Pope announces Year of Prayer
International
Pope Francis has inaugurated a Year of Prayer ahead of the 2025 jubilee year, calling on the faithful “to intensify prayer to prepare us to live well this event of grace and to experience the power of God’s hope”.
Speaking after the Angelus last month, the Holy Father explained that the Year of Prayer was dedicated “to rediscovering the great value and absolute need for prayer, prayer in personal life, in the life of the Church, prayer in the world.”
The Pope invited Christians to pray especially for Christian unity and “to not tire of invoking the Lord for peace” in Ukraine, in Israel and Palestine, and in many other parts of the world, including Ecuador.
He said those who suffer most from the lack of peace were the vulnerable.
“I think of the little ones, the many children who are injured and killed, those who are deprived of affection, deprived of their dreams and their future,” he said.
“Let us all be aware of our responsibility to pray and to build peace for them.”
Pope Francis said that the Dicastery for Evangelisation would prepare materials to assist in celebrating the Year.
Outlining details of the Year of Prayer, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, pro-prefect of the Dicastery, said it would be “a time to discover how to pray and, above all, how to educate the people of today in prayer, in this age of digital culture, so that prayer can be effective and fruitful”.
“We cannot deny the fact that our time manifests a profound need for spirituality,” he said.
“From those who quickly make the Sign of the Cross to those who participate in the daily Eucharist, there is such a vast range of ways of praying that no one can fully describe them all; they can range from quick to distracted prayer to contemplative prayer to prayer filled with tears of pain.”
Archbishop Fisichella said the Pope would set up a ‘School of Prayer’.
“This school will be a series of moments of encounter with specific groups of people to pray together and better understand the various forms of prayer: from thanksgiving to intercession; from contemplative prayer to the prayer of consolation; from adoration to supplication.”
The Vatican is expecting an estimated 35 million people to flock to Rome for the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope – the first ordinary jubilee since the Great Jubilee of 2000.
A jubilee is a special holy year of grace and pilgrimage in the Catholic Church. It typically takes place once every 25 years but the Pope can call for extraordinary jubilee years more often, such as in the case of the 2016 Year of Mercy and the 2013 Year of Faith.
The Jubilee Year begins on December 24 and concludes on January 6 2026.
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