Diocese Opens Jubilee Year of Hope

At a Eucharistic celebration at St. Joseph Cathedral in Baton Rouge, the Diocese of Baton Rouge joined the universal church in opening 2025 as a Jubilee Year of Hope. The faithful were encouraged to embrace their trials and crosses in life and move forward in faith with a “hope that does not disappoint.”

The Dec. 29 Mass began with the congregation turning their attention to the back of the church. From there, Michael G. Duca, who stood near the baptismal font, welcomed them to the Year of Jubilee.


Then Deacon Mark Cloutier, deacon assistant at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Baton Rouge, read from the ambo Jn 14:1-7. In this passage Jesus talked about heaven having many dwelling places and that he was going to prepare a place for them there.

Chris Redden, pastoral assistant of St. Joseph Cathedral, then read from Pope Francis’ papal bull indiction, “Spes Non Confudit,” proclaiming 2025 as the Year of Hope.

Bishop Duca blessed the jubilee cross, which the cathedral has possessed for several decades and uses extensively at its liturgies and special events. He then led the people in commemorating their baptismal vows. The bishop and St. Joseph Cathedral pastor Father Cary Bani sprinkled people with holy water during the entrance hymn “Good Christian Friends Rejoice.”

In his Mass homily, Bishop Duca told the people that the Latin title of the Year of Hope papal bull indiction means “Hope Does Not Disappoint.”

“In this jubilee year the pope has invited us to become pilgrims of hope. Hope is the center of our lives and time together and our reflection during this year of jubilee,” said Bishop Duca. His episcopal motto is “Hope in the Lord.”

He noted Pope Francis hopes the jubilee will be “a moment of genuine personal encounter with Jesus, the door of salvation whom the church is to proclaim always and everywhere to all as ‘our hope.’”  

“We often think of hope as a virtue of feeling – ‘I’m hopeful’ or ‘I’m not hopeful’ but it’s something much more profound,” the bishop stated. “For us it’s a theological virtue – faith, hope, and charity. And that is to embrace the virtue of faith, hope, and charity we must have a special grace from God. The  grace given as well as earned.

“Virtues are normally habits, but theological virtues come with them a gift of grace,” Bishop Duca said.

This gift flows from grace and helps people love each other the way God loved us first by sending his son into the world, he added.

“It is a grace from God to go to a heroic, you might say life-giving sacrificial love that mirrors Jesus’ love on the cross,” the bishop said. “It is in the cross that we find what we are talking about this year and where we find the hope that does not disappoint.”

When people encounter difficulties in their lives and their plans fall apart and they don’t see any way around it they become hopeless, according to the bishop. They think “my life is over.”

The bishop said, “But in these moments, all we need often times is someone to help us, to ask for help, to pray to God for another way of seeing ourselves through this; and an insider, for someone else coming and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve been through that before. Here’s what I did.

“Suddenly, it sparks an idea when they had not come to us before because we didn’t want to think of going in any other direction. But with a little twist, a turn, a letting go of something, we suddenly see a whole other possibility open up for us. Opportunity even in the midst of despair.”

The bishop said an illustration of having hope in the face of tragedy is when people’s homes have been destroyed and they say to themselves, “Thank God we’re still alive. There’s still a future here.”

And such virtue of hope is to be shared with others as pilgrims of hope, Bishop Duca emphasized.

“Hope in the Lord who died for us, who saved us on the cross and raises us up to new life,” said Bishop Duca. “No matter if our hope has become too small, he always has a hope that’s bigger for us.”  

Mass ended with the jubilant recessional hymn, “Angels We Have Heard on High.”