The Jubilee of Choirs

In the Roman Liturgy, one of the Lenten Prefaces ends with the exhortation:

Through him the Angels praise your majesty,
Dominions adore and Powers tremble before you.
Heaven and the Virtues of heaven and the blessed Seraphim
worship together with exultation.
May our voices, we pray, join with theirs
in humble praise, as we acclaim: 

The Easter Prefaces end:

Therefore, overcome with paschal joy,
every land, every people exults in your praise
and even the heavenly Powers, with the angelic hosts, 
sing together the unending hymn of your glory
as they acclaim:

And the text of the Sanctus that these words introduce takes us to the words of the six winged Seraphim before the throne of God in the vision of Isaiah (Is. 6):

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.

As the Church celebrates the Jubilee of Choirs in the days 22nd-23rd November 2025, to coincide with the feast day of St Cecilia, the Liturgy suggests to us that the voices raised in praise of God here on earth, voices which express praise on behalf of the whole cosmos, are one with those of the heavenly liturgy. It is interesting to consider the extent to which, as we attend Mass, we let ourselves become explicitly conscious of the heavenly character of our worship.

In his chapter on "Music and Liturgy" in the book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger offers the following reflection:

In the Eucharist a communion takes place that corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage. Just as they become "one flesh", so in Communion we all become "one spirit", one person, with Christ. The spousal mystery , announced in the Old Testament, of the intimate union of God and man takes place in the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, precisely through his Passion and in a very real way. The singing of the Church comes ultimately out of love. It is the utter depth of love that produces the singing. "Cantare amantis est", says St Augustine, singing is a lover's thing.

For those who sing in more secular contexts, their singing can perhaps be seen as one of those "seeds of the Gospel" of which the Jubilee Prayer speaks:

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, when, with the powers of Evil vanquished, your glory will shine eternally. 

Jubilee of the Poor

 The Jubilee event dedicated to the poor is to be celebrated from the evening of 14th November 2025, concluding on the World Day of the Poor on Sunday 16th November 2025. It is reported that, after his election to the See of St Peter, Pope Francis was prompted to take the name Francis after a remark from one of his fellow cardinals to the effect that he should not forget the poor. Similarly, Pope Leo XIV's first major document has been dedicated to the Catholic Church's particular mission towards the poor:

...  in continuity with the Encyclical Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis was preparing in the last months of his life an Apostolic Exhortation on the Church’s care for the poor, to which he gave the title Dilexi Te, as if Christ speaks those words to each of them, saying: “You have but little power,” yet “I have loved you” ( Rev 3:9). I am happy to make this document my own — adding some reflections — and to issue it at the beginning of my own pontificate, since I share the desire of my beloved predecessor that all Christians come to appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor. I too consider it essential to insist on this path to holiness, for “in this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which every saint seeks to imitate.” 

The person who is poor is likely to lack shelter, to be without access to clean water for drinking or for washing, to lack regular access to wholesome food, to lack clothing suitable to the weather, to have no habitation that they can call their own with any permanence, to lack the company of family or friends, to be disregarded by those who pass by; they might be anywhere in the world, not just in those places that are less developed than our own. The person who is poor lacks the material things that are the framework for a life lived with the dignity that is due to a human person; being poor, they lack the agency  that gives them the opportunity to choose a way in life. 

It is this lack of agency in their being poor that distinguishes their poverty from that of the life of the evangelical counsels. At first sight, the Church appears to contradict itself in advocating for poverty as one of the evangelical counsels freely chosen by those in religious life and working to alleviate poverty among those who do not have the agency to choose other than their poverty. Though the two poverties are quite different in nature from each other, there is a common ground for both of them. The life of the evangelical counsels represents a choice for a style of life lived in close imitation of that lived by Christ himself, and so is an attempt to identify a life with the life of Christ. Then, as Pope Leo XIV has pointed out, in a kind of reciprocity we are called to recognise Christ in those who are involuntarily poor and suffering.

There is a story of St Benedict Joseph Labre, who lived the last part of his life as a poor vagrant in the city of Rome in the 18th century, that captures the essential dignity that belongs to the person who is poor. On one occasion, he was picked out from the vagrants around the Spanish Steps to pose as a model by a painter. It took a bit of persuasion before St Benedict Joseph agreed, and he then posed for the figure of Christ, having at first shuddered at the prospect. Given the intinerant nature of his life, St Benedict Joseph (see here and here) is an appropriate figure to whom we can turn in a Jubilee Year.

