The Roman Jubilee

The first Roman Jubilee was proclaimed by Boniface VIII for the year 1300, granting a plenary indulgence to those who came to Rome and visited the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul on a set number of days. Accounts of the crowds that resulted are large and not easy to check, but the effect on the city was substantial enough that the practice was repeated. The theological machinery behind it is the indulgence, which in Catholic teaching remits the temporal punishment due for sins already forgiven, drawing on what the tradition calls the treasury of merit.

Eamon Duffy's history of the papacy sets the first jubilee in its political moment, at the height of Boniface's claims for papal authority and shortly before the humiliation of his pontificate's end. The rite that became characteristic of the jubilee is the opening of the holy doors of the four major basilicas at the start of the year and their closing at the end, so that the year itself has a threshold. The interval between jubilees was set at fifty years, then shortened to thirty three in memory of the years of Christ's life, then to twenty five, which remains the ordinary cycle. Jubilees have been called outside that cycle as well, and the years in which one has fallen are recorded in the atlas under the Christian calendar.

An indulgence granted for a pilgrimage is one thing; an indulgence available in exchange for a financial contribution is another, and the distinction was blurred repeatedly in the later medieval centuries. Preachers were licensed to offer indulgences in return for donations to particular projects, commissions were taken, and the proceeds funded building works including the rebuilding of Saint Peter's. That practice was the immediate occasion of Luther's ninety five theses in 1517, which are largely about indulgences and about what a pope can and cannot remit, and the controversy that followed became the Reformation.

The Council of Trent later reaffirmed the doctrine of indulgences while abolishing the office of the questor and forbidding the taking of money for them, which is an acknowledgement that the criticism of the practice had force even where the doctrine was defended. The jubilee itself continued and continues. Extraordinary holy years have been called outside the ordinary twenty five year cycle to mark particular anniversaries, and modern jubilees are pilgrimages on a very large scale with the indulgence attached to conditions including confession, communion and prayer rather than to any payment.