On Christmas Eve 2024, Pope Francis opened the Holy Door in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and inaugurated the Year of Jubilee 2025. The Holy Year, celebrated every twenty five years, is an occasion of grace, an opportunity to renew our own commitment to Christ and to renew society, to make it more just, more in conformity to God’s vision for humanity. On our website, you’ll see some of the work we’re planning to do for the Jubilee Year: https://www.csan.org.uk/jubilee-2025/.
Caritas Social Action Network is a member of Caritas Internationalis, the Church’s global network of humanitarian help for those most in need. Their focus for the Jubilee Year is International Debt. To find out more about their campaign and sign the petition, please visit: https://www.caritas.org/2024/12/caritas-internationalis-launches-global-jubilee-turn-debt-into-hope-campaign-2/
CSAN is also an agency of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, with a focus on combatting poverty and exclusion in England and Wales. We campaign on issues of dignity and justice, such as our current campaign against the harmful two-child benefit cap and against the proposed legislation on assisted dying.
We’re a network charity, with a small team based at Romero House in London, the home of CAFOD, our sister Caritas organisation. There are 51 charities that are members of our network, working across a wide range of human need, supporting people who are homeless, seeking asylum, disabled, working at sea, caught up in the criminal justice system, working at the grassroots in parishes to support people in poverty and isolation.
Our members run services for people seeking refuge from human trafficking, educational provision for children with special needs, social care provision, hospices to provide compassionate palliative care at the natural end of life. Our members employ nearly 5000 staff and have just over 14000 volunteers, spending hundreds of millions of pounds each year to contribute to the common good. To find out more about the amazing work of our members, visit our website: https://www.csan.org.uk/member/.
In this Year of Jubilee, the work of our members brings hope to thousands of people who are not thriving due to systemic poverty and disadvantage. People sometimes ask us, what can we do to help? Well, here’s one suggestion. Have a look at our resources for the Jubilee Year and have a think about a Jubilee Pledge which your parish can make to build a better world: https://dojustice.co.uk/resources/
We’ve also been working with our colleagues from the Catholic Education Service, CAFOD and CYMFed on resources for Jubilee for Schools, including an invitation to schools to make a Jubilee Pledge. For more information and resources, please visit: https://cafod.org.uk/jubilee-schools
While we are called to be alive to injustice and suffering in our communities and to respond by the grace of God to act to bring about a better world, we are also mindful of the good news in the world, all the places where God’s Spirit is breaking though to build bonds of friendship and to bring hope.
As Pope Francis said in Spes in Confundit, “We need to recognize the immense goodness present in our world, lest we be tempted to think ourselves overwhelmed by evil and violence. The signs of the times, which include the yearning of human hearts in need of God’s saving presence, ought to become signs of hope” (#7).
Wishing you all a blessed and fruitful Holy Year.
