The Jubilee, Archbishop Fisichella and La Tenda di Gionata
By Roberto de Mattei | 15 January 2025
On 24 December, with the opening of the Holy Door of St Peter’s, Pope Francis inaugurated the 2025 Jubilee. The Pope crossed the threshold of the Door and entered the Basilica to the resounding words of the Gospel of John, “I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved” and then of Psalm 117, “This is the gate of the Lord, the just shall enter into it”.
Behind him was a procession of cardinals, bishops, priests and several families representing the five continents. On 26 December the Pope opened, for the first time in an ordinary Jubilee, a Holy Door in the Roman prison of Rebibbia, and on 29 December that of the Basilica of St John Lateran, the Cathedral of Rome. At the same time, the Jubilee Year was opened by all the bishops of the world.
Tradition has it that every Jubilee is to be proclaimed through the publication of a papal bull of Indiction. The Jubilee of 2025 was proclaimed at St Peter’s on 9 May 2024, with the bull Spes Non Confundit —“hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5). In this bull, Pope Francis recalls that “hope, together with faith and charity, makes up the triptych of the ‘theological virtues’ that express the heart of the Christian life”. Supernatural hope has eternal life as its object. “Another reality having to do with eternal life”, the pope recalled, “is God’s judgement, both at the end of our individual lives and at the end of history. … The sacrament of Penance assures us that God wipes away our sins.”
The Apostolic Penitentiary has published the norms on the granting of Indulgence during the 2025 Jubilee. The Indulgence, with the remission and forgiveness of sins, can be received by all of the faithful who are “truly repentant”, “moved by a spirit of charity”, “who, during the Holy Year, purified through the sacrament of penance and refreshed by Holy Communion, pray for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff”, visiting one of the four Major Papal Basilicas of Rome or one of the numerous sacred places provided by the Church all over the world.
However, to obtain the indulgence it is not enough to pass through the Holy Door. One must confess and be repentant for one’s sins. The Council of Trent defines repentance as “a sorrow of the soul and a detestation of the sin committed with the intention of sinning no more” (Sess. 14, chap. 4). Without the intention of not sinning, there is no forgiveness of sins or remission of the punishments that are the consequence of sins.
It is in this light that we must judge news like that of the possible participation in the Jubilee of the La Tenda di Gionata — “the Tent of Jonathan”, an association that claims to reconcile the Christian faith with the practice of homosexuality.
The pilgrimage had been included on the Jubilee website among the hundreds of events listed for 2025, but after many Catholic sites expressed their disapproval of this inclusion, which could come across as a form of official approval of LGBT culture and practice by the Vatican, the official presence of La Tenda di Gionata disappeared from the calendar of the official Jubilee website. The Jubilee Year staff have explained that the removal occurred due to a lack of details provided by the organisers.
In an interview with the Spanish agency EFE on 23 December 2024, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, pro-prefect of the dicastery for Evangelisation, responsible for organising the Holy Year, stated that “if an association that provides pastoral care for homosexuals wants to make this experience of faith concrete, I think it should find the Jubilee prepared for them too”. That same day, in an interview with Il Giornale, Archbishop Fisichella stated:
“The Jubilee belongs to the people; it is for all; it cannot be denied to anyone. Among the many requests of all sorts, we received one from the association, La Tenda di Gionata. However, after the verbal request — put on the calendar — we were not certain of their participation, so we removed the event from the schedule until the association registered like all the others. At that point it was put back on the calendar. We have acted transparently. I also want to say that this is not a specific Jubilee for a category of people; they are believers who want to have an experience of faith. I wonder who could forbid them a pilgrimage to the Holy Door.”
The words of Archbishop Fisichella unfortunately display the same pernicious ambiguity as the declaration Fiducia Supplicans of 18 December 2023. The practice of homosexuality is a very serious moral transgression condemned by Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church. If a homosexual repents of his sin and confesses, he can certainly pass through the Holy Door, entrusting himself to the mercy of God for the remission of the punishments due to his sins, but he does not need to do so with fanfare, and much less in an organised group. The association La Tenda di Gionata instead presents itself as a group formed to “expand the Church’s support and welcome for LGBT people and for every person hit with discrimination”, and notoriously supports the compatibility between the Christian faith and the practice of homosexuality.
Official participation in the Jubilee by an association of homosexuals, which does not have the goal of their conversion but rather justifies their conduct, has a clear instrumental intent: that of making it appear that the Church has changed its judgement on homosexuality. To prevent these instrumentalisations, but above all for the good of souls and for the honour of the Church, those who have the greatest organisational responsibility for the Jubilee would have the duty to reiterate on this point and on all others the incompatibility that exists between the Holy Year and moral transgression asserted as a right. Otherwise they become complicit in the moral violation that they fail to condemn.
The Jubilee is not the canonisation of sin lived out and vindicated, but the occasion to convert to an authentic Christianity, because, as the Psalm recalls, only the just enter through the Door of the Lord.