27th July 2025, that the Jubilee indulgence can be obtained under the usual conditions for a visit to the elderly who are alone:

[Pope Francis] wanted the World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly to be celebrated primarily through an effort to seek out elderly persons who are living alone. For this reason, those who are unable to come to Rome on pilgrimage during this Holy Year may “obtain the Jubilee Indulgence if they visit, for an appropriate amount of time, the elderly who are alone... making, in a sense, a pilgrimage to Christ present in them (cf. Mt 25:34-36)” (APOSTOLIC PENITENTIARY, Norms for the Granting of the Jubilee Indulgence, III). Visiting an elderly person is a way of encountering Jesus, who frees us from indifference and loneliness. 

Integral Ecology and the Mass for the Care of Creation

Pope Francis' encyclical letter Laudato si' is entitled "On care for our common home". There is also another term, used within the text of the encyclical, that might also have provided a subtitle for the encyclical.  This is the term "integral ecology", and it indicates that the encyclical does not advocate for a kind of ideological environmentalism.

When we speak of the “environment”, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it. ... We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.

After exploring ideas of environmental, economic and social ecology, of cultural ecology, and of an ecology of daily life Pope Francis addressed the principle of the common good. Towards the end of his account of an ecology of daily life, Pope Francis wrote:

Human ecology also implies another profound reality: the relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of an “ecology of man”, based on the fact that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will”. It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings. The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. ...

The texts for the Mass for the Care of Creation are reflective of this sense of an integral ecology. (The translation from the Latin is mine.)

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands (Entry antiphon)

Father, who in Christ, the first born of all creatures, called the universe into existence, grant, we pray, that docile to your Spirit the breath of life, we may in charity care for the work of your hands. (Collect)

May the sacrament of unity that we have received, Father, increase our communion with you and our brothers, so that, looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, we may duly learn to live at one with all creatures. (Prayer after Communion)

Placing this new Mass formulary in the context of the Jubilee 2025, the Prayer for the Jubilee contains the following:

May your grace transform us into tireless cultivators of the seeds of the Gospel. May those seeds transform from within both humanity and the whole cosmos in the sure expectation of a new heaven and a new earth ...

 

 

Dare we hope ....

Dare we hope that all men be saved? This is the title of a short book by Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it perhaps asks of us an interesting question during the Jubilee 2025. The book was written in the heat of a polemic, a polemic triggered at least in part by the re-phrasing of the question as one about whether or not anyone will go the Hell. Fr von Balthasar's treatment of the subject is wide ranging, and it should be noted that it is far from suggesting a superficial notion of universal salvation.

To open the discussion in the way that Fr von Balthasar does, we can start by observing that, in living our Christian lives, we stand under the judgement of God, in an existential choosing between the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death, the way that leads to heaven and the way that leads to hell. Scripture offers both a picture of a severe judgement, with the separation of the saints from those condemned to hell, and a picture of hope in the mercy of God. The risk that we face if we insist on a populated hell is that, at least on the part of others, we lose our faith in the work of redemption. The risk that we face if we insist on the mercy of God to the exclusion of the idea of a judgement, at least on our own part, is that we become complacent and fail in our actions to make the choice for the way that leads to heaven.  The Christian life involves keeping both of these pictures in view and in balance, one with the other. 

In some words of Pope St Gregory I:

Before sinning, let man fear God's justice, but after sinning let him presume on His mercy. And let him not so fear His justice as not to be strengthened by the consolation of hope; not so confident of His mercy as to neglect to apply to his wounds the medicine of adequate penance.

At one point in his book, Fr von Balthasar quote Adrienne von Speyr to a similar effect:

The truth is not simply an either-or: either somebody is in hell or nobody is. Both are partial expressions of the whole truth. Thus, too, Ignatius has a right to make his meditations on hell and to instruct that they be made ... The truth consists in a sum total of partial truths, and each of these partial truths must be wholly expressed, wholly thought out and lived through. We do not arrive at the truth if we only bring out one part and cover up the other. In every perspective, the whole must come to expression.

In a Jubilee Year dedicated to a them of hope, it is a most audacious expression of that hope to ask ourselves the question posed by the title of von Balthasar's book: Dare we hope that all men be saved?

To adapt the words of the Jubilee prayer:

May the grace of the Jubilee

reawaken in us, Pilgrims of hope,

a yearning for the treasures of heaven,

not only for ourselves but also for others.