There is a story that has made its way into at least three homilies I’ve heard over the years. It involves a pious man who is in an area in danger of flooding during an especially productive rainstorm. As warnings of flooding came over the wire, a police officer drove by the man’s house and told him of the impending flood and offered the man a ride out of the danger area.
“I’m going to stay,” the man said, “If there’s trouble, God will save me.”
A few hours later, as the floodwaters came up to the front door, a person in a rowboat came to the man’s house. “The water’s rising, hop in,” said the rower.
“No thanks. If there’s trouble, God will save me.”
Still, a few more hours on, the man found himself on the roof of his house as the flood had risen that high. As luck would have it, a helicopter chanced by and lowered a harness, only to have the man push it away.
“I don’t need your help; God will save me” yelled the man to the astonished crew and the helicopter left.
A few minutes later the flood swept the man off the roof and he drowned.
Upon approaching the gates of Heaven, the man found the Lord and said to Him “I put my faith in you to save me when the floodwaters came. Why didn’t you help me?”
“What do you mean ‘I didn’t help you’?” the Lord asked. “I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter!”
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In April of 2024, Pope Francis published "Spes non confundit" ("Hope Does Not Disappoint"), a papal bull formally announcing the year 2025 as a Holy—or Jubilee—Year. Beginning Christmas Eve 2024 with the opening of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica, the year will conclude on the Feast of the Epiphany, 2026. Addressing Catholics who participate in the year as “pilgrims of hope,” the Holy Father expressed his desire that “the Jubilee be a moment of genuine, personal encounter with the Lord Jesus, and “an opportunity to be renewed in hope” (SNC #1).
Hope, we remember, is “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (CCC #1817). It is confidence that The Lord will be there for us, that He loves us, and that He will save us from sin and eternal death. It is the virtue the man in the story was trying to practice—however misguidedly—when the waters swept him away.
The Jubilee Year of 2025 is meant to help us get a better understanding of what hope is and to encourage us to practice this virtue. It is meant to be a time for us individually and collectively, to recall that God is “our Savior…Who wills everyone to be saved” (1 Tim 2:3-4) and that He, in many and varied ways (sometimes, as our hero on the roof discovered, in unexpected ways), sends us the means by which we might come closer to Him and be with Him forever: through the counsel of our family and friends, the experiences we have as we go through life, books we read, moments of prayer and reflection, participating in the sacraments, etc.
In each of the homilies that used the story above, that was the conclusion each priest came to—God loves us so much that He will try to save us in many ways, but we have to be open to those helps. But I think there is something else going on here: we—like the police officer, the rower, and the helicopter pilot, can be the instruments of hope and healing (and therefore salvation) for others.
Such is the gist of Pope Francis’s message.
Noting the sense of hopelessness that—if I may be allowed to extend the metaphor—threatens to drown us in this world, the Holy Father calls on Catholics to “be for our world a leaven of authentic hope, a harbinger of new heavens and a new earth (cf. 2 Pet 3:13), where men and women will dwell in justice and harmony, in joyful expectation of the fulfillment of the Lord’s promises” (SNC #25).
To whom are we to witness? To the migrant, Pope Francis tells us, we should offer “[a] spirit of welcome, which embraces everyone with respect for his or her dignity, should be accompanied by a sense of responsibility, lest anyone be denied the right to a dignified existence (SNC #13). To prisoners, we should offer support and forgiveness for those who seek it (SNC #10). We should visit the elderly and the sick for whom “works of mercy are also works of hope” (SNC #11), and we should accompany the young, many of whom face an uncertain future and whose “dreams and aspirations [are sometimes] frustrated” (SNC #12). Last, we are to be signs of hope for the billions of poor in our world by recognizing that the “goods of the earth are not destined for a privileged few, by for everyone” (SNC #16) and making their plight a priority, not merely an “afterthought” in policy discussions. Implicit in this is that we use Christian love as the guiding force in our interactions with those who struggle financially.
This is a tall order—not one for the faint of heart. As always, we call on the Lord’s help to enable us to be His instruments. As part of the Holy Year we are encouraged to make the sacrifice of traveling to holy places—ideally in Rome—to ask God to help us grow in the hope we are called to share. After all, we can’t give what we don’t have.
Our diocese has information about how the Church in Cleveland can celebrate and grow more deeply in the virtue of hope—including those places of pilgrimage within the Diocese for those unable to travel to the Eternal City. These places include eight parishes (St. Edward, Ashland; the Cathedral of St. John, Cleveland; St. Mary’s, Chardon; Immaculate Conception, Madison; Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Lorain; St. Colette, Brunswick; Queen of Heaven, Uniontown; and Sts. Peter and Paul, Doylestown) and three shrines (Our Lady of Lourdes, Euclid; Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine, Parma Heights; and Shrine of St. Ann, Highland Heights). This Holy Year, pilgrims who visit one or more of these sites after having made a good confession of sins, attended Mass, and having prayed for the Pope and his intentions, can, if they are truly penitent, receive a plenary indulgence.
The Holy or Jubilee Year harkens back to the Old Testament, where the Jubilee Year was a time of freedom and forgiveness—those enslaved because of poverty were set free, and lands were returned to those who lost them to debt.
People could start over.
Our Jewish forebears knew—in hope—that if they just “hung on,” things would get better because God was their God and God saves His people. We don’t have to “drown” in the discouragement and despair brought on by our fallen world—and we don’t have to let others drown either.
Twenty-twenty-five is the year of jubilee, of forgiveness, of hope. In this Jubilee Year may the words—and commitment—of Pope Francis be our own:
Let us even now be drawn to this hope! Through our witness, may hope spread to all those who anxiously seek it…May the power of hope fill our days, as we await with confidence the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and glory, now and forever. (SNC #25)
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.