Pope Francis expressed his wish that hope be granted to the poor in the Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee Year, citing his Encyclical Letter Laudato Si' n.49:

I ask with all my heart that hope be granted to the billions of the poor, who often lack the essentials of life. Before the constant tide of new forms of impoverishment, we can easily grow inured and resigned. Yet we must not close our eyes to the dramatic situations that we now encounter all around us, not only in certain parts of the world. Each day we meet people who are poor or impoverished; they may even be our next-door neighbours. Often they are homeless or lack sufficient food for the day. They suffer from exclusion and indifference on the part of many. It is scandalous that in a world possessed of immense resources, destined largely to producing weapons, the poor continue to be “the majority of the planet’s population, billions of people. These days they are mentioned in international political and economic discussions, but one often has the impression that their problems are brought up as an afterthought, a question which gets added almost out of duty or in a tangential way, if not treated merely as collateral damage. Indeed, when all is said and done, they frequently remain at the bottom of the pile”. Let us not forget: the poor are almost always the victims, not the ones to blame.

The claim to the title "Christian"

I am prompted to reflect on the claim to the use of the title "Christian" by some recent events. On two occasions recently, the Christian symbol of the Cross has been displayed at political demonstrations in London, thereby appropriating to the intentions of those demonstrations the title "Christian". In the United States, the Turning Point movement, essentially political in character, has used the Christian faith of its founder to appropriate a Christian character to the movement. There is also the claim to identify Britain as a Christian country, expressed eloquently by Danny Kruger speaking in the House of Commons:

When I speak of the Church of England today, I am not speaking about the internal politics of the Anglican sect; I speak of the common creed of our country, the official religion of the English and the British nation, and the institution—older than the monarchy, and much older than Parliament—which made this country.

I have three observations:

1. Beware of a use of the term "Christian" in way that leaves an exact meaning unexpressed. In this usage it might refer to anything from structured Christian bodies, such as the Episcopalian Church in the United States or the Church of England in Britain, to completely independent congregations via networks of Evangelical (mega-) churches. In this usage, exactly who or what is the "Christian" that is referenced? If we are not careful, the use of the term has such wide range of possible references that it becomes empty of substantial meaning.

2. Beware of a politics that is, first of all and in principle, a politics but which then wishes to add to itself the descriptor "Christian". This remains first and foremost a politics and, even if its advocates might profess a Christian faith (but see point 1 above), that does not allow the political stance in itself to be called "Christian". As might be said on the London Underground, we need to "mind the gap" and not permit the "Christian" claim of such a politics to establish for it an unwarranted credibility.

3. There are politicians who profess a Christian faith and, on the basis of that faith, advocate for certain positions in their public life. This, however, is a somewhat inverse of the position described at point 2 above. See the words of Pope Benedict below.

But rather than trying to create a politics that wishes to claim a title of "Christian", Pope Benedict XVI and, more recently, Pope Leo XIV have advocated for a "healthy secularity" in the world of culture and politics.

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking in Westminster Hall during his visit to the United Kingdom in 2010:

The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

 Pope Leo XIV speaking to a working group on inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue:

European institutions need people who know how to live a healthy secularism, that is, a style of thinking and acting that affirms the value of religion while preserving the distinction — not separation or confusion — from the political sphere.  In particular, it is worth noting the examples of Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi.

Jubilee of the World of Work

 A Jubilee for workers was due to take place during the days 1st-4th May 2025, but was not able to take place following the death of Pope Francis. On 8th November 2025, a celebration of a Jubilee for Workers will take place.

In September 1981, Pope St John Paul II issued his Encyclical Letter Laborem Exercens, dedicated to the principles of the idea of human work and to discussing the contemporary problems relating to human work.

From the beginning therefore [man] is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.

Starting from an analysis of the teaching of the Book of Genesis (Gen.1:28) - "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it" - John Paul II presents work in both its objective and subjective senses. He first suggests that work is something characteristic of the human person that identifies the human person apart from other creatures. The objective sense of work lies in the nature of the actual tasks undertaken, and John Paul outlines how this has changed over time, developing from a largely manual form of work to an increasingly mechanised form.

Understood in this case not as a capacity or aptitude for work, but rather as a whole set of instruments which man uses in his work, technology is undoubtedly man's ally. It facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it. It leads to an increase in the quantity of things produced by work, and in many cases improves their quality. However, it is also a fact that, in some instances, technology can cease to be man's ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work "supplants" him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave.

This development towards an ever more technological form of work, viewed in its objective sense, brings to the fore the question of work in its subjective sense:

Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the "image of God" he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject of work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfil the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity. ...

...the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one.

...This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". 

 From this starting point, John Paul goes on to discuss in detail the contemporary situation of the world of work. But this reflection itself can already prompt individuals to look at their own experience of work, and ask how they can try to achieve that agency with regard to their work that will allow them to more effectively act as a subject rather than a slave of their work. And it also brings to the attention of those fortunate enough to be able to work that long term unemployment represents an undermining of the dignity of the person.