Pope Leo XIV closed the Holy Year 2025 at the Vatican today, ending the year-long celebration of Christianity, during which about 33 million pilgrims flocked to Rome and a historic change of one American pope with another took place, the Associated Press reported, BTA reported.
At 9:41 a.m., Pope Leo XIV closed the "Holy Door" of the "St. Peter" basilica with a special rite marking the end of the year, SIR (Servizio Informazione Religiosa) reported.
Under the gaze of cardinals and diplomats, the pope knelt in prayer on the stone floor at the threshold of the "Holy Door" of St. Peter's Basilica. He then stood up and closed the two wings of the door, symbolically marking the end of the Jubilee Year, opened by the frail Pope Francis in December 2024, which also saw Francis' funeral and the conclave that elected his successor in the Vatican. Only once before, in 1700, has a Holy Year been opened by one pope and closed by another.
Today's ceremony at the beginning of the Epiphany liturgy was the culmination of a dizzying year of special audiences, liturgies and meetings that dominated the pope's first months as pontiff and in many ways delayed his own agenda.
As if to signal that his pontificate could now begin in earnest, the head of the Roman Catholic Church summoned cardinals from around the world to the Vatican for two days of meetings starting tomorrow to discuss the governance of the 1.4 billion-strong Catholic Church.
The agenda includes the issue of the liturgy, suggesting that the pope is diving headlong into the church's strife over the celebration of the Old Latin Mass. Masses.
For the Vatican, the Holy Year is a centuries-old tradition in which believers make a pilgrimage to Rome every 25 years to visit the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul and receive indulgences for the forgiveness of their sins if they pass through the Holy Door. For Rome, it is an opportunity to use public funds, in this case about 4 billion euros, to implement long-delayed projects that will lift the city from years of neglect and bring it into line with modern European standards.
Yesterday, the Vatican announced that 33,475,369 pilgrims took part in the Jubilee, but the Vatican's Holy Year organizer, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, acknowledged that the number was only an estimate and could include double counting. At a press conference, neither he nor Italian officials provided a ratio of the number of pilgrims for the Holy Year to the total number of tourists to Rome for the same period.
Rome's connection to the anniversaries dates back to 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII declared the first Holy Year, which historians say marked the definitive establishment of Rome as the center of Christianity. Even then, the number of pilgrims was so significant that Dante mentioned them in his poem "Inferno."