by InTrieste
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2026, Pope Leo XIV will push shut a massive bronze door beneath the colonnades of St. Peter’s Basilica, bringing to a formal close one of the most extraordinary pilgrimage cycles of the modern Catholic Church.
The Holy Door of St. Peter’s, opened just over a year earlier by Pope Francis on Christmas Eve 2024, has been crossed by an estimated 30 million people during the 2025 Jubilee of Hope — a global influx that has transformed Rome into a city of prayer, endurance and quiet spectacle.
Jubilees, held every 25 years, are among the Church’s most ancient rituals, dating back to the Middle Ages. For believers, passing through a Holy Door is not symbolic alone: it is tied to the granting of a plenary indulgence, the remission of the temporal punishment for sins, offered during a year meant to emphasize mercy, reconciliation and renewal.
The Vatican this week released the final schedule for closing the Holy Doors of Rome’s four papal basilicas, a sequence of ceremonies that will unfold through the Christmas season and into early January, culminating with the pope’s appearance at St. Peter’s.
The first door to be sealed will be at the Basilica of St. Mary Major on Christmas Day at 6 p.m., presided over by Cardinal Rolandas Makrickas. The choice of the basilica carries added poignancy: it is the resting place of Pope Francis, who was laid to rest there earlier this year after his death in April.
Two days later, on Dec. 27 at 11 a.m., Cardinal Baldassare Reina will close the Holy Door at St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome and the spiritual mother church of Catholicism. On Dec. 28 at 10 a.m., Cardinal James Michael Harvey will preside over the ceremony at St. Paul Outside the Walls, built over the tomb of the apostle Paul.
Each closing will follow a solemn liturgy in which the bronze doors, sealed since Christmas Eve 2024, are slowly shut again — a physical gesture meant to signal the end of a year when the Church threw open its spiritual thresholds.
The final act will belong to Pope Leo XIV, who succeeded Francis and now shepherds a Church still shaped by his predecessor’s emphasis on mercy and inclusion. At 9:30 a.m. on the Feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6, 2026, Leo will close the Holy Door at St. Peter’s, ending the Jubilee of Hope before the eyes of thousands gathered in the square and millions more watching around the world.
For Rome, the Jubilee has been both a logistical feat and a spiritual drama: pilgrims sleeping in parish halls, waiting in winding lines under winter rain, and stepping across thresholds worn smooth by centuries of faith.
When the final door closes, the Church will not simply be ending a calendar cycle. It will be marking the close of a rare moment when millions, from every continent, converged on the same stone thresholds, seeking forgiveness, healing — and, in a fractured world, a shared sense of hope.
