Pilgrims of hope amid crisis: Archbishop Rino Fisichella on the 2025 Jubilee in Rome

Usually, we think that prayer is participating in the holy Eucharist on Sunday, and this is true, but this is the summit of your prayer because it is with the community. There is also your personal prayer; there is your capacity to understand that in every moment of your life, in every moment of your day, you can be in the presence of the Lord.

This is the most important thing: To pray is to recognize that you are in the presence of God. And in each moment, God is beside you. He’s inside you. He’s right there in front of you. You should not have any problems; you should not be afraid to understand how beautiful a moment of silence is for you, for your life. A moment in which you listen to the voice of God speaking to you; and this is prayer. It’s not just that we multiply our words to God. He knows already what we need, but it is to listen to his voice, to listen to his word, and to perceive that we are in his presence.

Another side of the preparations for the jubilee are also cultural events. And I think you personally organized wonderful works of arts to be presented in Rome; there’s also a film festival and other initiatives. Why is culture an important aspect as well?

As a spiritual event, spirituality is not just prayer; spirituality is also an experience of the contemplation of beauty. This is very important for me. The way of beauty is one of the privileged ways to announce the Gospel today. I am convinced that this is possible even through the beauty of a concert or the beauty of an exhibition. Contemplation of this beauty becomes a spiritual experience.

To give you an example, last September, we had an exhibition of three pieces of El Greco’s art in a beautiful church, not in a museum, because to enter a museum one has to pay. We shouldn’t have to pay in order to contemplate beauty. Beauty should be free, beauty should be immediate. In the beautiful Church of St. Agnes in Piazza Navona, we had an exhibition of three pieces of El Greco’s art.

Never had these three pieces of art come to Rome. In one month, in just the 30 days of September, there were about 300,000 people coming to contemplate the face and the expression of Christ in the painting of El Greco.

We are in touch with another museum in the U.S. to bring a very important piece of art to Rome for the first time, to express once again that music, painting, literature, everything can be an expression of faith and they can challenge you to a spiritual experience.

Together with media outlets and EWTN, you are preparing the Jubilee of the World of Communications, which will be at the beginning of the year in January. From a perspective of evangelization, what role does the media play today?

Media is important for communication.

I continue to be convinced that the most important communication is a personal communication. We need to look one another in the eyes, and that is the best way of communicating. But we also need to understand how the world is today, communication is coming from technology, from the internet, from television, from everything.

How can we express a spiritual event if, first of all, we who are called to communicate do not have a personal, spiritual experience? For this reason, we wanted to dedicate at the beginning of the jubilee a moment for the world of communications, so that the men and women of the vast world of communications can personally have a spiritual experience of what a jubilee means.

Then, from that experience they will be able to communicate and give others a coherent and profound sense of this experience.

What are your personal hopes for the jubilee? What will be a successful jubilee for you?

Independent of my desire, I think the jubilee has a goal to reach, that is, to give an experience of the mercy and love of God. I hope that all pilgrims coming to Rome or celebrating the jubilee in their own local Churches can have this kind of experience: God loves me. Because this is the heart of the Gospel.

This is the Gospel! The Gospel is not a book; the Gospel is the person of Jesus Christ, revealing to you the love of God. Nothing else. Everything within the Church should be this experience. The jubilee is an extraordinary moment because we have a jubilee every 25 years. If a jubilee will be able to challenge us to understand more and more that we are in the presence of God who loves us and never abandons us, even in those moments in which we are suffering, or lacking something, or when we feel alone, God never, never abandons us.

You recently visited the Philippines. Can you tell us a little bit more about the new evangelization and the role Asia plays for the Church?

Asia is like a spring, because if you look to Korea, every year, there are thousands of baptisms of all those people coming to the Catholic Church. If you look to the Philippines, they have a very strong Catholic-Christian tradition; it’s their soul. It’s emotional to see how people are present in the Church.

They are proud of their own faith, and then they share it with everybody. This is the way of evangelization. If you look to our Western countries, in our own countries, in Europe, the USA, Canada, and also in Latin America, we can say that there is a big crisis of faith.

We can touch this reality every day. There are also beautiful experiences and positive experiences, but we cannot look away when there is something that isn’t working, like a crisis of faith. Our churches aren’t empty, but they aren’t full.

We have several difficulties. We can see how the kingdom of God is not just the West, the kingdom of God is around the world. Looking to Africa, looking to Asia, we can see the enthusiasm of the new generation growing in faith and enthusiastic in sharing the faith, resulting in new baptisms. This gives us concrete hope, a sign of hope.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.