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Pope Francis, in accordance with an ancient tradition, proclaimed 2025 a Jubilee Year with the central theme of hope. He qualifies hope saying, “This hope has nothing to do with mere ‘human’ optimism or the ephemeral expectation of some earthly benefit.” He calls on us all to be “pilgrims of hope.” Certainly, seriously ill people and their caregivers can be pilgrims of hope. Few have ephemeral expectations of any earthly benefits. Few are optimists. Indeed, in his Christmas Eve homily Frances reminded his global audience that “Hope too is needed by the sick and those who suffer in body and spirit; they can find comfort in our closeness and care.”
I propose that all parish councils, kingdom priests, and apostles enter body and soul into the hopeful spirit of the Jubilee Year, living out the promise to accompany parishioners, patients, and their families through serious health-related suffering with palliative care. Palliative care does not try to take death away, nor does it offer death; it nurtures life in the face of death, making moments sweeter than they might be without it. It kindles interpersonal relationships that generate light and nurture confidence in what is to come.
Francis recognizes that “The reality of death, as a painful separation from those dearest to us, cannot be mitigated by empty rhetoric,” but promises that “The Jubilee […] offers us the opportunity to appreciate anew, and with immense gratitude, the gift of the new life that we have received in Baptism, a life capable of transfiguring death’s drama.” Religious people and parishioners who are already convicted about eternal life can share this sense of hope, but what of those with no religion? What can palliative care offer them this Jubilee year?
Forgive us our debts
The Jubilee, traditionally, is about forgiving debts, sometimes emotional and spiritual debts, sometimes financial ones. Dying persons and their loved ones don’t need to be people of faith to understand that the most challenging spiritual pain many approaching death experience comes from unfinished emotional business. People we need to forgive and ask forgiveness of may be foremost in our minds. We don’t want to go out without making peace with them. The practice of reconciliation draws both the religious and the unaffiliated towards peace. Spiritual care practitioners on the palliative care team and chaplains to the affiliated and non-affiliated alike can help with this.
Forgiving the monetary debts of resource-deprived persons, collectives, and countries is another traditional jubilee practice, which can be extended to the lower- and middle-income countries where palliative care services appear a luxury budget item compared with maternal child health and malaria control. Even a tiny portion of the crippling percentages of GDP that currently supports debt servicing could support the training of community volunteers, palliative care specialists, and the construction and equipping of basic morphine manufacturing plants.
Pope Francis’ Jubilee Bull tells us that “More than a question of generosity, this is a matter of justice.” The immense economic inequality and inequity in palliative care development in the world today didn’t happen overnight, or even in the past century. It is the path-dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism.
Palliative care’s solidarity with the suffering person and compassion expressed in clinical care and accompaniment is a source of hope in itself for seriously ill people and their caregivers, whether believers or not. The quality of attentive encouragement at the bedside of someone taking their last breath is stem cell therapy for the maladies of humanity that spring from its opposites: indifference, self-absorption, and domination. Palliative care’s alternatives—overtreatment, the fear and chaos of abandonment to suffering, and euthanasia—all represent a turning away from the mystery of death, one that forecloses the fractal expansion of joy, knowledge, and resilience.
Hope abounds in palliative care, whose practitioners exemplify the pre-Christian cardinal virtues of ancient republican citizenship: friendship, courage, truth-telling, and phronesis, or practical wisdom. Palliative care teams bestow these gifts of praxis on the patients and families they care for, thereby conferring on them the grace to extend those gifts to others they encounter. Therein lies the social and political hope of building more peaceful and compassionate societies.
Community-based services for neighbors who are lonely, abandoned, and lack hope in the face of death represent pools of light in seas of social darkness. This light resonates, or echoes (from ‘resonancia’ L), eventually crystalizing in what Pope Francis calls a “hymn to human dignity” that calls for the choral participation of society as a whole. Parishes and faith communities around the world are invited to take up palliative care for their members and non-members alike in this Jubilee Year of Hope.
Author’s Note: The Vatican Academy for Life has a website dedicated to palliative care, including resources (some of which I contributed to) of which parishes can avail themselves.
Additionally, in his homily for the Nativity of our Lord 2024, Pope Francis declared a prison jubilee by opening the door of Rebibbia New Complex Prison in Rome, telling the prisoners, “Do not lose hope. Hope never disappoints . . . I think of you always with an open heart; the heart, which is precisely what makes us brothers. Open wide the doors of the heart.” We open wide the doors of our heart by developing palliative care services for prisoners, especially those serving life sentences. This is another priority during this Jubilee Year, and I look forward to attending the Jubilee Mass for Prisoners at St Peter’s in December.
Photo by Patty Brito on Unsplash
